“People killin’, people dyin’
Children hurt and you hear them cryin’
Can you practise what you preach
Or would you turn the other cheek?

Father, Father, Father help us
Send some guidance from above‘
Cause people got me, got me questionin’
Where is the love (Love)?

It just ain’t the same, old ways have changed
New days are strange, is the world insane?
If love and peace are so strong
Why are there pieces of love that don’t belong?”]
‘Where Is The Love?’ - The Black Eyed Peas

“...and you think if you save poor Catherine, you could make them stop, don’t you? You think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the lambs.”
Dr. Hannibal Lecter, ‘The Silence of the Lambs’

Truro, Nova Scotia.

A small town located where a river opened out into an estuary. To the Mi’kmaq natives who had been born of this land long before the white men came, this place was Wagobagtik, ‘end of water’s flow’.

Settled in the 1720s, founded in 1759, and incorporated as a town in 1875. Seat of Colchester county.

The site of a major interstate interchange and a rail junction. The ‘Hub’ of Nova Scotia.

And also, 3232 miles from CERN.

The Barrier did not appreciate any of this, nor did it appreciate the millions of other settlements that could have been anywhere from ramshackle collections of lean-tos to metropolises steeped in history. Methodically, unthinkingly, thoughtlessly, it slowly advanced over the tiny, shattered community. Razing it as a skilled reaper culls the harvest, leaving not one stalk standing.

Its light, in which the community had bathed its final hours, swallowed the University Farm in the center of town. Wood and stone burned like paper, the cinders of their ruin cascading across the Barrier like water flowing uphill.

And so did Truro, Wagobagtik, where the flow of the water ended, meet its own end.

Homes and houses were scrubbed clean, scrubbed away. The new lords of the Earth had no need for such shelter. Furniture, trinkets, family memories fell with them. Somewhere, people were running on foot from the Barrier

*

“You! Identify yourself!”

“Lieutenant Teresa Jones, HLF First English Battalion, and you’ll fucking salute me when you see my senior rank, soldier!”

“Uh, Yes ma'am! Master Sergeant Birch, Thenadier Guards.”

“At ease. I’ve got a priority captive for delivery to your commanding officer. That’s Colonel Galt, correct? Let my train through, sargeant.”

“Whoah, woah woah! I can’t do that ma’am’. You think we’re idiots or something? Colonel Galt’s orders are for all rail traffic to be held outside Truro until the brothers liberate the railyard from the horsefuckers.”

“Got my own orders right here. The Front took the northern shoreline in Halifax and the railyards there, directed me to get the captive into custody for interrogation and extermination. Here’s the waybill to prove it. Take one Canadian Pacific engine, light power express, direct to Colonel Dagney Galt in Truro.”

“Looks legit sarge, got the train-number and our stamp and everything. And...holy shit…”

“What is it?”

“Says here that the hostage is the Carter bitch!”

“Show me.”

“Pardon me soldier, but I’m a lieutenant and you’re a sargeant. You want to see, you ask nicely.”

“On whose authority?! I don’t care what rank you are, this is the Thenardier guards!”

CLICK

“On the authority of my 9mm, Sargeant. I was there when London fell, when was the last time you faced the Barrier? Tomorrow? Now, you can come onboard and confirm I’ve got Verity Carter in custody, and then you can get the fuck back off my engine.”

*

It claimed the shattered ruin of the railyard, where cars and carriages lay scattered about as if the toys of a giant, petulant child. A lone locomotive, tipped on its side, blistered into ash.

The fractured interstate junction followed soon...as did tens of thousands of abandoned vehicles.

Their occupants ran, with nowhere to go. With Truro gone, there was no escape from Nova Scotia. As the Barrier pushed on it would drive them into the tip of the peninsula, squeezing and pinching them like a boil destined to burst and die.

Today, ninety-seven thousand souls would die in this state alone. They would not be the last.

*

The newfoals marched through the ruined town, snow crunching softly under their hooves. None wore anything over their fur, naked and pure. Small icicles hung from them, frozen beads of sweat forming a skein of frost...

“...coupled together, slaved together...permanently joined...never to part…”

Silent trees and buildings rose around and overhead like petrified sculptures or skeletons...as frozen as the newfoals’ smiles...as dead as their glazed eyes...

“...I am Load Bearer, I serve the Sun. I shoulder Her burdens...carry Her loads. I am Load Bearer, I serve the Sun…”

Everything else was silent but for their bastardized prayers, and the nonsense scraps of poetry and the calming litanies that they whispered to themselves. The words might have been genuine. They might have been prayers and screams for mercy, or lunatic babbling as their broken minds attempted to reconcile themselves with their their fate. None of them were inclined to make guesses.

Nor would they ever.

“...Firearm...Firearm...I am a weapon...I am a tool. Firearm…”

No birds chirped in the sky, no creatures scuttled in the underbrush. They had all fled.

“...glory be...glory be...glory be...I worship...I obey…”

The newfoals marched east, towards the Barrier. Like iron filings drawn to a magnet they obeyed their programming, returning to Home, to be debriefed, classified, and directed.

“...mama...mama...mama...mama…”

Some would be servants, others soldiers. All were slaves. Three hundred of them would die in this frozen overland trek alone, smiles on their faces even as their fellows left them to freeze. Nobody would pick them up if they were left to die. The Solar Empire was not picky...so long as it got new recruits, what was several hundred corpses...

“...thine be the glory, risen conquering Sun. Endless is the victory, thou o’er me has won…”

Five thousand newfoals trod the snow…

“...I serve...I obey...I hunt...I hunt…”

...except for one, who went the other way.

*

As it advanced, the Barrier crushed underfoot the many and storied houses of God; Anglican, Presbyterian and Pentecostal. It unmade the Church of the Immaculate Conception and reduced the Zion Baptist to the same nothingness that befell old Israel and Mecca. The various United churches were dissolved forever. The schisms and holy wars that had defined and divided them in the past meant nothing on this Day of Judgement: in the eyes of the Goddess, all faiths of man were equally worthless.

Those few who stayed behind for a final mass, putting faith in prayer, burned alive, their very atoms sundered into dust.

The Barrier moved on, reducing Stanfield’s Cotton Mills, where hundreds of townsfolk had labored for a century and a half, to a memory.

Finally, it overran the Colchester County Hospital, which was silent and still, a husk of lost lives and innocence, gutted of anything valuable, stripped of medical equipment that would be nigh-irreplaceable and priceless in the foreseeable future.

*

He came diving out of the sun, using its glare to shield himself. Nose down and engines at full throttle, the pilot pressed the jet to its maximum speed, trusting the runic enhancements to keep the wings from shearing off…

There! Bright dots of colour, swarming in the sky below...diving on a moving train.

“Oh shit no. Chupathingy to control, engaging targets…”

He held down on the yoke’s trigger, and felt the plane’s automatic gatling cannon begin to spit thunder. The pegasai scattered, but more were scattered across the landscape, in pieces. 30mm ammo did that, firing at over sixty rounds per second.

He pulled back hard, swinging through the nadir of an arc and back up into the sky. Some pegasai could pace this ‘Warthog’ jet in level flight, but only their best could keep up with him in a climb...

BUMP!

He looked up, and saw a pegasus stallion clinging to the cockpit canopy, death and fury in his eyes...a multi-hued mane flapping in the breeze...a bottle of potion clenched in his teeth.

“Chupathingy to control… ‘Flash Dad’ has got me...I think I’m about to check out…”

*

The Barrier’s conquest took less than an hour. And when those sixty minutes had passed, the town of Truro was gone forever.

The Barrier did not care. It pushed onwards, rolling inexorably towards Halifax, and beyond it the United States.

The same story was being told all across the world. The Holy Lands had gone to meet their makers, the Ethiopian cradle of human civilisation was being rolled into an unmarked grave, and Khazakstan, according to some ‘The Greatest Country in the World’, had been cast out of memory. Islamabad and New Dehli would soon follow Boston and New York into night.

At this very moment, on the far side of the world, Enitan, Yekemi, and Obayana Adebayo were fighting to help evacuees in Malawi, waiting for a slow evacuation train…

And eventually, inevitably, the Barrier would meet up with itself, several thousand miles southeast of New Zealand. No longer just expanding, but enclosing...

And then it would cease, and be no more.

And mankind, like the town of Truro, would itself be…

“Nevermore…” a harsh whisper croaked.

Lightning Dust felt her hooves crunching softly over a floor of crushed stone, moving towards a faint and distant light. Around her there was nothing but churning fog, and her breathing echoed cavernously as she slowly trotted forward.

Great, another mysterious change of scene. At least her wings has stopped hurting.

“Where am I now?” she whispered wearily. “Just let me go away from all this...please let me go home.”

“Nevermore.”

With nothing else to guide her, she pressed onwards, drawn into the light...as she drew closer her surroundings solidified out of the swirling fume, resolving into rough-cut stone walls that arched to meet overhead.

Wherever she was, she was now underground. And ahead there was movement, the furtive motion of someone driven on by fear and urgency.

It was a mare, a dull grey earth pony with a purple mane, the fringe of which had been trimmed straight above her eyes, the rest of it cut short just below her ears. It gave her a look of no-nonsense focus, accentuated by the dark hoodie and saddlebags she wore.

Lightning paused and cocked her head, eyes narrowing in suspicion. The odd mare was moving from side to side across the tunnel, digging a hoof into a wall or the floor and scooping up a small amount of rock that was quickly scrutinised, sniffed, or licked.

On the ground rested the source of the light, a small lamp with a ring fitted as a mouthold. Iit did not gutter or flicker like a candle or firefly-lamp, and the glow it cast was bright and sterile.

‘Like the beacon at the lighthouse….’

Just beyond the mare was a side-tunnel, above which was mounted a paint-peeled sign.

Reflexively Lightning moved to rustle her wings, and then had a moment of shock when she realised not only had they stopped hurting, they had stopped being anything at all. She couldn’t feel them!

‘Why can’t I feel my wings!’ she opened her mouth to cry, but another set of words came out.

“What’s going on, Maud?” she sighed wearily. “Why am I here?”

The mare looked in her direction, placid eyes barely lingering for a moment.

“Because I asked you to come,” she replied in an even tone, before turning back to gouging a rut into one wall with her forehooves.

Lightning blinked in confusion, bringing one yellow hoof to her throat...she, but...yes, this mare had invited him here.

“Everyone’s noticed your absence,” he said cooly. “Zecora apparently threw a rhythmic conniption when she got to Boston and found you’d abandoned your post.”

“It doesn’t matter,” ‘Maud’ answered, before pausing to eyeball a few flecks of ore on her hoof. “Copper...and Zinc.”

Lightning grunted, and used a hindhoof to scratch something that itched between his legs.

His...his…NONONO! She was a mare, not a stallion!

The world pulsed, and Lightning bucked hard, trying to throw herself out of this alien, masculine body. Hurled aside, she slumped against the tunnel wall, sinking into it as if was soft as sand. It felt as insubstantial as smoke…

Head swimming, chest racing, she looked sideways and saw the stallion that she had just been violently self-ejected from. He was canary yellow, with a curly brown mane pressed trailing like filthy string out from under a battered fedora. Like the mare, he was wearing a pair of timeworn saddlebags, borne over a thick vest made of padded plates of no material she’d ever seen. Everything he wore looked to have survived a journey through the Everfree Forest during one of its infamous storms. Some remaining part of her kept insisting that by Equestria’s rules, this shouldn’t happen. Lightning thought those sorts of journeys were mythical, that their time had passed by! And yet, something told her that this nightmare world she had been forced into did not play by the rules.

“She’s coming around…” he said, voice suddenly sounding far off and distorted. “Put her back under, quick!”

“It’s not that simple,” Maud replied, still digging away with manic fervor, her voice full of stress and concern. “She’s probably got human drugs in her system. Trying to work around those takes care, or we might put her into a coma.”

Lolling against the wall Lightning felt her jaw being worked, something pulling it open and ramming something into the back of her throat.

“That bezoar should neutralise anything she took, and then we knock her back out to reset her wings…”

The swimming sensation in her mind was coiling into a raging monster that pounded and kicked on the inside of her skull. Panicking, her mouth clamped shut in order to force her to swallow, Lightning flailed out, trying to ward off the unseen attacker. In the corner of her vision, she could see the mare named Maud and the stallion shouting at one another.

“Darn, she’s a fighter!”

“Of course she is, she’s my daughter’s First Lieutenant!”

“Okay, that should do it...don’t let her spit out the bezoar until I can get the sedation talisman on her.”

The pressure on her mouth tightened, almost choking her as the stallion took two steps forward and threw out a hoof to still Maud’s hooves. She reacted with a kick that knocked him away.

“I’ve got it. Just keep her still!”

Then something snapped shut around Lightning’s neck and the world of smoke and shadow dissolved under a wave of soothing bliss…

‘New subject recognised...searching for unity...unity unavailable, resorting to default configuration daemon…’

She floated, serene and unthinking, her arms and legs hanging loose at her side, fingers trailing in foaming waves of light. Dimly she felt that something was wrong about that...but the sense of relief was too strong for her to care. Faintly, somewhere else, she could feel dozens of warm, furry bodies pinning her down, rubbing their damp hides against her. She could hear their distant giggles, and sense the dampness seeping into her, warm and rich and magical…

‘...Configuration daemon loaded...commencing ponification…’

She was ready to be purified. She was ready to become her true self. To kill her imperfect self and at last smile with honesty.

“Why...hello there,” said a voice, calm and collected. “It’s been a while since I was last used like this. The spell’s network must have gone down…”

A lavender unicorn leaned into view, purple eyes bright and curious. Her mane was also purple, with two streaks of colour in it.

She was the most beautiful thing Lightning had ever seen.

“I’m ready…” she said, voice joyous. “I’m ready to join you. Please take me…”

“Oh, a willing convert!” the unicorn giggled, hooves clopping together in glee. “We get so few of those...oh this is going to be fuuuuuuuuuun…”

She ducked out of view and Lightning found herself being tipped upright, sliding onto a ethereal floor like a marionette with cut strings. Unable to move beyond a numb stirring, her limbs still swimming with that lovely warm lethargy, she looked around, seeing a sky of stars and a sea of glowing orbs and luminescent smoke below.

Windows hovered in the void, on each of them playing familiar memories. She recognised herself in those windows, recognised her coffee-toned skin and flowing hair. There was was at her high school graduation...her first day at medical college...helping to deliver a baby.

The unicorn mare was trotting around, examining each image with clinical coolness. Lightning knew her name.

“Twilight Sparkle…”

The purple pony ignored her, instead focusing on a particular cluster of windows.

“So you were a nurse? That’s interesting. Ah well, not much use to us.”

She tapped that cluster with a hoof and it burst like a soap bubble. Lightning felt something twitch in the back of her mind, and shadows seemed to press into her past. It was so hard to remember! A nurse? Had she been…

“I wanted to be a nurse…” she said slowly, trying to dredge up the old thoughts, with an effort that was not inconsiderable. Why was it so hard? “Can I please be a nurse? A perfect pony nurse, helping others…”

“Oh, no…” the pony said chirpily. “No, we don’t need any more doctors or nurses at this time. We have been dreadfully short on numbers, least of all in the quality that we so need.”

“But...I wanted…”

“Oh, and I’m not Twilight Sparkle,” the creature added, and this time its smile seemed to have more than a hint of fang about it. “I’m your friendly configuration daemon, a utility spell within the Ponification matrix designed to help find your perfect role in our happy society.”

Lightning blinked…”Then why can’t I be a nurse...that’s my skillset, my special talent...isn’t it?”

“Oh, you misunderstand…” the pony daemon crooned. “This procedure is not about finding a niche in ponydom for you to fill. The goal is to reshape you to meet our needs.”

Lightning listened numbly, her mouth falling open. “That’s….that’s…”

“What’s wrong?” asked the daemon, tipping its head. “Didn’t you say you wanted this? To become a pretty pony, perfect and free?” Those words were honeyed and sweet, yes, but to Lightning, they somehow felt rancid, more mocking in their sincerity than if she had said it sarcastically. It was as if something was being forced down her throat, rebelling against her system even as she accepted the taste.

It smiled, beguiling. Lightning slowly looked down at her hands. Her horrid, human hands. They shook, as if confessing a secret fear.

“Don’t you trust me? Don’t you trust ponies to be better than what you were?”

Lightning could not answer. Slowly she looked up at the memories floating overhead. Her wedding day, her son...her grief. An outpouring of grief upon grief, of unmarked, unknown graves and empty beds. The shadow of a nameless, faceless Taliban soldier stalking her dreams.

“Yes…” she said, weeping. “Just take it away. Make me better.”

“Gooooood,” it sighed, before leaning in and giving her a brief nuzzle. Its hide felt cold and smooth. Reptilian. Lightning shuddered, but the creature did not notice. Its’ gaze had fallen onto another floating window that had appeared.

“Oh, my Creator is so clever...she’s updated the potion with new templates. How wonderful!”

It scrolled through arcane webs of light, until it finally settled on something.

“Here we are...the perfect use for your raw emotion. Plenty of room for intelligence and creativity too, within limits. You’re very lucky, you know that?”

It smiled sweetly, but the smile did not reach the eyes. “You’re going to do so much good for Equestria, as our newest, brightest soldier.”

“NO!” Lightning screamed, trying to throw a leg up and failing. “Not a soldier, not a killer! Ponies don’t kill! I don’t want to kill! I wanted to be perfect and peaceful! To-”

“I already told you,” it answered, ears falling in disappointment. “It doesn’t matter what you want. You are only apes, after all, before the smiling goddess! Oh, and I had so hoped you would just receive this blessing willingly. So disappointing.”

Then it leered, and jabbed a hoof in her direction, eyes flashing. “And you’ll do whatever we tell you, my mare. And then, you’ll never disappoint anypony again...”

Lighting looked down, and saw to her horror that her hands had fused into solid, blunt hooves. Soft, peach-orange fur had already formed a coating over them, and was swarming up her arms. Her shoes ripped apart as her feet followed suit. It hurt more than anything she had ever felt, her muscles torn and reformed, stretched and pushed further than they ever should have been. Tipping her head forward she saw a thick, spiky fringe of pink-and-red mane fall forward over her eyes. She could feel her hairline pulling in tighter at the back, short and spunky. Hyperventilating she felt tears come to her, grief mixed with joy. She was going to be a pony…

“Oh, what beautiful colours...orange, red and pink form a lovely contrast. And your eyes...such a submissive shade of grey. Tall and lithe too...I think you’re going to be quite the looker.”

It hummed to itself and tapped the matrix floating beside it. “I think I’ll need to adjust your libido and muscular development to account for that. So many ponies crave an Amarezon, and I think you’ll get a lot of use off the battlefield for mess-hall relaxation. You’ll need the endurance to keep up with demand.”

The words slowly sank in, and Lightning looked at it, betrayal stabbing deep into her.

“You...want me to have sex?”

“But of course. Like I said, you won’t be able to say no. You’re going to be an obedient squadmate, helpmate and playmate. That should do wonders for your unit’s morale.”

“No!” she howled, trying to claw the fur off of her, even as it swarmed under the tatters of her shirt and out above the neckline. “No! Not like this! You’re not supposed to be like this! I was supposed to be happy! Perfect and peaceful and-”

The creature smiled, and this time its mouth was full of bladed teeth. Its eyes, once so welcoming, looked almost hungry. Nearly feral. “The troops can get rather frustrated, and we do so need those numbers. I am what I am, a construct following a programmed directive. And soon, you will be too. Execute reconfiguration.”

Lightning sprawled on her side as thousands of tiny needles seemed to stab into her body, penetrating deeper than flesh and bone. She wanted to scream, but she had no breath. Instead she could only shudder and gibber, frothing blood and spittle as she was touched, fondled and violated in a way that no pain or man had ever done to her before. It was as if cold knives were inside her memories, feeling at once as if she was being stabbed and suffering a concussion, shredding all that she held dear.

“Whyyyyy-rgh! Whhhhhhyyyyyy!?”

“Because we don’t need all that pesky individualism silly. We don’t need your soul. Just the bits of it that are useful to us. Besides, this is what you wanted, deep down. Freedom from your past.”

It touched her, stroking a hoof over her forehead as, with a ripping of flesh and bone, a bloody horn burst though. And as it pushed out, she felt something else press in, flowing along the path of the needles until it reached her centre, dug its claws in, and started to cut and slice.

“Such a beautiful thing I am, crafted by such a clever mistress. To take something as raw and primal as a living soul, and reformat it into a machine for useful work. Oh yes, what a beautiful thing I am.”

She had endured abuse, but this...this was the agony of a putric essence thrusting into her!

“You know, I really do love you ones who come in smiling. That moment when you lose your faith is so rewarding, and so useful in breaking you down for processing and reassembly.”

Above her the memories swam in their orbits, blurring and washing. Some faded away, while others began to glow red, pushing forwards in her mind until they seared like they never had before.

Pain...rage...hatred...hatred for the people who all her life had hurt her. All the humans that had hurt her. The longing to make them pay, make them suffer, make them share in this torture...driving, sinking, embedding.

“Hurt...them! She screeched, an equine roar ripping up from her throat. “Let me hurt them!”

“Oh you will sweetie, you will. And I think you’re going to be glorious. We just need to seal it...get you all wired up. See - look at that.”

It cradled her head and lifted it up so she could see. “That’s the strongest, happiest memory of your childhood. The foundation of your existence.”

Herself, five years old at Christmas, dressed in a nurse’s costume. She was cradling a doll, a baby doll, and taking its temperature with a toy thermometer. A smile on a face she couldn’t remember.

“Almost finished now...all we need is a name.”

“Nightingale…” she managed, forcing the words out in a whistle. “My true name is Nightingale.”

“Oh? No, that won’t do. I see your little thoughts, and I can’t give you that. No...I know…”

Words blazed across memory, dredged up from a long-lost school lesson, soon to be pushed deep into her subconscious.

‘Wretch!’ I cried. ‘Thy God above has lent thee - by these angels he has sent thee,
Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!’

“There we go. You wanted to forget, and you wanted to share what you have. So you can be a gift of oblivion to other humans, my little Nepenthe.”

“I..am...Nightingale…”

“No,” it cooed. “You’re Nepenthe, and you belong to us now. And here...we...go…”

The memory burst into into blazing shards, and Lightning screamed as she felt herself shatter in kind. The rage and hate and loathing burned bright, and everything else of her mind and essence was reduced to fragments orbiting a red star of festering emotion, slowly drawn by its gravity into a new shape, a shell to encase what had replaced the core of her very existence.

Information poured in, forming a filigree of wire on the developing husk. Barbed wire. Battle tactics and drill practice, weapons handling and hoof-to-hoof technique all poured into her mind and muscle memory. Everything she needed to be a perfect, powerful warrior…

...and the knowledge on how to please a mare. How to coax a stallion to climax. How to flick her tail in such a way as to invite attention...

Slowly, her mind was bound up, locked in and chained down. Somewhere, deep inside, she was screaming for release, begging to have even a shred of awareness in what she was going to become.

‘But what’s the point?’ Another part of her asked, though it felt unfamiliar. Wouldn’t she be happier? Why would she want that? She could feel her thoughts twisting, her worldview warping...becoming clean and simple and bright…

...as it did a new image began to form overhead. Screams and howls faded into a low background buzz, and she began to feel calm. All the emotion dulled and dwindled as she beheld the new rock upon which the throne of her soul rested.

There was still a doll in the picture, a beautiful pony doll with an orange hide, short pink-and-red striped mane, and eyes of the softest grey, dull as the edge of a blade. She looked so strong and brave, clad in her shining plate armor.

And holding her, lovingly playing with a favourite toy, was the giant form of Queen Celestia, an alicorn filly with a flowing, rosey mane. With a flick of her horn, she levitated over a label: Property of Celestia.

She looked like nothing more than a petulant child of grotesque size, made hideous through demeanor and behavior, kept happy only as long as things were going its way and its way alone. A slight pudginess looked more like slimey extra layers, eyes set in a happy expression and yet filled with malice.

She was a monster, a nightmare…

The abomination magically stitched the label in place, and hugged the dolly tight.

...perfect, wondrous, radiant, divine. Her One! Her All! Her Owner!

The toy was...she was Ni… Nighting… Nepenthe… Ni… she could not remember. Could not reconcile, as her last bastions of self fought against the growing void within her soul. The doll was that nurse from her childhood. The doll was the beautiful pony doll, eyes made of nonreflective grey buttons. It was neither. It was both?

Tittering, her wonderful Owner glanced under the dolly’s tail, and found a pull-string. Slowly, She bit onto it and...

YANK.

“Hi there! I’m the Pretty Private, Nepenthe!”

Hot fire exploded in between her nethers and she bucked, her mouth spitting out the same words as the doll. Her eyes rolled back in her skull at the heat, the intensity, the raw pleasure that was inviting and somehow dark, all-consuming...

She was a pony. No matter how she struggled to believe that she was not, that was truth. To associate anything human with the idea of happiness was heresy...

Her seventh birthday. A brownie sundae instead of a cake, she hadn’t wanted one. A set of child’s fake tools, which she’d used to play doctor as all little fillies did. No, not a-

YANK.

“I love you, Your Majesty!” bleated a voice that she knew to be her own.

A great tsunami of other crested and splashed over her, and the memories washed away as she writhed in the afterglow, bits of herself running out with the tide.. She got a toy sword for her birthday, and grew up playing with the neighbourhood colts, whipping them in their games of cowponies and buffalos…

...once she was old enough, she’d let them whip her in other ways…such fun ways.

YANK.

“Everypony is my special somepony!”

And it was true...she’d happily lift her tail for anypony.

Raw...lustful...sexual...submissive...obedient...loyal...soldier...

“NO!” screamed some semblance of that hateful otherness. Pathetic. As if it deserved that mercy. “THIS ISN’T ME! THIS WASN’T ME! I WAS NEVER SHE WHO WAS NEVER ME AND I NEVER-”

“Then who were you?” the daemon asked.

“I… was...a healer...not a...”

YANK

“I’ll always protect you!”

Her entrance into high school. Awkward, gawky, another face in the hundreds at her school. Another girl, no, a filly, no, a girl, a best friend that she had known all her life whose name was escaping her, suggesting that they would be great friends. Invitations to parties. The two of them smiling on the river together among other friends, drunk with her best friend’s older brother, telling what seemed like great and terrible secrets in the bright light of the

YANK

“I’ll always serve you!”

Another wave. What need was there for such secrets? For the darkness of the human world? No, she could look up to another, other… brighter light, like the sun that lit Earth, but brighter somehow. She could not stop smiling inside. And her smiles seemed better, fuller, wider. What point was there in resisting?

YANK

“I belong to you!”

She… was… she was somepony, that was for sure. She might have been somepony who wasn’t Nightingale before, she thought? But even saying she was somepony seemed wrong. No, she couldn’t have been human, could she? She’d certainly hate to have been

YANK.

“I’m a Pretty Pony!

YANK.

”Everypony should be a Pretty Pony! It’s so much fun and you’ll be happy all the time!”

What use was there in resisting? If humanity was so great, she’d surely remember something of it. Something other than pain.

YANK

“Hi there! I’m the Pretty Private, Nepenthe!”

With each draw of the string, a rush of alien emotions and sensations, rushes of not-quite memories that she knew to be of life in Equestria, conditioning her to fit into their perfect society almost seamlessly. A surge of feeling that flooded and drowned her mind, swamping all resistance and doubt.

She came, and spoke, and thought...only when the string was pulled. Only as her Owner wanted her to, only when she was ordered to...

Regular, conditioned...programmed.

Gazing up, eyes wide, entranced and glassy, taking in this vision, the newfoal mare felt the muscles in her cheek twitch. This was her, she was a dolly. A happy pony dolly to be used, abused and discarded. And wasn’t that just wonderful?

She was free at last. Free from her past. Free from her pain.

Free from thought. Free from conscience. Free from choice.

And she had to do, all she wanted to do, was as she was told.

“There we go…” crooned the monstrous magical mare who had helped her, stepping back so that she could climb onto her hooves. A tall and strong unicorn mare, muscular and lean, ready to serve and die…

YANK

“Private Nepenthe reporting!” she said brightly, forehoof snapping up in a salute, her hindquarters twitching as some very special nerve endings flared deliciously.

She obeyed, and was rewarded. Simple, elegant...perfect. She was perfect now.

“How may I serve, mistress?”

The daemon trotted forward, giggling at the result.

“Oh the cleverness of me!” she trilled, almost intoxicated with the results of her own work. “Just serve and obey, Private…”

And then, with one hoof, she pulled the newfoal into a kiss.

YANK.

The freshly-baked mare responded with programmed enthusiasm, her eyes wide open and mindless as her mouth and tongue began to suck and hum. All there was in what remained of her mind, her every thought, was of how to serve...

...and a voice, a screaming, distant voice that hummed in the back of her consciousness, pleading and begging to die. But she ignored it. Even as her tongue worked with sensual skill inside the mouth of the daemon, her gaze fixated up above on the vision of herself in the hooves of her Owner.

And the twitch in her cheeks grew stronger, drawing her lips into a wide expression of adulant joy, the bliss of a toy fulfilling its purpose.

And so the pony named Nepenthe looked upon her reason, her meaning, her soul.

And she saw that it was good.

And smiled. She was her Queen’s loyal soldier pony dolly.

And it was playtime.

And all that she had been before, the woman who had been a mother and wife, the victim who had struggled to overcome pain her whole life, the nurse who wanted to be a better being, was…

“Nevermore…” something squawked in Lightning’s ears, and she tumbled with a horrified scream into a wet wooden deck. She hugged herself in a ball, eyes streaming and sobbing.

“I’m Lightning Dust, not Nepenthe…I’m Lightning Dust, not FUCKING Nepenthe. I’m not that thing!”

But there was a hole in her soul, a terrified void into which the horror of what she had just seen, felt, experienced, was pouring like water spiraling down a sink.

“Nevermore…”

“AND SHUT UP!” she screamed, throwing her head back, eyes squeezed shut. “What does that even mean!”

‘Whatever you believe it does…’ something whispered in her own voice. Lightning did not answer. She’d had enough of twisted visions and voices that spoke strange words with her borrowed tongue.

And so she held herself, and wept. She was afraid, and scared...but she was also in grief. She had seen that horror, and come back from it. But that creature...that ‘human’ that had become Nepenthe, she was trapped in that everlasting nightmare.

Because deep down, somehow, Lightning knew that what she had seen, the horror she had escaped, had been real.

She wept for the woman who had wanted to be Nightingale. It was an alien feeling for her, as foreign as the fear she had felt before the lighthouse. Empathy.

The sky above wept as well, soft teardrops of rain settling lightly on her coat and wings. Her stiff, broken wings.

At last she opened her eyes, and saw that she was lying atop a familiar flyer.

Luna: The World’s First Commercial Diesel Princess.

She blinked, and shook her head. No, it said ‘Tugboat’. The World’s First Commercial Diesel Tugboat.

Exhausted from emotion, she pushed herself up onto all four hooves, and took a self-steadying breath.

‘Remember your training. Assess the situation. Work the problem.’

Cautiously, and very aware that this time she was wholly conscious of her surroundings, she examined herself, building a situational checklist in her mind.

Teal coat. Pegasus. No additional limbs, digits or...members. Definately female. Proud and loud cutie mark of a lightning bolt and three stars, though it looked a little bruised in this dim light.

She was herself again. Not a passenger in another’s body, not experiencing something else’s life.

As for where she was...well, that was something else entirely.

She was once again standing on the deck of the tugboat where she’d been recovered by the stallion called Prism Flash...that realisation threatened to overwhelm her with unpleasant memories, but having suffered enough trauma already today she kicked those thoughts down. She had to retain composure, at least for now. And compared to what she had just experienced, her brief time aboard the Luna had been a holiday cruise…

Oh Celestia. That madmare, ‘Revving Engine’, or at least the madmare she’d been turned into...she was like Nepenthe...the same thing had been done to her...oh nononono…

“NO!” she barked, clenching down on herself. “We don’t panic, we don’t freak out. We stay calm, and we work the problem…”

Okay, okay. She had this, she had this.

Putting one foot in front of the other, she trotted around to the prow of the tugboat, to see where it was going.

And stopped, stunned.

’DAMMIT!’

The Luna had changed. Before it had been painted in dirty browns, blacks and shades of maroon, textured with rust and water-rot. Now the superstructure was a dusky blue, the hull a gleaming black. The vessel’s name was picked out on the wheelhouse in silver lettering, and from the single exhaust stack a cloud of stars slowly churned out into the sky, a corona of galaxies and nebulae pouring out behind it like a tail, and spreading out astern…

...over a sea of nothing. To either side a still ocean reached out under a dark and empty sky, with only a faint silver line to mark the horizon. Mist reached in an even blanket over the black water.

And ahead, there was a light, shrouded in clouds. The prow of the boat was pointed right at it.

Lightning stepped up to the forefoot, peering ahead. In the distance she could see a shore, one which seemed to recede away with every second. Beyond it, lit in the fleeting patches of light breaking through the flying cloud-wrack, she could see a green and radiant land. But something about it seemed wrong-the colors too dull, the light cold and pallid like a particularly unforgiving day. Yet she didn’t care. Today had gone beyond the events of a horror movie, beyond even a nightmare. You could at least wake up screaming from a nightmare, or go lucid and blink yourself conscious as you realized none of it felt real. Sometimes, they were even consistent.

Today, however, had been all too real, and none of it had made sense.

“Equestria...that’s home! That’s my home!”

“Nevermore…” an increasingly familiar voice intoned, and Lightning felt a chill wash over her. Turning, she looked up towards the wheelhouse and saw something perched over the teal-green windows.

An ominous shape, all feathers and beak, silhouetted by the light streaming over it from the masthead light.

It was a raven, gazing down at her. Still and silent..she would have sworn it was dead except for the burning light of its eyes, which were fixed on her with stern decorum.

“Nevermore,” it spake again, mocking her in those three syllables. Lightning gritted her teeth and flared her wings, ready to push off and kick the bird in the beak…

...and found her hooves anchored to the planking, stuck to its surface…glued to the monstrous shadow of the bird, cast long across the deck by the lamplight, and slowly inching up over her.

“Get off me! Get off me!” she roared, outrage at the past days events overwhelming fear. “Get the fuck off me!”

The bird tipped its head.

“And don’t say nevermore!” she screamed, even as the silky skin crawled over her cutie-mark...it pulled at her, tried to drag her down.

“Nevermore.”

Fingers grabbed at her, hands of darkness tearing at her wings. Shapes were crawling up out of the bird’s shadow, ghosts with blazing eyes and gaping mouths in which hellish light blazed. They screamed, a wordless howl of rage. Lightning thrashed wildly, her hooves sinking into the pooling oblivion, even as they stretched out to take her.

She saw the woman who had called herself Nightingale at the front, black hands covered in dripping blood.

“Saaaaaaave me! SAVE ME!” the monstrosity slurred. Then its face burst apart, and the pale figure of a dead infant crawled out covered in ichor, moaning in pain and clutching the doll of Nepenthe in its tiny, frostbitten fingers.

Others, billions of the apelike creatures she now knew to be humans, and hundreds of ponies screamed and howled, crying for deliverance, salvation, revenge, and blood.

Her blood. The blood of a pony.

They surged for her, oily flesh foaming into a wave of fingers and writhing tendrils. Lightning screamed as it burst at her…

“ENOUGH!”

Light blazed from behind her, golden and radiant, and the mass of shadows recoiled as if struck. Then, with a feral scream, it drew itself together into a hateful singularity, wings and horn slick with slime, an alicorn of death that threw itself over Lightning’s head and at whoever had spoken..

...and then there was another mare. An Earth Pony mare, creamy and solid. She reached forward, and Lightning threw herself back against the gunwale, whimpering.

The mare drew away, and then slowly lowered herself onto the deck, smiling kindly. A rusty lyre was strapped to her side, and she twitched spasmodically. Her eyes seemed to roll in random directions in time to those spasms.

“Two by two, eyes in blue…” she said, in a voice of a mad prophet, cracked and broken. But there was warmth under it.

She pointed ahead of the boat, from where screams and roaring “Two by two, eyes in blue; me and her, vee and u…”

Lightning slowly turned to see where she was pointing.

The shadowmare was duelling with another alicorn, a minty mare whose streaming mane was woven from silver and gold wire. Her face was regal in wrath as she swooped and dove on her fullspread wings; her eyes blazed like twin suns as she cracked her horn back and forth, hurling spell after spell in battle…

...and where each of those spells hit her opponent, they burnt away the shadow, revealing the monster beneath. Pearly fur, a rainbow mane, rosen eyes narrowed in malice and hate.

Struck speechless with awe, Lightning saw Princess Celestia in duel with the green mare, and did not know who to root for.

“Queen, not Celly, as you don’t know…” the mare beside her corrected softly. “Equestria yours not, this script gone badwise.”

“Who is she?” Lightning whispered, not caring about the broken syntax and mangled words.

The mare carrying the harp scrunched her face, and managed a single coherent burst of language.

“Lyra Heartstrings. Greatest in Equus or Earth. Dead and gone, but not forgotten.”

She smiled with pride, and then her expression broke, one side collapsing into heartwracked sobs.

“And her I am Bonnie.”

Lightning looked at her, and saw a grief that had become so familiar to her in just a few short hours. Unsure of what to do, she slowly stepped closer and pulled the mare named ‘Bonnie’ into a hug.

“I’m dreaming..aren’t I?” she said, maintaining her hold on the shaking earth pony, eyes still locked on the two titans roaring at one another in a cataclysmic storm of magical defiance. The alicorn named Lyra was clearly the younger, yet she traded every blow from the monstrous Queen Celestia like for like, her horn a fiery sword and her body ablaze in emerald light.

The flashes of their collisions threw up huge flares, illuminating a matching battle in the clouds and sea, a war of shapes wrought in storm and spray. One one side arose a swarming army of ponies, churning like grist in a mill as they were hurled into the fray, do close together and numerous that Lightning at first thought they were some solid oozing mass. Against them, outnumbered but cohesive, was a cluster of humans and ponies, holding tight together and lashing back with fist, and hoof, and weapons she couldn't believe.

And yet the swarming ponies seemed to be, slowly, relentlessly, pressing the advantage.

Far beyond the battle, half obscured by a mountain that rose beyond the vision of Equestria, Lightning saw that the light shining over all was not the sun, but a radiant alicorn mare with a scarlet mane and a white coat. As the whole world tore apart, she watched on with silent pain...and pride.

The raven watched on too, not so much as even rustling a feather.

“Dreaming of coruscant you ares,” Bonnie replied. “Envisioning and, handy yup.”

Lyra felt the trembling prophetess reach around and hold her close. “I seize your pains…” Bonnie said through clenched teeth. “And I nose what you can do. There’s greatness in you Dusty...don’t bumblebee afraid to seeker it. Become justice, and seek truth… for there are few ponies left and right to Doo that.”

And then, her hooves hooked around Lightning’s stiff wings, and with a sharp crack, dislocated them.

“Wake and fly...dream not die…” she said, holding Lightning’s head steady as the sudden pain sent the pegasus into a screaming recoil...before letting go, letting her drop overboard.

Lightning hit the water with a splash, and found herself once again writhing amidst living shapes that pulled themselves up out of the black foam. But this time they were ponies.

“You can’t fight us!” they chorused. “We cannot be denied…”

Two sets of hooves grabbed hold of her, threatening to rip her in twain. Panic dulled by shock and pain, Lightning saw she was being held up between two titanic pegasus mares formed from storm and froth.

One had a rainbow mane and tail, her face the very image of cocky contempt.

The other, was Lightning herself.

“You can’t fight us…” she taunted. “You are us…”

And then the sea below split open into a gaping maw, lined with shards of rock over which foam poured into a bottomless void.

“AND YOU’RE GOING TO BECOME US!”

They let her drop. Screaming, Lightning plummeted into the pit, which slammed shut on her…

Forevermore.

And then she woke up.

ABENAKI ROAD, JUST SOUTH OF TRURO

“Jean, elle se rèveiller…”

“Oui, oui…pouvez-vous parler assez bien le francais qu’elle ne peut pas nous comprendre?”

The brown and black mare stirred on the floor of locomotive’s cab. Her pierced ears twitched, and then with a groan she lifted her head, which felt as if it had a chestburster in it.

“I speak french…” she said weakly.

Two humans looked down at her, a older black man and a young woman, practically a girl. He was driving the engine, and she was leaning on the back of his seat.

“I can understand you, idiots,” she clarified. Je parle francais.”

They looked down at her for a long second, and then at each other.

“Sa mere est etait un amstere.”

“Oui, ei son pere odeurs du sureau.”

When she did not react, the girl smirked. “Yeah, you’re screwed. No way you speak French.”

Her accent was British; to the mare’s ears, it sounded smug, invasive. Another outsider.

“Fuckers…” the mare growled. She moved to stir, only to find all four of her legs had been shackled together with two padlocked lengths of chain, which themselves had been looped around the upright for the vacant conductor’s chair. She wasn’t going anywhere, and did not have the reach needed to reach either of them, or the controls.

Where were her guns…oh, cute, hanging over the windows in a rack, along with her saddlebags. Perfect, just fucking perfect...

As her captors continued debating in French, she gave up trying to get leverage on the chain, and instead lay still. She could hear a constant revving hum coming from behind, and the whole cab bumped softly as it rode over the rail joints. Snow flitted past the windows, beyond which she could see frosted, wintry pines gliding by, black on white.

Then the engineer started, and eased the throttle back. The cab bumped sharply, and the squeal of brakes rang out as he brought them to a stop. The mare watched as her two captors peered forward through the windscreen, but chained to the floor, she could not see what they were reacting to.

But her pony ears were sharp, and while she did not speak French, she was fluent in Spanish. There was not much overlap between the languages, but since her change she had found it easier to bridge the linguistic gaps.

And beyond that, phrases like ‘PHL’, ‘HLF’ and ‘Thenardiers’ needed no translation. After listening intently, she laughed snidely.

“Well fuck me on all fours and call me a pony...the boys pulled off a coronary!”

“You tell us what that means,” the girl ordered.

“It means kids, if you don’t know the score why not ask an expert. I didn’t know the old boys were making a move on Nova Scotia, but this sounds like their stuff. A coronary, a seizure of transport infrastructure. What’s happening?”

They whispered quickly in each others ears, and then the man looked at her.

“There’s a barricade across the line, not far ahead. Guys with guns and red signal flares. We’re trying to identify who they’re aligned with.”

“Is the barricade a school bus?” she said, tone sharp.

The glance they shared confirmed her thoughts. “Then it’s the HLF. It’s one of the Thenardier’s best tactics when it comes to holding up trains. Soft-hearted loco crews always stop because they never know if the bus is empty or full of bombs or hostages.”

She laughed again and let her head rest against the floor. “If it is them, then I’m just as fucked as you.”

To her surprise, the girl suddenly stepped away from the engineer and crouched down in front of her, close enough that she could get a buck in if she tried. The girl whipped up a sheet of paper, a familiar set of orders branded with the HLF crest.

The orders calling for her own destruction.

“Is this you? Verity Carter?”

The pony...Verity, nodded slowly. The Brit smiled in response, a nasty grin that bled across her face like a seam unzipping.

“Then you can help us, and in return, I’ll not just hand you over to your old compadres in the HLF. And afterwards we’ll discuss your repayment...”

Verity shuffled around to look her in the eyes. “What do you mean.”

Her captor stood and pulled on a tactical vest that had been hanging over the back of the engineer’s chair. It was dirty and battle-worn, and the letters ‘HLF’ had been crudely burned and scored across the breast, probably with a soldering iron.

“Did that myself…” she said proudly. “Thought I’d look the part…”

Well, it worked. She looked as much the part as anyone else in the HLF’s ramshackle rabble.

“And you can help me pose as one of them…” the Brit said, zipping the vest up tight, and holstering a pistol. “Now, who’s the commander of the Thenardier Guards?”

“Colonel Galt…” she replied, stunned. “Atlas Dagney Galt. He’s the one who’d be leading any attack. But how are you going to pose as a soldier...you couldn’t even shoot one fucking pony last night!”

“Simple...I’m going to present you as our captive. And then you’re going to tell me how you got fixed in the head.”

“What...is that my ‘repayment’?”

“Yes!” the girl snarled, getting down on all fours and pushing her face into Verity’s. “In case you’ve forgotten, you’re kind of a fucking unique snowflake right now; a newfoal with a fucking will of her own. So you’re going to help us do our job, and then you’re going to tell me how to heal my whole fucking family! I don’t care what Erika Kraber’s studies said, you’re proof that there is a way, and I want to know!”

If she had wanted to, Verity could have put her hooves through the redcoat’s pretty face. But she didn’t.

Instead, she smiled sweetly.

“Deal. Keep me alive, and I’ll tell you everything I know…”

What followed was a crash briefing of names, ranks, and attitude. The girl, Tess...was healthy and dirty enough to pass for a HLF soldier, but she lacked the proper discipline or bearing. So instead, she had to make up for it by feigning a Napoleon complex.

“Be dominant…” Verity stressed, still chained down, as Jean advanced the throttle and moved them slowly forward. “Don’t give an inch and feel free to wave your gun around. The Thenadiers are macho-macho, they respect a show of balls.”

“Speaking from experience?” Jean quipped sarcastically. Other than the odd comment he had remained silent, but he kept giving Verity the stink eye. Whatever deals she made with Tess, she was certain he didn’t trust her.

Good. He shouldn’t trust anything that walked on hooves.

The engine lurched to a halt just before the barricade, where twin red flares were burning in the fresh snow. Through the windows, Jean-Eric saw men in armor and fatigues approaching his side of the cab, and held down on the horn as they reached for the catwalk railing. This was part of the plan as well, to keep them on their toes.

“Get away from there!” Tess shouted, emerging through the nose door. “That side of the cab was hit with a potion-phial coming out of Hali! You want to get turned into one of those geldos cause of a stupid-ass mistake?!”

The men jumped back, and Tess scrambled down on the opposite set of steps, the tac-vest she wore buckled up tight and both of Verity’s shotguns strapped to her back. Holstered as they was, it would be impossible to see that the stocks and trigger mechanisms had been modified for saddle mounting.

“You! Identifiy yourself!” a voice barked.

“Lieutenant Teresa Jones, HLF First English Battalion…” Jean heard her answer before the door swung itself shut. Through the driving snow he could just see her stepping around to the front of the engine, casually leaning against the coupling as she confronted the small unit’s leader.

“She’s got some smarts…” the pony named Verity said, almost casually, from the floor. “Inking the HLF stamp onto the train’s waybill was cunning. We could do with more minds like that.”

“Be quiet…” he answered coolly, not feeling any of his usual levity.

“Why should I? If this goes tits-up I’m dead anyway, might as well spend my last seconds in friendly conversation.”

“Because pony or person, you rub me the wrong way,” he said, the growl in his voice matching the idling snarl of the diesel motor. “Just listen to you, going on about how clever the HLF are, using school buses to stop trains.”

“Worked, didn’t it?” she smirked.

“Of course it did!” he seethed. “Any engineer would go full emergency on the brakes seeing that parked ahead of them; we watch footage of test collisions at grade crossings in training, we’re made to understand that road vehicles are sardine cans compared with a locomotive under power!”

He stared down at her, eyes burning, and then shook his head.

“Merde! No decent person wants to take out an entire bus of kids! If the HLF use tactics like that… how can they call themselves decent people?!”

“Well, sorry Mr Conductor, but this is war, not Shining Time Station. Everything goes out the window when survival’s at stake. You know the shit going on in Asia and South America. People are eating their own children down there.”

“I’m the engineer, not the conductor…” he answered, jaw clenched and a vein in his neck throbbing. “Tess is the conductor, and you’d better fucking hope she’s well disposed to you after this, because she’s the one making the call on your worthless life!”

He rose out of his seat, peering back down over the locomotive’s nose.

“Now shut your face and play dead, she’s bringing someone aboard.”

Verity, seething, rolled under the conductor’s seat with her face to the wall and went limp, feigning unconsciousness as the door opened, letting in a gust of howling wind and snow.

Tess came up with it, and Verity felt the thud of her drop into the conductor’s chair, the floor shaking as the girl planted a booted foot down either side of her little pony head. Then there was a soft pressure as the cool tip of the 9mm’s barrel pressed gently into the fur on her temple. She forced herself to not tense up.

“Here we are, Master Sargeant Birch. As promised, so delivered,” she heard Tess say smugly.

“Holy fuck!” a male voice answered. “It really is Carter’s traitor daughter.”

‘Dad...and where do I know the name Birch...was he in the Guards?’

There was a momentary silence, and then the HLF master-sergeant spoke again, voice threatening.

“Standing orders are to kill this whorse.”

“That’s changed, Birch,” Tess replied. “We made a successful capture of a former high-ranking operative. Priority now is establishing how deeply she’s betrayed us. What… secrets… she revealed to the horsefuckers.”

‘Birch...Birch...oh yeah, Johnnie Birch, the crazy who thought the ponies were some sort of zionist Illuminati plot cooked up by the Rothschilds and the reptilians…’ She stifled a groan. He was going to be almost physically painful to listen to. Still. Least he’s not part of Glanzon’s Gluemakers…

“John…” she moaned softly, stirring her limbs as if waking. “John, is that you…”

“Quiet, you!” Tess said, genuinely surprised, and jabbing the gun against her head. It was an impotent threat though, Verity had the measure of her now, and she wasn’t a killer...or at least not the kind that could kill with their own hands.

And she had Birch’s measure too. This could be amusing...

“...it’s me, Johnnie. It’s Verity…” she moaned, slowly rolling over to face them, a manic grin on her face and her eyes wide and staring. “We shared a drink once, Johnnie. I know you liked me. Come drink with me again Johnnie...drink deep of the potion of life…”

“Oh fuck, it even sounds like her…” Birch muttered, backing away. “That’s just twisted. God give us strength.”

“...come join me Johnnie, come be a happy slave...frolicing under ther all-seeing eye of illumination. Join our New World Order...our perfect new Babylon, one nation under Satan… living as one under the unrelenting love of our smiling Goddess...”

Birch had gone white as a sheet, stumbling back against the control console. Behind him she could see Jean-Eric the engineer goggling in disbelief.

“Oh sweet Jesus…” the soldier burbled. He looked much the same has he had before her ‘transformation’...right down to the giant Knights Templar cross painted in pony blood on his own tac-vest. “It's all true...I was fucking right about them! They’re…. they’re monsters, I knew it! They were taking people before the portal, you know!”

Nonsense. Superstitious nonsense. Yet something seemed odd about the tirade he was doubtlessly about to launch into.

“Saw it with my own eyes!” he practically screamed, pointing to one eye. “Homeless man… just got taken and vanished! Their hooves round his chest! Everyone called me drunk, but I know...”

Tuning him out, Verity twisted her neck to look up at Tess, turning her head as if she was auditioning for The Exorcist.

“We are your truth…we are the harrrrrbingers of your perrrrrfection,” she giggled, and then with the eye that was hidden from Birch by the angle of her muzzle, winked at the train’s conductor. “The fulfillment of alllllll conspiracy.”

Tess’s head flicked back and forth between her and the panicked sergeant, and then she got it.

“See what I mean, Sergeant!” she said, jumping up out of the seat, a vision of strength and command. “The enemy is at our gates. Their plan to bring all Earth under the aegis of the elites is on the precipice of victory. The PER and the PHL are both puppets of the demonic United Nations, and this creature is the key to their undoing! Colonel Galt has to interrogate it immediately, before the pure American nation, the last bastion of God-fearing humanity is rendered unto the Beast!”

It was having an effect, and so was Verity, who was putting up an admirable backing track of insanity as she thrashed on the floor, slurring out the same nonsense she remembered Birch forcing down the throat of everyone in the Guards. The paranoia and zealotry made him a very effective soldier...it also made him easy to fuck with.

“Prepare the camps! FEMA is ready to declare martial law...the ponies are in play, microchipped and perfect! Novus Ordo Seclorum! Novus Ordo Seclorum!”

Even Jean got into the action, clasping his hands together and fervently praying for deliverance from all evil. Under the threefold attack, Birch had no chance.

“Right!” he stammered. “Oh Lord, save us! Yes, Lieutenant! The Thenardier Guards are ready to serve...”

He scrambled down the steps and threw open the nose door, screaming for the barricades to be cleared. The blast of cold air in the face seemed to clear his head slightly however, and when he turned back into the cab, his expression was more composed.

“We’ve secured access for a mile and a half, up to just short of the town center, but the horesfuckers hold the railyard and the junction. Colonel Galt is leading our assault from an Home Hardware store on this side of town. There’s a spur that kicks back into a grain loader right beside his HQ. Go forward slow, and when you meet Corporal Flamel at the switch track, stop. He’ll help you set back into the siding.”

She saw Tess salute smartly. “Good work, Master-Sergeant.”

Then she looked thoughtfully out of the rear window, back down the line. Jean-Eric looked puzzled, and Verity herself felt a sudden unease.

“We’re the last train out of Halifax, Sergeant…” Tess said, turning back to face him. “There’s no need to hold the rail-line anymore. Disperse your forces here and scatter.”

“I...I can’t Lieutenant. Colonel Galt’s orders are to…”

“When Colonel Galt is made aware of the ponies’ true purpose he’ll confirm those orders!” Tess barked. “Take your men and get them away from here. Get them to where they can do the most for our cause, before the Barrier cuts off your line of escape! That’s an order, Second Lieutenant Birch!”

Birch opened his mouth to retort, and then paused as the last three words sank in. “You’re promoting me to a commission?”

“Yes soldier!” ‘Lieutenant’ Jones nodded, reaching up to clap a hand on his shoulder. “By the authority confirmed in me by our God, our creed, and our species, I confer upon you a battlefield promotion to the rank of second lieutenant. Now rally your men and get them to safety!”

Birch twitched, and then smiled, lifting his own hand in a shaky salute. “Yes ma’am, and God bless you! You do old England proud! You’ve got the fucking biggest dick I’ve ever seen a woman carry! I know you’ll serve the Colonel well!”

Then he scurried down the steps and disappeared off the engine.

“I’m fucking Welsh…” Tess muttered, before smirking. “Dipshit!”

“Good work…” Jean said softly. “You’ve cleared the line for any following trains, and maybe convinced those idiots to keep themselves out of harms way.”

“No, that was fucking stupid!” Verity seethed, pulling herself upright with the meager give in the chains. “Birch is a deranged idiot that should’ve been institutionalized, but he’s very good at his job. Mad dogs are good maulers, but they need to be kept on a short leash - you’ve just turned him loose and stuffed his ass with ginger!”

Ahead, the bus rolled clear of the crossing, and with a blare on the horn Jean throttled them forward, 9782 easing over the road and away into the snow.

“What harm can an idiot like that do?” Tess shook her head. “He’s just a moron with a handful of guns.”

“So’s the fucking Decepticon Justice Division!” Verity screamed. “A guy like Birch isn’t just a paranoid moron, he’s a zealot! All faith and rage and no restraint, just waiting for an excuse! Don’t you get it?!”

Jean simply raised an eyebrow.

Verity tapped a hoof on the wall, making a hollow bang. “Look out the back and tell me what you see.”

Tess shrugged. “May as well humor you…”

She crossed over to behind Jean and pushed the door open a hair, looking back along the length of the accelerating locomotive towards the dwindling crossing. “Okay, so they’re taking people off the bus...it was loaded it seems. Some ponies and people in hospital gowns...and they’re…”

She suddenly screamed in terror and flung the door wide open with enough force that it slammed against the catwalk rail.

“NO! NO!”

“What? What’s wrong!” Jean shouted, trying to spin in his seat.

The sharp rattle of machine-gun fire answered them.

“Congratulations, Lieutenant Jones…” Verity said, sitting down with the chains pooling around her blank haunches. “You’ve just earned your first blood.”

Tess stood limply in the open door, and then she howled.

“I DID IT AGAIN! I FUCKING DID IT AGAIN! THEY’RE DEAD AGAIN!”

“It’s okay, it’s okay!” Jean said, desperately trying to reach behind him to comfort her, and watch the rails ahead at the same time.

“It’s not...it’s not…” Tess said, before slumping down into a slouch against his seat, ass on the floor and arms drawn up tight around her knees, hugging herself with the futile consolation of the damned. But not shedding so much as one tear.

And Verity watched on, rocking slowly to the motion of the engine and the rustling clink of her chains. Though she should have felt smug at the idiot redcoat getting her due, all she could feel was sadness, and a part of her, either the girl she had been or the monster she now was, wanted desperately to comfort her.

She leaned forward, feeling the chains tighten behind her. Useless.

“Idiot…” she muttered, maybe to no-one, or maybe to herself. “Softheart…”

NOT FAR AWAY

Lightning swam up through the darkness, towards a distant light. It flickered and shifted…

A weeping alicorn, hair red as wine…

A toy unicorn, with dull button eyes…

A minty mare, bearing a soul of gold on dreamspun wings…

A mirror, in which she could see herself.

She pushed up, unwilling to die, fired on by determination born of fear. She’d seen horrors, and survived. She was strong, she was brave…

‘There’s greatness in you, Dusty…’

But all she could see, as she came closer to the mirror-light, was a twisted mockery of herself. The eyes were cold, the teeth exposed with vindictive glee.

‘You are us...you will become us.’

She ignored it, steeled herself, and forced herself right up into its leering face. Then, with a defiant yell, she punched through…

...and out into light. She thrashed for a moment, feeling cool linens under her. Someone was moving over her, touching her gently, soothing her. It was a pegasus mare, a nurse in uniform, holding her down and repeating comforting words.

“It’s okay...you’re alright...Rio, get in here...you’re safe, Lightning Dust, you’re safe.”

The words percolated through, and Lightning stilled herself. She was safe?

Catching her breath, she looked around. She was in a hospital...how, how did she get here? She tried to speak, and found her throat was raw.

“Water…” she rasped, and the pegasus nodded.

“We need some wat...oh, thank you Maddy.”

There was someone else present. Lightning turned her head, and recoiled at the sight of an upright, hairless biped of some sort, proffering a glass of water.

Seeing her reaction, the ape-like creature flinched as if struck.

“I’m sorry...” it said..

Seeing that, Lightning chided herself.

‘Human...not an ape, a human,’ she thought, though she wasn’t sure where the words came from. How did she get here...she remembered a lighthouse, and a ship, and then…

...nothing but shadows. And screams...

“Tha...thankyou…” she whispered, reaching to take the glass in her forehooves as the pegasus doctor helped her sit up in the bed.

The human’s eyes beamed at the word of gratitude, although the rest of her expression remained somber. She had short, straight black hair, and almond-shaped eyes. Almost like a Chineighmare’s eyes…and she was small, clearly a child, a filly not yet grown.

“Well done, Maddy…” the pegasus said, gently shooing the child away. “Go find Rio…”

The child nodded, and walked away with prim little steps, moving her arms in sync, fists balled, as if miming hooves. The doctor watched her go, and Lightning thought she saw tears in the mare’s pink eyes, but a proper view was hidden by the glasses she wore.

“Well…” the doctor said, turning to face her patient. “What’s your story. How did you get here, Lightning Dust?”

There was a sharp inflection to the words, as if she was questioning her patient’s very identity. The unspoken accusation rankled Lightning, but calling on newfound powers of restraint, she slowly sipped her water and carefully chose her words.

“I was...in trouble. I was trapped in a lighthouse, somewhere called ‘Maine’. I tried to escape, and was attacked by more of the...humans. Then I was rescued.”

There was more to it than that. Questions, mysteries, and the horrific sound of ‘Revving Engine’s’ gibbering giggles all churned in her forethoughts, but she felt wary about saying too much. Her rescuers were almost certainly the same ponies that casually made ‘Revving Engine’ lose her mind. Admittedly, they’d put her somewhere nice, but something about it all was terrible.

“And before that?”

Before that there had been those voices, those warm, wonderful voices that had left her feeling so cold and worthless. No need to mention that. This mare would think her delusional. Before that…

“I was flying over Ponyville…” she began to recount. “All the newspapers were full of the wedding at Canterlot, the changeling invasion...and this mare who performed a sonic rainboom.”

She paused and sighed, before swallowing a little more water. She could see the doctor was frowning, but she was on a roll now, as if pouring out a confession.

“I wanted that...she’d done it twice before and I wanted that glory. So I left Cloudsdale and headed for Ponyville. I was going to smash the rainboom barrier, prove that I was a great flier...the greatest flier…”

The doctor waited for her rambling recount to trail off, and then gently steered the conversation in another direction. As she did, she used a wing to pull a small fire-fly torch from her coat pocket, and shone it into Lightning’s eyes.

“Humor me with a little cognition test. Tell me about the wedding, everything you remember.”

Lightning frowned.

“It was a month ago...and I wasn’t paying much attention. But I remember thinking ‘where’d this third alicorn come from?’ I didn’t know Princess Celestia had a royal niece!”

“Pegacorn…” the doctor corrected. “Cadenza was a pegacorn, not an alicorn. She couldn’t fly.”

Lightning gently pushed the torch away and looked straight into the doctor’s eyes. “She could too. It said in the news that she made her first proper glide flying to her husband’s rescue…”

...more than that, Lightning had secretly collected several pictures and interview clippings of the glamorous new member of Equestria’s ruling circle. Just to look at those eyes, those colours, and those amazing wings…so broad in span and rich in texture. EqSPN had run an entire feature in their supplemental magazine, predicting the new alicorn’s top speed and flight capabilities, and the figures quoted had turned Lightning’s head as much as Princess Mi Amore Cadenza’s other ‘dimensions’.

She felt herself blush and sped on. “She said in an interview that Princesses Celestia and Luna were personally teaching her to fly.”

The doctor blinked in confusion and then fired off another set of questions. “Alright then. Moving on, what’s your full name.”

“Lumina Dust.”

“What’s your date of birth?”

“What is your cutie mark?”

“What is your home address?”

The inane questions rolled on, with Lightning’s underdeveloped reserves of patience increasingly wearing thin. She tried to flutter her wings, and found they had been bound up. She needed to fly, fly away from here, fly home…

...and fly away from the terrible silence in the shadows of her mind. The silence that had replaced the screams, and which somehow seemed worse.

Then the doctor, whose name, it transpired, was Merciful Light, or ‘Mercy’, asked a final question, and the barb loaded into the way she said it was big enough to hook a hydra

“What year is it?”

“2nd Year Anno Harmonia…” Lightning said, mentally adding a few choice comments about the new calendar.

“Alright…” Mercy said softly, and then extended a helping hoof. “Let’s get you on your hooves…”

Gratefully, Lighting took the hoof and shuffled over to the edge of the bed (’oversized for a pony...’) and dropped onto the floor. At Mercy’s direction, she went through a full range of mobility tests; head, neck, shoulders, torso, legs…

...and finally wings.

As Mercy made a last examination, Lightning noticed something odd. The medical pony was wearing armor. The back of her doctor’s uniform hid it, but at the front of her barrel it opened up to reveal a shining pink breastplate protecting her chest and vital organs. There was even a reinforced collar.

“Are you with the Royal Guards?” she asked, almost, but not quite, innocently. But if Mercy saw the loaded question she did not spring its trap. Instead she hummed softly as she removed the bindings pinning Lightning’s wings to her barrel.

“Raise your wings please.”

Lightning obliged, and found to her relief that her wings opened, spread, and moved with only the slightest of pain, twinges that only made her feel more relieved that her third pair of appendages still worked. A pegasus could lose one or even two legs and still have a reasonable quality of life, but to lose even one wing, to be grounded...that was a nightmare.

“A little strained, but you’re lucky. Once we relocated your wings they showed immediate signs of healing. You’ve got a strong spirit.”

The relief drove away all of Lightning’s questions and doubts, and she suddenly spun around in a triumphant little dance.

“Who-hoo! Oh thankyou, thankyou, thankyou!”

And then she was hugging Mercy, knocking the doctor’s pink-framed glasses askew.

“Ooof! You’re...you’re quite welcome…” she replied, and to Lightning’s surprise, she heard a tearful note in her healers’ voice. Pausing, she looked closely at Mercy, and asked a question that she had rarely asked before.

“Are you alright? Can I help you?”

Mercy’s wings trembled. With the glasses knocked away, Lightning saw black bags under the mare’s eyes. And although her mane had some natural lavender-grey streaks in it, there was also some silver forming too. More than anything, she looked weary, tired. Older than she had any right to be.

There was at most five or six years in difference between them, yet Mercy looked like a pony straining under decades of stress. Something had definitely happened to her… judging by this world of monsters, mad-beings, impossible magic and technology and outright insanity, it was understandable.

“I’m...I’m fine,” the doctor said, using her wings to flick tears from her eyes. “It’s...it’s just been a while since a pony said that to me.”

“Well, I’m saying it now…” Lightning repeated, continuing the hug. “You gave me back the sky...my sky. I won’t forget that. I will never forget that you gave me back to the sky...”

She held tight, and Mercy finally returned the hug, weeping softly.

“Why couldn’t they all have been like you…” she whispered. “Oh Jackie...my poor beautiful JJ.”

The words meant nothing to Lightning, but the emotion was familiar. She understood this pain now, had felt it herself and come through it, damaged but whole. And she wasn’t going to let this mare who had helped her suffer alone.

She held on until the weeping stopped, and when Mercy finally let go, the two of them realised they were not alone.

The human child, ‘Maddy’ had returned. There was another woman with her, an adult, darker-skinned and middle-aged, holding onto the child.girl Both of them were wearing padded clothes that a winterwear look to them.

“You see, Madeline…” the woman whispered, tears in her eyes and her voice cracking. “That’s what it means to be a pony. That is what we will be, when it’s time.”

The words prompted a surprised twitch in Lightning, but she let it pass.

Wiping her eyes properly dry and putting her glasses into place, Mercy made introductions.

“Lightning Dust, these are my friends, Nurses Rio Deneter and Madeline Liu. They helped treat you.”

Surprised, but not terrified, Lightning let herself be led over and extended a hoof in greeting. “Uh, hi!”

The woman, Rio, knelt and took the hoof in both hands as if receiving a blessing. “Thank you so much, Lieutenant Dust. You’ve done so much for Equestria and Earth...”

In the corner of her eye Lightning saw Mercy making urgent throat-cutting motions; something was not right. “Lieutenant...I’m not a lieutenant. I’m not even in a Protective Pony Platoon.”

‘Rio’ lifted her eyebrows in surprise, and Mercy ducked in between them. “Just a little confusion, no need to worry. Guys, could you please go make sure we’ve got everything the HLF didn’t take?”

The two humans nodded and made themselves scarce. The letters ‘PER’ had been stitched onto the back of their quilted jackets. Little Madeline waved a hand as they went, fingers once again balled up so that she looked like an equine waving with her hoof.

“She’s only ten…” Mercy sighed. “Only ten and an orphan in the middle of all this war. I try to help her accept how beautiful a soul she is… but she wants to be a pony. And Rio...she’s suffered worse than most, even before First Contact…”

She turned and looked Lightning in the eye. “You’re not Lightning Dust; you’re not the Lightning Dust I know.”

The accusation should have been a shock, a revelation, but Lightning simply took in everything around her, and echoed Mercy’s own sighs.

“And this isn’t Equestria, or even Equus. Please explain to me what’s going on. So much has happened, and I just don’t understand…”

Redd Flamel heard the sound of a locomotive approaching and stepped off of the railroad line. He gave a quick glance over his shoulder, and confirmed that the derailing boot he had bolted to the track was still in place a hundred yards up the line. The driving snow, growing in intensity all the while, made it hard to see, but the derailer was painted in bright yellow and stood out among the soft whiteness.

“Alright,” he said to himself, the words muffled under the scarf wrapped tight around his mouth. “What’s ‘Batshit Birch’ sent me now?”

He lit two sizzling yellow flares and dropped them either side of the line, then popped the cap on a red one and held it straight up above his head. In railroad parlance, it was a straightforward message, with the exact same meaning that the elevated FAMAS F1 in his other hand held in all other languages.

STOP!

Headlights gleamed on the curve, and a shadow deepened in the blurring snow. Clanking at each joint a mammoth diesel eased up in front of him, and purred smoothly in the gloom. Red livery, with black and yellow hazard stripes on the cowcatcher. Through the snow he could see the letters ‘CP’ picked out in white on the front of the nose. Windscreen wipers flicked like blinking eyes across the glowing cab windows, and above that the locomotive’s road number could be read on the illuminated number-boards: 9782.

Dropping the fizzing flare he waited for a moment to see if anyone would come down to him, observing the rolling steel island of warmth and light, resenting its air-conditioned comfort. The windscreen wipers continued to beat, the motor continued to thrum, and the snow continued to settle. Nothing happened.

Keeping the gun up he slowly circled the engine, noting several iced-over splatters of purple on the cabside windows. A thwarted potion attack. As he passed the rear steps he paused to change the switch track he was guarding, realigning the points back into the spur that led to the grain silos and Colonel Galt’s local base of operations, keeping the engine confined to this section of track and barring it access back down the main line to Halifax.

Then, returning to the machine’s head end, he slowly climbed up the side steps, and reached the nose door. Bracing himself beside it he knocked twice and then cracked it open, ready to fire around the doorframe if needed.

“HLF! Identify yourself!”

“Lieutenant Jones, just out of Halifax...I’ve got a priority prisoner for transport to Colonel Galt.”

The voice was calm, confident, American-accented. It sounded familiar to Redd, and he pressed through with protocol. God alone knew that he wouldn’t swallow whatever it was that Birch took in without some proof. That man was almost as crazy as Viktor Kraber… but at least the stuff Kraber said before he turned to the ponypounders made sense. Most of the time.

“Squawk your ident, now!”

“Jones, Corporal. J-O-N-E-S. Thenardier Guards Infiltration Specialist. Serial number SM40. Unit Passphrase: Phoenix, Arizona. Now stop waving a gun into my engine’s cab and get in here. I need to confirm my orders with you.!”

“No-no, you come down to me.”

“I’m the only one in here with hands Corporal. If I leave the controls, the locomotive shuts itself down. Do you want to try and turn a 4400 horsepower diesel motor back over in this cold, because I sure as fuck don’t!”

Redd whipped himself back against the engine’s nose and considered his options. He could go in and possibly get killed for his trouble, or he could stay out here and hold up whatever mission this Lieutenant Jones had to carry out. The ident she had called out sounded legit, and yet at the same time it felt wrong…

Dammit. This was the problem the HLF suffered from. Distrust and a lack of organization! That, and too many wanting to play soldier, obsessed with the glamor of code-phrases and secrets, coming up with such a myriad of elaborate identifications and naming schemes so opaque to other units that it was nigh-impossible to tell who worked for what. There’d been firefights, terrible pointless gun battles due to poor organization.

‘We want to be saviors, but we fall apart more often than we stand together, and so the best of us splinter off and team up with the pony-pounders. Fuck.’

Rare (if not outright nonexistent) was the HLF unit that hadn’t lost men to desertion to the PHL, or whatever country was willing to accept their services. Even the great units of the HLF, such as the Swiss ‘Glanzon’s Gluemakers’, the Russian ‘Oborots’, the Serpents, the Heidelberg Brigade, Old Skinner’s assortment of units, all had lost some of their best men to the PHL. And in the Pacific, east of the Sea of Japan and in the far south of Asia, the HLF was all but nonexistent, folded into PHL-aligned partisan units. Most famously, there was Angus Reid’s defection back in ‘22, which gutted the numbers of Taskforce Paris.

On top of that, to bolster their numbers, the HLF had been forced to take on numerous unsavory characters in their war. Criminals who hadn’t been evacuated from prison, gangsters, terrorists, mad conspiracists like Birch, men and women of great violence who seemed to revel in the slaughter, and often outright ignored discipline or structure, focusing only on the killing. It wasn’t all of them, but of course the media had seized on the image, painting them all as psychopaths. The most terrible thing, though, was that he couldn’t quite blame the news for demonizing them. After all… they did employ Viktor Kraber and Kagan Burakgazi. He shivered at the thought of those two. Admittedly, whatever the PHL had done to him had allegedly made Kraber somewhat more personable, and he’d been nice to children or dogs, but Burakgazi was simply unfettered. And yet, both of them deserted for the PHL around the same time in a mutual pact, having delivered their respective resignations through brutal, bloody vengeance.

He steeled himself.

‘You want to transform the HLF into something better, make it something the general public are proud of, Flamel, you start here, with yourself. Any alchemy you want to achieve has to be done by your own hand, your own heart.’

“Okay!” he called. “I’m coming in, but keep your hands where I can see them!”

He eased the door open, and stepped into the short access corridor. The first thing that struck him was the upbeat music wafting down from the cab.

“This will be the day we’ve waited for,
This will be the day we open up the door!”

The second was an unholy stench coming from the chemical toilet compartment to his right. Grabbing the door handle he pulled it open from the side and glanced through the gap at his eyeline over the hinges. No-one was hiding in there.

“I don’t wanna hear your absolution,
Hope you’re ready for a revolution!”

Opposite the toilet was the locomotive’s handbrake wheel. Keeping his FAMAS aimed up into the cab proper, he reached over with one hand and began to turn it.

“Welcome to a world of new solutioins,
Welcome to a world of bloody evolution…”

“I’m setting the handbrake!” he called up. “Do you have any objections?”

“None,” came the cheerful reply. “But please remember to turn out the lights and lock the door if you’re the last one out.”

That got a chuckle from him as he wound the wheel tight, pinning the brake shoes on the engine’s leading wheelsets. “You’ve got a sense of humor Lieutenant, that’s rare these days.”

“And you’re following protocol to the letter Corporal. That’s admirable. HLF has a bright soul in you.”

He felt a small rush of pride, and did his best to not let it get to him.

“In time, your heart will open minds,
A story will be told,
And victory is in a simple soul!”

The song ended as he finished the job. With the brake wheel wound to the stops, he carefully tugged off his woolen gloves and made sure he still had decent finger-flexion, blew on them a few times to help circulation.

“Alright, I’m coming up the steps!”

He went up the short flight one step at a time, sweeping the gun across the cab. As his head came up level with the top of the cover provided by the workstations he crouched, and then rose quickly to sweep the cab, then dropped back down. Up, then down again, then two strides forward and into the centre of the cab, gun held safely down.

There was no danger. Only a single pony chained up beneath the conductor’s seat, and a pale-faced young woman sitting ramrod straight at the engineer’s position, one hand on the controls. The only weapons he could see were two shotguns laid out on the conductor’s workstation. Spotting the modified trigger mechanisms he snorted derisively.

‘Pony-rigged. Almost impossible for a person to fire, and practically useless to a quad not wearing a saddle on which to mount them. Junk!’

Finally he turned to the young woman. She had unzipped her tac-vest, and was staring at him with huge, haunted eyes. She looked shaken.

“Lieutenant Jones?” he asked, snapping off a smart salute.

“Hi…” she said weakly, waving one hand and managing a frail smile. Redd felt danger looming immediately. “Welcome aboard...”

He dropped the salute and brought his F1 up in a single fluid action. She went even paler and pressed back into the seat.

“Your voice...your accent,” he growled. “You’re not the person I was speaking to.”

“No,” someone replied casually. “But I am.”

No, not someone. Somepony.

Redd spun round and aimed down at the mare secured on the opposite side of the cab. She smirked at him.

“Good job soldier...but not good enough. You had the situational awareness down perfect, but you just blew it at the ten-yard line.”

And Redd felt a wall of cold air strike him from behind as the rear door, to which his back was now facing, burst open, and someone threw themselves into the cab and slammed an elbow into the small of his back.

The F1 flew out of Redd’s hands, but was kept within reach by the strap looped around one of his shoulders. The young rebel tried to spin and get traction on his attacker, but at that moment the chained-up mare shot forward as far as she could and bit him hard, just above the ankle, clenching on with an animal’s jaw strength. His feet were booted and padded with several layers of clothing, but he still yelled and went down hard.

“Go Tess!” he heard the man pinning him yell. “Go now!”

“We can’t, he set the handbrake!”

“Then unset it!” the man screamed back. Redd managed to get his elbow into his attacker’s sternum, and was rewarded with a gasp of pain. The resulting slack gave him enough reach to grab the F1 and spin onto his back, snapping the pony mare off his ankle with momentum…

“Hold it!” he yelled, pinning the girl in the assault rifle’s line of fire before she could jump out of the engineer’s seat. “No-one goes anywhere!”

Lying on his back he checked his sides. The mare was slumped against her side of the cab, nursing where the chains had cut into her ankles. The dark-skinned man who had jumped him, surely in at least his mid-fifties, had pulled himself into a seated position up against the back bulkhead, one hand pressed to his stomach.

“I SAID SIT DOWN!” he screamed again as the girl, face white except for two swollen green eyes, slowly eased herself up onto her feet. One hand slowly reached for the door handle behind her…

...the other was holding a handgun. He recognised it as a Beretta M9, US Army standard sidearm.

He also saw how she was shaking as she held it, barrel towards him. She had the safety off, well done to her for that, but the wobble betrayed her: she didn’t have a killer’s instincts.

‘...but it doesn’t take a natural killer to commit manslaughter. A fool with a gun is just as dangerous as a soldier.’

He didn’t lower his own gun, working to resume control of the situation, break the standoff.

“Drop the gun, girl…” he said. “If you don’t, I guarantee I can cut you down before you can even so much as squeeze the trigger!”

“You won’t shoot…” she said, voice shaking. “You wouldn’t shoot a human.”

The letters HLF were scored deep into one breast of her tac vest. They seemed to burn their way into his own vision. She might have thought it gave him doubt...instead it fired his resolve.

“I would!” he snapped back, pulling off the safety and hauling back on the bolt, loading a round into the bullpup rifle’s chamber.

He could...couldn’t he?

The girl’s free hand tightened on the handle and she pushed it out, letting in a flurry of snow.

He could.

The gun leapt in his hand as he pulled the trigger, spitting out a fat stream of bullets. The recoil threw him wide and to the left, swinging away from the girl and smashing the driver’s side window. She fell back out of sight through the door with a scream, and he heard the Beretta discharge as she toppled, the shot firing wide. Redd leapt up, ignoring the pain in his ankle, and hurled himself to where she had been standing so that he could cover the cab and watch the rear catwalk at once, standing with his back to the smashed window.

“Now...I’m in fucking charge here!”

The engineer was still slumped winded against the back bulkhead’s wall of fuse boxes and access panels. The girl was flat on her back, sprawled down the short flight of stairs onto the catwalk, her body holding the door open. She was taking short, clenched breathes and clutching the wrist of her gun-hand; the recoil had probably sprained it.

“You two are alright…” he said, chest heaving. “Just stay down and don’t fuck with me!”

Then he slowly drew his sights on the third target.

“But not. The. Fucking. Newfoal.”

He lined up on the mare and this time, squeezed the trigger gently...

...the FAMAS jammed with a crack...

...and Tess Jones, broken, hurt and betrayed, kicked him in the wounded ankle with all the strength she could muster.

“FUCK!” he howled, dropping the gun and stumbling back against the window. He flailed for the frame and missed, slicing his arm on the broken glass shards that lined it, scattering them everywhere like translucent daggers.

He screamed again, and slowly sagged against the back of the engineer’s head, holding himself up by its headrest.

“Get him out!” the mare screamed. Redd lolled his head drunkenly in her direction. His vision swum...why was his arm burning.

“GET HIM OUT OF THE CAB! LOOK AT HIS ARM!”

Her words penetrated the sea of shadows scunning inside Redd’s skull and he looked down at his arm...seeing the glass shards, the running blood, the spreading bruises…

No. Too purple to be bruises...too bright and vibrant.

No. No, no, no!

His trembling good hand reached for a splinter of glass piercing his wrist, pulled it out. Scarlet, arterial blood splurted on the floor. Redd didn’t care. His eyes, terrified, were focused on the purple residue speckled on the glass, mingling with his own fluids...

‘Potion...there was iced-over potion on the engineer’s window…’

And as he watched, his fingers twitched, shook, and slowly began to fuse together.

He should have screamed. He should have howled. But instead, something in his mind spasmed…

...and he felt himself begin to smile. A red cheshire smile as his muscles drew tighter than they had any right too, and tore.

...the shadows in his mind tore apart as well, and the Sun broke through.

He began to laugh, to shriek with deranged glee. He didn’t stop, not as his body twisted and bubbled, not as his mind bent, and not as the engineer rose up and flipped him, a mass of alchemised flesh, out of the window and into the snow.

Jean-Eric gasped, keeping his own bare hands away from the jigsaw of potion-tipped glass. It was all over the controls, his chair and the workstation. He swore silently, turned towards the catwalk, and dragged Tess back onto her feet and into the cab with him.

“Wait!” she cried, cradling one wrist. “The pistol! I lost the pistol!”

“No time!” Jean urged. “Get in before he finishes changing!”

Both of them struggled to ignore the sounds coming from track level outside the broken window as they slammed and wedged the back and nose doors shut. Both also struggled to not inhale deeply. Potion in a frozen state was safe enough except for direct skin contact, but if it warmed up…

“Can’t touch the controls…” he winced as they fell down to one side of Verity, none of them much caring about her shape or attitude anymore. “Can’t go forward or back even if I could shift us….he changed the switch behind us and set a derail ahead of us!”

The mare had a hoof on the dropped rifle, her eyes dull.

“FAMAS F1…” she said, poise and tone hollow, desperately trying to distract herself from the suffering outside. “French. Useless piece of crap. Disposable 25-round plastic magazines some genius decided could be reusable… jam like crazy. He should have gone for a G2. Or hell, he’s in Canada, could have gotten a Colt C7. Plenty of things he could try. ”

Jean looked down at her hoof, and then over at the lethal workstation. “If I unchained you…”

The question was left hanging. Could you drive us out of here?

“No,” she shook her head, her voice a frightened whisper. “I don’t know what that potion would do to me… I’m not risking that.”

Jean sighed and hung his head low. From outside the sounds of a life being mutilated had dwindled into a quiet series of snuffling sobs, and finally silence.

Not any more.

“Come out!” they heard the newfoal shout. “Come out and plaaaaaaaaay with meheehee!”

“Go fuck yourself!” Tess shouted back with surprising force. “Take some of that broken glass and stuff it up your sheath!”

“Oh it doesn’t hurts! It doesn’t hurts so gooooooooood!” came the answering moan. “Come out of your pretty red monster and play….red like meeee...Petticoat Red, that’s me. That’s meeeeeee!”

He continued to giggle, a mad lyrical outpouring.

“Red monster, red engine, come die with me!
Red button, red button, push it, yippee!”

“Oh shit…” Jean muttered, cracking his head back against the wall. “He found the emergency fuel stop.”

An alarm bell screamed for an instant, and then the whole cab gave a shudder as the motor shut off. Lights flickered and dimmed as they switched over to battery power, and the windscreen wipers stopped mid-swing. All that could be heard was the soft howl of the wind through the broken window.

In one instant, locomotive 9782 died, reverting to four hundred thousand pounds of inert steel.

And the three figures trapped inside, huddled against a wall from fear of potion inside the cab and a maddened newfoal outside, could only wait for their own deaths.

“What are you?” Tess said at last, looking across at Verity. “You’re a newfoal, but you’re afraid of potion.”

“I never said I was a newfoal!” she answered roughly, before flicking her eyes down in apology. “Look, I lied. I told you what you wanted to hear, to stay alive. But I’m not a newfoal...I’m not the cure for your family.”

“Iesu, Dafydd and Dduw yn y nefoedd!” Tess hissed, mirroring Jean in whacking her head back into the conductor’s seat. Her teeth were gritted, and Jean, looking sideways, almost wished he could see tears in her eyes, just so he could know if she was feeling rage, regret, or despair.

“Why don’t you cry?” he asked at last, as gently as he could. “You seen enough shit the past hundred miles to make a grown man bawl his eyes out. But not even a glint.”

“It’s private Jean…” she said at last. “My pain, my life, my rules. How about you? When’s the last time you cried?”

“Six months before CERN,” he answered without hesitation. “Was bringing forty cars of coal down through the Matapedia valley when I saw a car parked across the track...SUV.”

“Was...was it a breakdown?” Verity asked quietly. “Did they get out?”

“No...and no…” he said, and pinched his eyes. “Suicide...she had her kids in the car with her. And I could see...I could see it coming along the straight from a quarter mile away, but I had too much weight on to check in time. I was blowing the horn, dumped the air brakes into emergency, screamed for them to move...please move…”

Tentatively he reached out and put an arm around each of them. His shoulders twitched. “Two girls...two kids. I could see them staring up at me as I bore down on them. They died instantly.”

He hugged them, hesitantly. Verity stiffened, but Tess leaned in sideways and rested her head against his shoulder, looking up at the snowflakes flitting past the window.

“That was years ago,” she said at last. “You’ve not cried since?”

“Yeah…” he sighed. “I was laid off for ‘compassionate reasons’. Came back after the war started. Saw horrors that made those girls deaths look like a mercy. But by that point, I had no more tears left to shed.”

He tightened his grip on her shoulder. “Guess you’re the same way, huh?”

“Guess I am,” she answered. Then he felt an unexpected nudge to his other side, and realised Verity was now trying to draw herself in close to him as well.

“It was a mercy…” the creature in the guise of a pony said, in what sounded almost like a comforting tone. “You spared those girls all this crap we’ve had to swim through. Years of blood and blast…”

Her ears were drooping low either side of her head, and her mane and tail were sagging. Newfoal she may not have been, but she sure had a pony’s body language. He raised his arm so that she could curl under him, and gently scratched behind her ears. Against her will she gave a soft sigh. Yup, Pony nervous system too. Close up he could see her muddy mane was actually black with deep, burgundy waves, curling softly at the ends. Like blood and oil.

“We’re going to die here…” Tess asked. “Aren’t we?”

“Fuck we are…” Verity muttered. “Of course we’re all going to die. Either by the ponies, or by our own hands...hooves, whatever. People were screwed in their heads long before CERN. We’re just fucking motes of dust swirling into a drain, and too busy trying to drag each other down with us rather than trying to climb out.”

Then she lashed out with one hoof, connecting it smartly with the conductor’s workstation. Shaken loose, her two shotguns, balanced on top where they had been left in plain sight for ‘Petticoat Red’ to see, tipped off and clattered onto the floor. Tess’s Ipad fell with them, its padded case protecting it in the fall.

“But not fucking today!” she hissed, and tipped her gaze back to meet Jean’s. The blue rings around the edges of her irises seemed to flare, like warning marks.

“Unchain me...and I’ll put ‘Petticoat’ to sleep,” she said softly. “I just need the right...music.”

*

‘Petticoat’ staggered up and down the side of the locomotive at rail level, his hoofprints wearing a wobbling line into the snow. The ballast beneath crunched pleasantly under his hooves...his lovely new hooves.

He giggled again. He’d never laughed so much in the whole of his old life. Now he wanted to do nothing but laugh and sing and cry inside. Part of him, deep down, was constantly screaming in rage and frustration, but it couldn’t get any grip on the chains binding his every thought, reduced to a senseless, mindless howl struggling for purchase. Every time he felt it flare, felt it colliding with his wonderful new paradigm, the burst of emotion was suddenly siphoned away, soaring off into some unseen and terrible horizon in which countless faint voices screamed forever…

And that moment of fire, that sense of self-annihilation, burned and pleasured him like no womare ever could…

So good. It hurt so good. And it never went away. The screaming mote of pain inside him wasn’t fading, wasn’t dwindling, and he clung tight to it, clung to it to feel the pain, and to inflict it, to torture and terrorise what remained of his hateful human self…

All for His Queen. His glorious, eternal Goddess.

There were other humans here too, cowering in the red steel abomination. He could feel them, feel three motes of light singing their notes of discord, singing out against Her Light. Good for them...so good….they would hurt so good just like him, just like they all did, and that’d be all wonderful. They would scream and sing in the chorus of mastubutory self-destruction, burning forever in the radiant nuclear fire of Her Sun…

Sun...Son...he was her son now, a child of perfection...the hiding ones had to know this pain, this glorious pleasure. They had to serve it too, and make others serve…

Yes.

Yes.

YES-YES-YES!

He shuddered again as he felt that howl snuffed again, felt his whole perfect pony body flare with orgiastic bliss…

Then he heard the music. Angry, raging music…

“Death surrounds,
My heartbeat slowing down,
I won’t take this world’s abuse,
I won’t give up, I refuse!”

The words slammed into him like a sack of bricks, feeling the rhythm lighting more of those hot collisions in his soul. Something stirred in him, something disgusting and gross and human, but even as it rose up inside him, his perfect pony self grew stronger, happier, bigger in his mind. His smile widened, and he shook with bliss.

“Oh yes! Oh MY Queen YES!”

He was so enraptured that he nearly caught a shotgun slug right between the ears in the back of his skull, but the spell matrix binding his mind simply tugged a string and he spun, beaming like a soul enraptured and horn flaring with newly discovered magic.

Spells! He could cast spells!

The bullet cooked in mid-air, incinerated in a standing field of magic. Giddy, Peticoat mentally fumbled for more magic, and to his momentary disappointment found only that option available to him…

‘That’s a shaaaaaaaaammmmmm-eeee wants! That’s what She wants me to have! That’s all I need and that’s all well and all well and all that my unworthy self should ever need!’

He dropped the field of ionised fire and looked beyond, seeing a mare standing beside the locomotive’s nose. She was holding something yellow in her mouth...and he dimly recognised it as the derailing boot Redd Flamel had set on the track.

Then with a whipcrack of her neck she hurled it at him, and he caught the lump of metal in another cocoon of fire. The two disgusting human weapons strapped to her saddle barked, the slugs impacting in the snow.

“Fuck! They ruined the calibration!” she swore. So bright, so alive! Her eyes blazed. But she wasn’t right...he could tell. Not really a pony.

Not yet! But soon!

“This is how it feels when you’re bent and broken!” the music continued to scream. “This is how it feels when your dignity is stolen! When everything you love is leaving! You hold on to what you believe in!”

The words were familiar, but unimportant. All that mattered was the pleasure, the joy of being raped, the promise of raping another. This beast, this human in stolen fur, he needed to defile her, to make her like him!

Petticoat made eye-contact as she adopted a fighting stance. The guns she wore clicked as fresh slugs were chambered. She shouldn’t be wearing them, she shouldn’t exist!

Dirty, improper, unperfect!

“Let’s dance, little pony!” Verity hissed.

*

“Merde!” Jean swore as he slammed shut a control panel in the cab. “One of his bullets went through the ‘start engine’ relay. I’ve got the battery knife-switch set for start, reset the fuel pumps and closed all the circuit breakers, but I can’t actually bring the power on!”

“Is there another way?” Tess called from down in the nose corridor, where she was taking the handbrake off. Inside she wondered if it might have been the one shot she got off that might have hit that control panel...

“Yeah, in the actual engine bay, out on the catwalk, right above where they’re fighting…” Jean replied, and in the corner of his eye saw her tense. “Oh, no girl, don’t you dare!”

But before he could lunge for her Tess had already thrown open the nose door and was scrambling down off the front of the engine, zipping up the armored tac-vest as she did.

“Just get her ready to start!” she called up, circling round on the other side from the fighters. Jean paused, cursed again and clambered back to his control-desk, perching on his chair’s armrest. He had on a pair of woolen gloves that had been found dropped on the floor, and as he gingerly stepped up to the controls he pulled Tess’s old gas-mask over his face. The Second World War relic stank of sweat and old rubber, but it should hopefully protect him from inhalations.

“Right…” he muttered, voice distorted so much that he sounded like the French-Canadian cousin to Darth Vader. “Throttle shut, reverser in neutral, brakes in suppression.”

He reached out and flicked a switch. “Set to run…”

The alarm bell began to scream…

*

Verity screamed obscenities as she whirled and jumped, trying to avoid bolts of crackling fire that were being hurled by the unicorn newfoal. It was dancing and prancing over the snow like a child at play, whipping its horn in every direction and evading her attempts to put a bullet in in.

All the while, Tess’s Ipad, sitting in her saddlebag, continued to scream out a song of defiance, a song that every member of the Thenardier Guards knew…

“No! Not gonna die tonight!
We’re gonna fight for us together!
No we’re not gonna die tonight!”

It seemed to be having an effect as she and the animal sparred at long range. It was moaning in sadistic pleasure in tune with every chord, a warbling, perverting ullulation that rose and fell to the music.

She’d seen this before, seen an entire mess-hall of the HLF’s best turned by a potion-attack, and seen the resulting newfoals acting in this same way, mentally stroking themselves off to the tunes playing on the unit’s old MP3 speaker set.

It disturbed and sickened her, but she remembered it, and planned around it.

“Break their hold!
Cause I won’t be controlled!
They can’t keep their chains on me
When the truth has set me free.”

Yes, fucking yes. As the newfoal’s attention faltered in sync to the powerful shriek of the singer, Verity hurled herself forward in a gallop, getting into close range and spinning in a fierce buck, sending Petticoat flying into a tree. His only response was to giggle again, even as he tumbled into the snow.

Then his horn flared, and she felt an unwelcome tingle as a magical field wrapped round her.

‘Oh shit, I forgot all unicorns know that TK shit!’ she had time to think, before she was abruptly thrown off her feet by the non-Newtonian force and shot straight back into the 9782. She slammed into the locomotive’s side, her weight bashing a huge dent in the engine cowling. Somewhere nearby she could hear an alarm ringing as she dropped onto the catwalk…

...landing right next to Tess, who had been trying to get up onto the engine from behind.

“What the fuck are you doing here!” she shouted, her stolen Earth Pony physiology not even leaving her winded from the blow. A little sore, but still fired for full steam ahead battle.

“Saving our asses!” Tess blurted out. “And don’t break my iPad!”

“This is how it feels when you take your life back
This is how it feels when you finally fight back
When life pushes me I push harder
What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger!”

“Two for two!” Petticoat tittered, looking up at them from the trackside. “Two for two, ready to go!”

“Go!” Verity shoved Tess forward. “Whatever you’ve got to do, do it now!”

Tess scrambled forward on fours and grabbed hold to one of the access doors to the engine compartment, just as Petticoat jumped up onto the catwalk between her and Verity.

“Who’s first!” he screamed. “Who’s first to join my family! We’ll crack your minds and drink down your problems till smilies are all that’s left!”

Verity jumped onto his back and he threw her off with a telekinetic shove. Eyes rolling, spittle frothing at the corners of the mouth he turned to Tess, who was dragging herself up by the catwalk railing.

“You first!” he shrieked. “So much pain and self-hate! You’ll blaze like lightning! BURN!”

He dropped his head and aimed his glowing horn. Without thinking she grabbed the engine compartment latch and swung the sheet metal door open straight into the newfoal’s face. There was a crack as his horn took the brunt of the impact, and a flash as the incineration spell backfired. Hands pressed to the open door, using it as a shield, Tess listened to his sudden screams of pain and shuddered…

“This is how it feels when you back your life back!
This is how your life feels when you fight back!”

The catwalk shook, and she heard Jean yelling as he threw open the cab door. “The ‘start’ button Tess! The ‘start’ button! Push and hold it!”

She could see it, just inside the engine bay. An upright control panel with several buttons on it. With one hand she reached out and held down on the one marked ‘Engine Start’. The distant alarm bell began to ring even louder.

The metal door was heating up under her hands…

The immense motor, the size of a truck, coughed, and then began to chug and rumble as each of the sixteen cylinders struggled to turn over in the cold. Her other hand still holding the door open against the thrashing, screaming newfoal, Tess squeezed her eyes tight and hoped...

The rumbling, bellowing diesel motor spluttered, whooped and then, with a colossal belch of exhaust gas, caught itself. The alarm cut out and she took her finger off of the button, feeling the power of the locomotive surging through her feet…

And then the newfoal hurled itself against the door and slammed it back onto her, knocking her down onto the catwalk.

Petticoat rose over her, his horn burnt and his skin blistering where his own magical flames had turned back on him. One of his eyes watered incessantly, and the other was a burst, runny, ruin.

“Die!” he hollered. “Die and burn! Die-die-die!”

Despite his horrific burns he never stopped smiling, or giggling. Tess, horrified, spread her hands back to try and push herself up…

...and felt one land on something cold and deadly. The pistol.

“You won’t take Her blessing!” he screamed. “Why won’t you accept it! YOU MADE ME TAKE IT! YOUR FAULT! YOUR FAULT!”

Tess closed her hand on the gun, swung it up and around...and once again felt herself freeze at the last moment. Even now, even in the face of her death, she couldn’t…

KA-BANG!

The entire top half of the newfoal’s head tore away, two shotgun shells reducing everything between eyes and jaw to red paint. Tess didn’t move or scream as it splattered over her, just stared in mute horror as the furry corpse slumped off the catwalk...still grinning even in death.

With a pitiful clatter, the pistol fell from her hands and onto the metal deck.

The motor roared as Jean-Eric opened the throttle, and ‘82’ smoothly purred forward, away from the switchtrack and further into the town center. The snow continued to fall, swirling around her, stained pink where it landed in the splattered blood.

Verity Carter appeared through the fall, the twin barrels of her shotguns steaming softly as she approached along the catwalk. Her expression was grave, her eyes shadowed and stern.

“You choked…” she said bluntly. “If I hadn’t been here, you’d be ash or goo under his hooves.”

She sat facing Tess, the two of them swaying with the motion of the accelerating locomotive. With one hoof she reached forward and drew the pistol towards her.

“Beretta 9mm,” she explained. “Simple to use, clean and maintain. You treat it right, and it won’t fail you.”

She looked up and met Tess’s eyes, the strange colouration of her own holding the other girl transfixed. “But that’s no good if you can’t bring yourself to pull the trigger.”

She pushed the gun back along the rocking catwalk into Tess’s fingers. “This is your gun now, your best friend.”

“I can’t…” Tess replied in a hushed voice. “I can’t kill…”

“BULLSHIT!” Verity snapped and slammed her hoof on the engine’s side. “Anyone can be a killer! Children and foals can be taught to take a life, and they do! It’s no longer about IF you can kill; it’s WHY you kill that matters, because that’s the only choice left to you! So, are you going to be a mindless killer, a butcher, or are you going to be a soldier, someone who kills only when they have to? Look around you. World’s gone mad, and you need to step up.”

“I’m not a soldier…”

“YOU’RE FUCKING DRESSED AS ONE! YOU FUCKING PRETENDED TO BE ONE! YOU GAVE ORDERS AND DRESSED DOWN A FUCKING HLF PSYCHOPATH! YOU CLAIM TO BE THE TRAIN’S CONDUCTOR, IT’S COMMANDING OFFICER, SO START ACTING LIKE IT!”

Tess didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. Instead, she slowly reached forward and picked up the Beretta, holding it up in the palm of one hand as if it was a strange and possibly dangerous animal she had only just discovered.

Distant gunfire could be heard either side of the line, shadows on two and four legs flitting between abandoned houses and businesses. The PHL and HLF were trading fire, blood and thunder for the Hub of Nova Scotia.

Then, brakes squealing, they drew up in a triangular junction of tracks, a rail-bound island of land that at one end opened up into a yard of parallel sidings. New figures in military fatigues stepped forward, their motions crisp and professional. Their equipment and fatigues, while still ragged from use, looked somehow more… natural on them. Their weapons looked almost new, bearing the signs of PHL enchantments, and, unlike the HLF, they had not been reduced to using jury-rigged hand and pipe-cannons as their primary armament.

“I helped you get this far,” Verity finished, taking a step back. “But from here, you’re on your own.”

She dropped something from her saddlebag, and then leapt down to the trackside in a single bound. Tess looked down at her silent Ipad, then cradled her face in her hands and let out several broken, dry, sobs.

“Halt!” someone called. “This yard is under the jurisdiction of the PHL/UN joint forces. Are you the locomotive Halifax sent us?”

“They are…” she heard Verity respond. “I was just along for the ride. Please direct me to your C.O. immediately, and give these poor bastards all the help you can spare. Right now they’re both out of their depth.”

Truro, Nova Scotia. They’d arrived at last.

Tess just wondered what she had lost along the way.

*

“What…what does this mean?” Lightning said in confusion, staring at a floating image of several oscillating lines of light flowing across a chart.

“It’s proof that something strange has happened to you, little mare lost…” Mercy said softly, studying a spinning crystal that was hovering over Lightning’s head and projecting the illusory chart. The medi-mare had identified it as a ‘plumbob’...a device for measuring the magical state of a patient.

‘Magic from the Crystal Empire’, wherever that was.

“That teal line there…” she explained, pointing. “That’s your unique Thau/S identifier, your magical signature charted as a wave. 12.04.21.19.20 Gigasparks at an amplitude of 16.05070112151920 Microswirls.”

Lightning shifted uncomfortably, uneasy at the idea that she could be expressed as a series of lines and numbers. It made it feel like science knew more about her than she herself did.

“It should be the only line displayed here”, Mercy continued, before indicating a cluster of waves laid over one another. “But there’s several others. Ponies always fall within specific Thau/S ranges, so I can’t even begin to understand what these six outliers represent, except that they all share a common amplitude: 12.08011813151425 Microswirls, and running at such a high frequency that the plumbob can’t even properly detect them.”

She pointed again. “Same with the last line there, the dark blue one off by itself, tag-along number seven. It’s somewhere in the pony ranges, but too faint to measure exactly.”

She reached up with one wing and snatched the plumbob out of the air, cutting off the chart.

“So...does this explain what’s happened to my cutie-mark?” Lightning asked hesitantly. She had at first thought that it had bruised, but now that she had been washed and cleaned she could see that something more profound had occurred.

The same twin lightning-bolts still rode loud and proud on her flanks, but the six stars beneath had changed colour, each to a unique and distinct shade. Lavender, red and blue on one side, and orange, purple and pink on the other.

She should have felt panicked...terrified. Something had freaking changed her cutie-mark, the expression of her truest self, her destiny...instead, amidst all of this madness, she found the strange alteration somewhat comforting. It left her feeling that something...those voices that had plucked her out of Ponyville’s sky perhaps, had brought her here for a purpose. That give her flagging ego a slight adrenaline boost, which she really needed at this time.

“I honestly don’t know,” Mercy sighed. “All I know is that I’ve operated on the ‘real’ Lightning Dust, and you are not her. You’ve got none of her attitude, or her battle-scars.”

She pushed her glasses up, and the light streaming in through the room’s window glinted coldly off them. “You’re almost a glimpse of what Lightning Dust should be...would have been without the war.”

“The war…” Lightning Dust repeated, fresh questions pressing back upon her. She stepped away from Mercy, towards a map of this world that hung on one wall, and stared at it long and hard.

“I still can’t get my wings to catch that draught…” she said aloud, in what should have been disbelief, but instead came out as an accusation. “Equus made contact with another world, possibly even another dimension, and the first thing that happened was that we all went to war?”

“Not quite like that…” Mercy sighed, staring out of the frosted window into a wintry landscape of dark trees and buildings, before slowly looking down to study a handheld photograph. “It was just Equestria that went to war...against everyone and everything else.”

They had relocated to the hospital administrator’s office, which possessed the necessary wall-map on which Mercy had been able to explain to Lightning at least some of their situation. Lightning’s guesses at the lighthouse about her geographic location on the surface of the globe were roughly correct...it just wasn’t her native planet.

She had been shown ‘Maine’ (definitely spelt with an ‘i’) on the map, and Mercy had gone into detail about how after Lightning had been rescued, she had been brought here, the Colchester County General Hospital in Truro, Nova Scotia, a flight of some three hundred and sixty miles miles over a body of water identified as the ‘Bay of Fundy’.

“They were planning to extract you straight through to a Forward Operations Base, just past the Barrier, but realised that taking you through it with human food and drugs in your system might possibly kill you. So instead, they located a hospital and took it…”

“When you say ‘took it’, what do you mean?” Lightning asked warily, eying with some unease a drying purple stain that spread right across the office’s desk and one wall. It was magic, a tingle in her wings told her so...and a sickly feeling in her stomach warned her that it was no good form of magic either.

“The rainbow-maned bast...sorry, Prism Flash…” Mercy hissed. “He made a deal with the leader of a local group of human insurgents...some like-minded monster named Galt...the hospital was under heavy guard by defending forces. Equestria would ‘purge’ the hospital, then Galt’s troops would raid it for supplies, and withdraw...we could then come in and make use of what was left.”

“And you are?” the teal flier pressed, growing more and more alarmed at the story opening up to her, but needing to know the whole scope.

“Madeline and Rio are with a group called the PER...Ponification for Earth’s Rebirth. They support the Salvation Army and Equestria’s annexation of this world. I’m their little group’s pony liaison...the three of us were brought in while Prism Flash ‘secured’ access to this place. I did triage on you and kept you sedated in the air until we could get you into a safe environment to treat your wings.”

Her eyes went back to the photograph, and this time Lightning tried to get a decent view of it. She could see Mercy in it, a younger and happier Mercy, draped over the shoulders of a human mare with black-and-red streaked hair and a cocky, vivacious grin on her face.

“Who was she?” she asked at last.

“Jacqueline Jophish…Jackie...my JJ...” Mercy answered, in a voice so devoid of emotion that it screamed, not hinted, towards deep depths of personal grief. “Somebody I cared for...and somepony I no longer know.”

Then she tucked the photo away into a pocket and straightened her glasses. “You’ve got to get away from here, and fast. The Barrier is advancing on this place, and quickly. It will be here in less than a day, and when Equestria finds you, they are going to have some profoundly uncomfortable questions. Prism Flash already thinks that you’re his daughter’s *ahem* ‘sub’, and I would not want to be you when he gets intel that she’s flying high and directing the attacks over Halifax.”

From somewhere beyond the window there was a series of blasts, and Mercy yelped, her wings popping up in distress.

“Not to mention this town’s a battleground. Maddy and Rio answer to the PER, but they’re also my friends and I won’t keep them in a warzone any longer than I can. As soon as we’ve wrapped up our scavenging here I’m getting them evacuated.”

More explosions echoed from the world outside, and the purple mare trembled again. Used to sudden thunderclaps, Lightning Dust did not react so much, and instead stepped alongside and steadied Mercy with one wing - the poor thing was more skittish than a mistral.

“Why…” she asked again. “Why did all of this happen?! These humans must have done something to deserve it...surely...we don’t just declare war on other creatures...that’s not what ponies do.”

“I don’t know,” Mercy whispered, once again pulling out the picture of herself and ‘JJ’, as if seeking strength. “Oh there was some kind of ‘caucus beli’, some attack on the Conversion Bureaus that took the lives of pony volunteers...but I don’t think anypony who had ever spent time with humans could have seen that as reason to declare war on them all…”

Conversion Bureaus...that stirred other questions in Lightning’s memory, prodding at other recent events. The mentions of ‘purging’...the powerful, sinister magical residue everywhere...her oblique references to ‘JJ’ first as ‘someone’ and then ‘somepony’...and the fate of the creature that had called itself ‘Revving Engine’. It was all adding up like a terrible form of algebra. Lightning might not have been hot stuff in classes outside of Flight School, but even she could do simple arithmetic.

No. It couldn’t… they wouldn’t do that. But it all seemed to fit.

“Mercy,” she said, trying to make herself sound as firm as possible. “You told me all about the Barrier, your Queen, and these different factions, but you’re hiding something.”

She felt her companion tremble, heard a single sob.

“Mercy...what is Equestria doing to the humans it captures...and what are ‘Conversion Bureaus’?”

Mercy shivered, and then pushed away from her, reaching instead for a device on the desk, similar in appearance to the ‘Motorola’ Lightning had struggled to understand back at the lighthouse.

“Rio?” she spoke into it, holding it up to her mouth with a wing. “Is everything cleared up?”

“Everything’s stowed on the chariots and ready to fly Mercy…” came a crackling reply, and Lightning saw the mare’s wings drop. as if taking on an unwanted burden. “There’s just that last duty to carry out.”

“Alright then. Meet us in neonatal…” Mercy said quietly, before clicking the device off and turning to Lightning, eyes suddenly cold and accusatory.

“You want to know what the Conversion Bureaus were? Then let me show you.”

TO BE CONTINUED...

Author's Notes:

Very many thanks to Doctor Fluffy, who was practically this chapter's co-author and fellow pumper of high-octane nightmare fuel!

This would have been the first half of an absolutely massive chapter, but I decided to put this much up now as I won't have much time in the next fortnight to work on it.

Those who are interested, look out for a blog post in which I'm going to post some piccies of a few members of the cast.