Failure.

The thought ate at Rainbow Dash’s soul. She’d failed to knock out the Imperial leadership, thanks to the intervention of a frantic Balthasar Gelt, but she’d improvised. She’d stirred up a panic, thrown the defenders into disarray, opened the gates of the Empire. Still, her primary objectives were not met. If not for her improvisation and deliverance of other useful results, the punishment would have been far worse. She was lucky to only be sent to RIP.

Still, her choler was hot. What Ingethel showed her was already coming to pass. The Princesses were disgustingly worshipped, Rainbow and the bearers of the elements reviled or forgotten. She was so close to them, and yet...

Rainbow Dash idly ground her teeth, wings tucked in her RIP fatigues for warmth in the unusually chilly night. She didn't know any of her other two hundred odd RIP-mates, and so stood alone, wings in her pockets.

Drill instructor Hargo strode by, glancing over the group up and down. He was a short, but strong-built human who looked to have been woven out of jerky. Signs of surgery scars on his upper lip cast his expression in a permanent sneer.

“You,” he stopped before Rainbow Dash, twirling a hardwood stick the size of a chair’s leg in his gloved hand. “No servant of the Everchosen, not even a wet-fart scalp like you, parks their bits in their pockets.”

He stroked the stick against her right wing, and an acute shock of pain flooded her joints through her joints. On ‘wet-fart scalp’, the stick touched her left wing, which was still in its pocket. On ‘their pockets’ it came up into her ribcage, dropping her to the dirt, sucking air.

“Upright, wings at your sides,” he sniffed. “No other posture is acceptable in the Everchosen’s armies, are we clear?”

“Yes, driller.”

“Shit-soft attempt,” Hargo tilted his head to one side. “You call that a clean loader? Is that all you’ve got?” He smacked the stick in the palm of his hand. “Are we clear?”

“Yes, driller!” Rainbow shouted. “We are clear, driller!”

“Get up.” Hargo turned to the others. Many were greatly amused. Day one of RIP was barely ten minutes old and already someone was on the ground with pain-wet eyes. “Staple your lips and in formation, scalps! Six rows, move! Ten, nine, eight...” Ranks were made by ‘three’.

“Alright ladies and ladies. I’ve seen some details, but you all take the brass ass. You are RIP, the lowest of the low, and making your life a misery is my purpose, given unto me by the High Powers themselves. You come to me as wet-farts, and I’ll return you proper warriors. Or… you die. Anyone have anything to say about that? Go on, speak freely.”

“You can try,” The stallion beside Rainbow suggested.

Hargo whirled like a snake and struck him in the throat, then again across the back as he went down, choking. Rainbow moved to help him.

“Nobody move! No one. Let him suck it up. Now, anyone? No? No? Now, you sons and daughters of bitches, welcome to RIP detail. 'R' stands for… I’m waiting.”

“Retraining,” they murmured.

Hargo smacked his baton. “I can’t hear you.”

“Retraining, driller!”

“'I'?”

“Indoctrination, driller!”

“And 'P', you know what that means?”

“Punishment, driller!”

“Well, at least you’re literate. Who here is for Punishment?”

Most of the detail raised their hands.

“Who’s for Indoctrination?”

More raised their hands, and Hargo nodded.

“And ‘R’?”

The rest, including Rainbow, affirmed.

“Shit, ten of you? Alright, front and center.”

Rainbow came forward with the others.

“Look and learn, scalps. As far as we’re concerned, these are cherry bloody scalps, never seen a day of hot war, never swung a blade in anger. You better make sure none of them do better than you, or I will personally take a revolver to your heads and smile while I twitch the trigger. Now, Laps around the camp, weight loads with him.”

While the detail filed off for running weights with one of the equipment handlers, Hargo regarded the R-candidates. “You eight. Thrusts, fifty reps. Now.”

He stopped Rainbow from going with the others. He growled, a predator having picked his target, “I will not catch you changing forms, nor in any form than what I see before me now. Do you understand?”

Rainbow had to force herself not to seethe. “Yes, driller!”

His vice grip left her shoulder. “Get to it.”

It took a long time for Applejack to become acclimated to the rolling and pitch of sea travel. She was always a mare of the land, and so the uneven roiling of the sea brought great difficulty in settling on the fleet. Enough time, and skirmishes with the Imperial Navy had remedied that, and one of the sailors, a scrawny grub by the name of Bubondubon recently started calling her sea legs ‘chicken feet’ rather than ‘wet noodles’. Where chicken foot sat on his personal scale, Applejack didn’t know. Chickens could be nimble, after all.

The fleet coalesced as it moved, raiding groups joining the main body in a beeline for the port-city of Marienburg. A plague fleet was not only a force of the god of decay, but a vector to carry the forces of Chaos to the far corners of the world. Among Gutrot Spume’s growing armada, Bloodships prowled like wolfpacks, jockeying for position, but even they remained behind the pride of the Red Reavers, carrying a battery of hellcannons on the prow. Great Winged Terrors hovered just above the waves, great blinking eyeballs along their hulls.

-----------------------------------

Big Macintosh rarely stayed put for more than an hour at a time. His joints seized with rust if he did, and it hurt to break the corrosion. His condition deteriorated with time, his iron skin becoming caked with flaking rust and tarred machine oil. Growths of throbbing flesh-slime had long since attached themselves to him, but he grinned and bore it. He held out hope that getting on land, away from the nexus of corruption that was Spume’s flagship might undo these effects. For now, moving was good and fighting was better.

As the battle bells rang, it was surely a happy day.

More standing around, waiting, but only a little longer. In a dark hold near the front of the ship, hundreds of warriors were crammed like cargo instead of passengers. Further ahead, the battle fodder swayed and groaned.

Poxwalkers. Ever grinning through lipless mouths, they were a man-shaped parody of Nurgle’s Plaguebearers. The risen dead clutched makeshift weapons, from swords to pipes, to shivs of jagged metal, oblivious to the cutting of their own hands. Bone-fungal growths spiked out from their bodies like the horns of lesser daemons.

Macintosh attempted to roll his jaw, the rust seal snapping like an overstressed bolt. The coughing and moaning of the ill was annoying.

Someone shouted on the deck above. “Battle speed!”

-----------------------------------

“Battle speed!”

Applejack was gone. She had tucked Apple Bloom in her hammock and told her to stay put for her own safety. There she stayed as the minutes ticked by, but the boredom and feeling of victimhood gnawed at her. Was she to just sit and wait and hope?

From under the covers, she watched the commotion of crew and warriors rushing to battle stations with weapons and supplies. Words of encouragement between fellows, their lives on the line, the writing of history around her.

She could not sit idle.

“Oy! Ammo monkey!” Something overturned Apple Bloom’s hammock, throwing her to the floor. A brutish man dropped a squirming sack on her. “Get up, child, we’ll have no dead weight on this ship! Get that to catapult three. Off with you, off!”

He delivered a kick to her backside, and Apple Bloom rushed off with the sack in her teeth. She let his insult roll off. She wanted to be here, to take part and make her mark.

She was a Crusader.

She followed one side of the traffic up to the scramble of the main deck. Making it up into the sunlight and salty wind, the crew was hastily at work. Done a hundred times before, the crew readied great catapults, furled the sails, and secured the ship for the coming tumult. Warriors jeered from the rope ladders, some gathered around the boarding gantries She peered over the side, watching hundreds of oars cut the water, beating through the surf like great wings. Bloodships surged ahead, skull-prows opening to unravel great pincers like beetle mandibles.

The sails of the plague fleet were a forest, blotting out the sky under their span. A ubiquitous cheer of anticipation echoed from all corners, an impatient demand to be carried to the foe.

Apple Bloom looked to their destination, and her excitement vanished. Waiting for them, a line of warships was arrayed in splendour. Under bright sails depicting golden griffons and hammers, those ships formed a ring between the Manannsport and the Reik. Their formations separated around a monumental island, on which towered a castle, a guardian of the sea walls and main entrance to the city.

Apple Bloom left the ship side as the line of ships vanished in a burst of smoke. She took cover under catapult three, a whooping doppler scream filling the air, and the sea rioted.

-----------------------------------------------

Once in a while, the hold shuddered, sending uncomfortable thoughts through Applejack’s mind. That was the hit that sinks us… No, that one.

It was cramped in the hold, bodies packed together with scarcely enough room to scratch one’s nose. A few of the warriors were praying, sneezing, coughing. Weapons were held close, corroded steel coated in filth.

“Now we arrive at the first struggle of this great crusade!”

Applejack recognized Braeburn’s voice further ahead. Did he have some cue, or was this coming from some well of conviction he just had to share?

“I’ve heard stories of Marienburg’s riches, their hospitals with their balms and medicine. Oh, oh, oh, this will not do! This here city’s in dire need of Nurgle’s gifts. Putrefaction without reason, rot without end!”

A grumble of assent filled the hold, which helped to assuage some of Applejack’s fears.

Never alone.

“Brethren of the Crow, tallymen of the Plaguefather, make them suffer!”

A lurch and squeal of wood and steel threw everyone forward. If not for the crowding, many would have fallen. Rattling chains heralded bright light pouring into the hold from the front. The crush became tighter as eager warriors bayed to get outside.

A thundering volley of gunfire echoed in, stray rounds chopping off the roof and walls. It took nearly a minute for pressure to let up, and Applejack half-joined, half was carried along in the surge.

She stepped on poxwalker corpses that had already been trampled into the floorboards. Stepping into the sunlight was like entering another world from the hold’s dankness.

The air was hot and filled with acrid smoke. Soot and dust was already collecting on her unblinking eyeballs painlessly, and she had to remind herself to blink. She couldn’t see the enemy in the flow, but the formation was finally starting to spread out.

Applejack slowed down slightly at the sights. Marienburg was vast. An archipelago of artificial and rocky islands, extensive ports whose docks reached out like a hundred fingers into the water. Towers and castles of noble and merchant houses dominated the skyline.

She was cut short when she felt something unknown to her for a long time. Pain. A sharp stab in her flank accompanying a sonic whoop-crack. Her right leg crackled and deformed into her molar-axe and she looked back for the offender, the enemy at last.

It was not the enemy, but one of their own warriors. A pox-ridden man wearing a burlap sack over his head, one hole cut out through which a yellow stain of an eye glared at her momentarily. He swung a whip of corded leather, ended with a barbed icon of Nurgle which was coated in Applejack’s own flesh and blood.

“Focus and move forward!” he shouted, cracking the whip over the heads of the warriors.

Flashes of smoke came from all over as adjacent islands lent crossfire. Ships of the plague fleet and Imperial navy performed a danse macabre in the Reik’s mouth, exchanging broadsides, and warriors by the hundred rushing across boarding gantries.

She felt tiny, an ant trying to navigate a battle between giants. And the foe, unreachable on the other islands, but she finally knew what they looked like. Ochre overshirts and blue ruffles. Those already dead as the host advanced littered the ground.

Crossing a cobblestone bridge, an imperial wolfship drifted alongside them. The triumphant advance turned to a panic as dozens of guns trained on the bridge.

Applejack saw their shadowed faces in the gunports. Furious men and ponies, slick with sweat and caked with soot. She ducked as it unleashed, instantly deafened by its broadside. Pulverized masonwork blew out in dust clouds, and cannonballs and shrapnel vaporized limbs and torsos.

The bridge buckled, spilling itself into the the water. The pressure of bodies recoiled back, forcing troops off like a leak from a hose. Many sought safety in grabbing the comrades beside them, only dragging them both over the edge. Groups of figures, clinging to each other fell away and were swallowed in the current. Applejack felt a frantic hand grab her wiry tail, dragging her to the ground, clawing for purchase.

It was sudden, the certainty of solid ground vanishing from her hooves, and the grasp of gravity unresisted. She felt terror for but a moment, until a large metal claw grabbed her flailing hoof.

Big Macintosh pulled her and Braeburn appeared over the edge.

“Gimme yer other hoof!”

They pulled her up, and Braeburn helped the whip-bearing taskmaster who was clutching Applejack’s tail. They shared a momentary glance at one another before he jerked his thumb to keep going.

“Come on,” Braeburn said. “Keep movin’ forward, keep ‘em on the backfoot!”

The other side of the bridge opened into more breathing space, and the coast of the island had two more ships beached on the shore, disgorging more barbarians. Whatever passed for discipline had broken down among the defenders, and combat was reduced to desperate duels. That allowed the northmen to flood the gaps.

Applejack’s blood was up now, tired of being the victim of all this. She tackled one of the trooper stallions into a wall, crushing his ribcage under her rotting bulk and sending blood coughing out of him. She spared him a moment’s regard as he choked, slumping to the ground. A single hammerblow of her axe ended his misery, splattering his skull over the cobblestones, beads of blood already being dusted over.

Like that, she was already looking for her second.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Beneath the opulent palaces and merchant houses of Marienburg’s elite, the wretched and refuse of the city thrived in darkness. Smugglers, traffickers, and blades for hire worked under the nose of the city watchmen, or outright bought their blindness.

Mundvard von Carstein fumed. His was a small but secure empire. In the centuries since the battle of Hel Fenn and the fall of Mannfred, house von Carstein was scattered and disunited. Mundvard found refuge in the underbelly of Marienburg and built up his base. Four hundred years of work had won the Master of Shadows half of Marienburg dancing to his tune. Thugs intimidated and killed at the sprinkle of a few gold coins, and the global trading city was a perfect place to ‘shop’ for livestock.

The blood of men was a staple, the multitudinous cattle that grazed and grew on its own, sustaining its own protection and wellbeing. Elves and dwarfs too came to barter, work, and negotiate. A couple missing every few months would disappear into the crime statistics. And now they were being threatened.

His patience wore thin as the Directorate deliberated and schemed. An Imperial army was camped just outside the southern gates, offering reinforcement at the price of annexation. The Directorate had already allowed the Imperial Navy to supplement the battle on the river, but were they truly afraid of annexation, confident of victory, or willing to let the city burn for their pride?

He sipped from the wineglass on the side table, a mixture extracted from a bretonnian girl and an elf.

Something exploded on the surface, the shock penetrating into the city’s underbelly. Dust shook from the mortared ceiling, and a few drops of blood fell from the glass, staining the upholstery of his armchair.

Mundvard sighed, upending the glass and downing its contents in a single swallow, and threw it against the wall. The glass did not so much shatter as disintegrate into a vitrified dust on the floor.

“Serfs, attend!” he barked.

The door to the office opened and two fair women entered, heads bowed.

Mundvard rose, pushing his chair back. His eyes, showing the beginnings of an angry, unnatural red creeping in at the edges, flicked between them both, then down again.

He reached out with a pale-skinned arm and fished from the table drawer a scroll sealed with the stamp of a red dragon looming on a black kite shield and handed it to one of the women. “This is my word of approval. Begin our evacuation to Gorssel,” he said. “As quickly as you can.”

The girl smoothly curtsied and extended a dainty hand to receive the scroll. No sooner had her fingers grasped it than she hurried away towards the exit.

“And you," the Lord of Shadows said, turning to the other. His face twisted subtly upward, bearing the marks of a cruel smile. "Tell the harem it is time to hunt.”

--------------------------------------------------------

Gutrot Spume’s flagship hauled itself off the shore after disgorging its warriors. Its deck catapults screeched with each rusted-out throw, hurling sacks of lively wood-burrowing worms at enemy ships. A contingent of the fleet formed a defensive perimeter around the ship so it could launch the spearhead troops, and now it was eager to join the fighting on the water.

Sometimes a cannonball got much too close, and Apple Bloom could feel the sucking wind of its passing. A grey blur took a sailor’s leg off, the severed limb cartwheeling over board. She ignored him, she had no choice.

Keep the catapults firing.

One of the weapon crewmen took the ammo sack before she could drop it, and she took her momentary hiding spot, a corner away from the gears of the contraption. The platform rotated under her as it was aimed.

“Four hundred yards!” Bubondubon shouted, the crew adjusting sinew tension in concert.

At his order, the arm snapped up. Apple Bloom watched it fly for a moment, then moved to make another run. It wasn’t her place to know what they were shooting at, only make sure they had something to shoot with.

A cheer went up, and a moment later a sudden fiery roar set her ears ringing. An Imperial warship had shattered, broken in half by a blossoming fireball. It heaved and twisted, so suddenly put down.

A powder room had been hit, she thought. She didn’t care that it was another who loaded, aimed and fired the shot that felled the wolfship. That was her round, her first mark on history.

“Apple Bloom, come,” Bubondubon said. He pointed into the distant sky. “Your eyes are young. What be that?”

She squinted, locking onto a curious shape dancing out in empty space. Apple Bloom blinked, confused for a moment. She thought the creature was just a bird, but it moved too gracefully, its wings beat too slowly. Whatever it was, it was massive.

A terrible scream washed over everyone. Hands clasped over ears, warriors screamed, and Apple Bloom ground her teeth, every bone in her body vibrating.

-------------------------------------------------------

Across Marienburg, agents of the Master of Shadows maneuvered the streets, avoiding patrols and trooper traffic to reach padlocks to marked chests, buried warehouses, and basement doors.

-------------------------------------------------------

Marienburg was burning. Bent columns of smoke reached skyward, smearing the otherwise pristine sky like an oil slick. Guards at the southern gate still held their post, denying the Empire access and their annexation.

The Imperial 5th Army was arrayed in battle-ready marching columns, five hundred yards from the Knife Alley gates. General Aldred von Carroburg scanned the crenellations through a telescope, and lowered it.

“They’re spooked.” he said.

“Sir?”

The command staff rested behind him in chairs, sweating in their armor. Aldred recognized the voice, quartermaster Iron Harvest. A tall, lean pegasus of many years, and fast with a pen.

“They’re afraid.” repeated Aldred. “They can hear better than us what’s happening behind them, and if they’re uneasy, then the amphibious assault is probably breaking through. Mr. Gutro, address them again.”

“Sixth time’s the charm?” Gutro whispered, getting up. The amplification spell on his voice made him sound as if he were talking loudly.

Two men in gold breastplates bearing Imperial standards snapped to attention, following behind him, holding aloft the heraldry of Middenheim, and that of the Empire as a whole to flutter high in the breeze. Gutro took a position ahead of Aldred, and spread his arms. Some of the command staff plugged their ears.

“Hear yee, Free City of Marienburg! Their Imperial Majesties, Karl Franz, Celestia, and Luna offer you a boon in these dark times. The Archenemy is at your door, and here the might of the Empire stands ready to shore up your defenses. Our terms are but one article. Return to the Empire that which the Heldenhammer built with his own two hands. Remember your heritage! The nation calls, and we await your answer.”

Gutro made for his seat, feverishly scratching his neck. “Obiq, get this spell off me before I tear my throat out…”

While the unicorn undid the spell, Aldred raised his telescope again. Two sentries were weaving and whipping their arms at each other, appearing to be in a heated argument. The bigger one grabbed the other by the collar, pulling him in face-to-face. A minute later, they both entered one of the gatehouse towers.

“Mr. Gutro, I think you’ve started something,” said Aldred.

-------------------------------------------------------

Emerging from the cracks and shadows, sewers and shores, the forgotten and cast out showed themselves. Mutants and monsters, a cavalcade of corruption that once hid from their ‘normal’ counterparts.

But no longer.

Applejack met many as the warriors of Chaos advanced. A man with a swarm of barbed tentacles sprouting from his mouth, a cyclopean woman with a walrus-tooth growing from her lip, and wide-eyed gurgling mermen. They came howling into battle with knife and dagger, tooth, claw, and hook.

“This is what happens when we work together, everyone!” the taskmaster shouted, his whip barking over the mutant’s heads. “The Plaguefather comes to give you a new chance, so repay what you owe him! Fight on!”

Applejack’s heart swelled at his words. By His power she lived through so much damage, lived to see her family again. She had so much to be grateful for, had such a debt to repay.

She followed a fleeing pair of troopers into one of the houses, smashing aside furniture they overturned to slow her down. Down stairs, another man was fiddling with a lock that held shut heavy iron doors on the other end of the basement.

She swiped her axe at one, knocking his legs out from under him. Mid-twist, her jaws clamped down on his neck, crunching through his spine and dropping him. His partner took the opening to drive a spear into Applejack’s chest, through her barrel, and into the floor. She missed, snapping at his hands, and wheezed several curses through her punctured lungs.

“Boy, boy! Is this a way out?” asked the soldier.

The tinkerer looked half-starved and wrapped in shabby clothes. Applejack got the spear out of the floor, the rusted-out lock snapped off, and he looked up for the first time in several minutes with a yellow smile.

“In a way.”

-------------------------------------------

There was a phrase from the Red Reavers: when the blood was up, the world slowed down, and there was only the combat to be had. Fight Time. Followers of the Lord of Skulls fought like lions, with no care for individual lives, and all had to be an army in their own right. Each man bore his own arms and armor, fought in his own style; they were united not by the kind of rigid discipline of the Empire that made many men into a deadly force, but by their mutual, full-throated devotion to the battle, the greater war, and the great lord above it all whose unquenchable fury grew hotter with every gout of Marienburger blood.

Big Macintosh didn’t notice the yowling mob of Norscans and mutants following him through the streets. He didn’t hear their struggling to keep up as the iron rhinoceros gored enemies his horn and trampled them to pulp under his pounding stride. Most of the Marienburgers died with wounds in their backs, a most dishonorable way to fall.

Though his unblinking eyes were slick with blood, Macintosh saw one who was not fleeing. Bare-chested, save a harness for a greatsword that he drew with one hand. His features were feral, pointed ears, and eyes that burned like live coals. His right arm stretched out into a great bat’s wing like a webbed flesh-robe he wrapped around himself like a noble in fine silks.

Whoever he was, Macintosh didn’t care. He charged the figure, issuing a challenging roar that shook windows, but the figure stood his ground. Macintosh dipped his head for a thrust and the instant before he struck, the man swung his wing, and world went spinning. Wood shattered, glass trickled like rainfall, and when Macintosh came to he found himself resting upside down on his neck, covered in bread rolls and pastries. The figure was standing unharmed outside a large hole in the wall.

The vampire spared him a look and strode away.

What the hell just happened?

---------------------------------------

At first Braeburn was confused when a zombie bit him on the leg. Perhaps the poor thing was confused or in a frenzy over the battle, but he saw no worms eating its flesh, no ecosystem living off its body. It was dead, and nothing more.

They emerged by the hundreds from basements and manholes, wading up the shores and climbing anchor chains and ropes from the sea. In a voiceless march, the unbreathing horde fell upon the forces of chaos.

The Red Reavers laid into them with savage glee, raising an exultant cheer that the battle goes on. At their head, Wulfrik laughed, a haughty bark at a foe who would finally stand their ground.

Shuffling scraping and clatter of bones followed Applejack out of the house. They vocalized nothing in their pursuit, held no particular malice or hate, they only felt the will of their puppetmaster driving them.

To get these barbarians out of his city.

Applejack fell in with backup once she’d escaped the house, finding Braeburn shattering the skull of a zombie chewing on his leg. “Somebody find that blasted necromancer!” he snarled.

Plodding on Elephantiasis-infected feet, Ghurk Glott waded through the undead. His actions were purely savage for a slab-beast of foetid meat, stomping the enemy to powder and swatting them aside with the great lamprey’s maw that used to be an arm. Among the towering horns sprouting on his back, his brothers effortlessly balanced. Ethrac whispered his spells, casting miasmic clouds that withered the undead to dust, or broke the necromantic hold over them. Otto reaped bodies with every swing of his scythe, cackling at the show and guiding Ghurk with a boot to the back of his head. Otto spotted their next target and smacked the giant once more.

Many of the dead threw themselves bodily at the invaders, jamming armor joints with splashes of bones, clubbing with femurs and rusted-out swords and spears. Despite the clumsy assault, their strength was in numbers and the crush of their push. Some strikes found their mark.

Applejack pushed aside a mutant that had fallen against her with a bloody speartip poking out the back of his neck. Applejack struck out with her axe, shattering the offending skeleton’s skull. Her head jerked to the side as a spear tore through her windpipe and esophagus. She twisted her neck back, wrenching the weapon out of a zombie’s hands and brought her axe down, burying its head into its chest. Around the fighters’ legs bones rolled and clattered along the ground, collecting back together new skeletons to renew their assault. It was of little use killing them, too many, and they kept coming back.

Find the necromancer. Kill the necromancer.

Dark shadows passed overhead, an artifice of black iron webs fashioned in the shape of a great raised throne. Baleful energies pulsed about it, giving life to the skeletons grafted into its bulk that beat back on comers with impossible strength. Women, pale and voluptuous beckoned to the northmen, who came staggering to them, dropping their weapons with dumbstruck smiles and growing wobbly in the knees.

Those who got through climbed on the throne, entranced by the maiden’s beauty and promises. With swift slashes, retractable blades opened the men’s throats, and the maidens gently pushed them off, pretending to fan themselves while more suitors came pining.

Applejack saw Braeburn stumbling toward them as well.

He didn’t notice the spear that tore his heart apart, or the claws tearing strips of his flesh away. No longer thinking rationally, Applejack came bludgeoning the undead, pulverizing bone and tattered skins with no swing gone to waste. But the dead kept coming with no end in sight. The barbarians had been cut into pockets, and the section her kin was in was shrinking by the second.

“Braeburn, stop!” screamed Applejack. Her voice was lost in the din; she could barely hear herself.

Braeburn climbed onto the platform, enraptured by a petite bat-pony looking at him with half-lidded eyes. She leaned toward Braeburn, lips pursed, and he removed his helmet. It would have gotten in the way. Applejack tried to throw herself through the crowd, screaming feebly, her body becoming a pincushion of driven weapons.

A single punch put a blade through Braeburn’s forehead. His expression twitched, and his smile slowly faded. The bat-thing kicked him off unceremoniously and whipped her mane, already disinterested.

Blinking, dizzy, Applejack looked around. The crush of corpses was overwhelming, rebels and children of Nurgle were falling to these unfeeling puppets. Otto and Ethrac were gone from their perch, and Ghurk had collapsed against a building, holding the yellow ropes of his innards from falling out the the tear in his belly. Ghurk’s roar wasn’t of rage nor savage glee, but of pain. Creatures like him weren’t supposed to hurt, such sensations should have gone when their nerves decayed.

Something snapped.

Applejack roared something that northmen would argue over for years to come. Some said it was an Apple Family phrase, others an oath to the Plague God. Some said she was cursing herself or Big Macintosh for not reaching him in time.

She screamed the name of her cousin Braeburn.

She brought on a wild onslaught, summoning a frantic strength that few but an earth pony could muster in crisis. Desiccated bodies and parts of bodies flew skyward with each uncalculated swing, scattering enemies like a giant might throw the little people around its feet. It was impossible not to notice her rampage.

“Children of Nurgh’leth!” A yellow-eyed taskmaster yelled, putting his whip away for a second dagger. “Do you want to live forever?”

The Crow Brethren followed the dent Applejack pushed in the line, coming on like a tidal wave and crushing the undead faster than they could rise again. It did not take long before the pockets were connected, and Applejack shoved her way to the throne, beating down warriors who were about to throw their lives away.

The maidens’ composure broke as their charms didn’t faze the wrathful corpse-mare, and they fled up the platform. Applejack caught the bat-pony by the tail of her dress as she tried to fly away and dragged her down face to face. A retractable blade stabbed Applejack in the stomach several times before four sets of gnarled teeth destroyed her head in the most sudden and abrupt way.

Barbarians stormed the throne, cutting down the women in vengeance. Applejack held the headless pony high to the cheering warriors.

The vampires would pay. The Empire, their cattle, would pay the blood toll for Apple Family lives. Pumping the headless corpse to the sky, she chanted, and in her anger, she was heard. The army of the High Powers responded in kind, echoing the same cry as the undead weakened with their falling masters.

“Death! Death! Death! Death!"

The gates of Marienburg were opened, and people fled from within. A deluge of humans and ponies carrying prized possessions, babies, and children in tow. The Imperial army fanned out wide, catching deserting soldiers form the city, and questioning civilians. Many were more than keen to abandon the insanity of the burning city for the hard-edged protection and of the Imperial army, even those who had once scoffed at them.

The smoke had become a pall, a curtain draped over Marienburg like a funeral shroud. Orders had gone out to dismiss any fanciful stories by the civilians. Begging the Empire to retreat, spare their lives, fight another day, were to be ignored for the time being, and panic-mongers detained.

The Imperial leadership deliberated, argued. A punch was thrown, and accusations of treason shouted in anger.

Aldred von Carroburg cut through the heat. “We came to reinforce a city! Do you see a city? I see ruins, and its people coming to us for safety. Marienburg doesn’t exist anymore; there’s no strength left in the Directorate, and the people paid for their arrogance. Our only recourse now is to put them beneath the Emperor's banner, with all that implies. Gather every spare weapon we have and put the civilian men into scratch companies. This army will leave bigger than it arrived.”

In the southern deserts of Equestria there was an unnamed village, founded in ages past, before the rise of Celestia and Luna. It went almost unnoticed in the rise and fall of a dozen kingdoms that claimed the land, subsisting on fishing in the nearby river and irrigated crops. Almost.

A tyrant had come, only one creature. It led no army, for it was beyond any of the townsfolk. No cities or empire had its interest, only the village. It demanded their crops as tribute and in return spared their lives. As they languished under its greed, a single mare came forward and banished the tyrant, and entered legend for her life’s deeds since.

Ages passed in peace, and the people eked out their meagre existence. Then the tyrant returned. It bellowed for their hero to present themselves, voice dripping with venom as it named them.

‘Somnambula!’

No one answered, not a soul or building stirred. The tyrant tore roofs from houses and pulverized buildings in a single blow, and found no one in its rampage.

All it found was a mound of dusty skulls with all the tops sawn off burying the water well. Supported in its height was a wrought iron standard bearing an eight-pointed star.