Sweet Nothings

by Golden Tassel

First published 20th of September, 2014

A story about loss, grieving, and the relationship between mother and son.

I wrote this story a long time ago. I don't know how to describe it properly. It's filled with the despair of loneliness, the anger of isolation, and the fear of losing one's self in what others want you to be. It follows the narrator who struggles to piece together his own identity while burying a terrible secret from everyone around him who all have their own secrets.

If there is anything I would hope that you, dear reader, would take away from this story, it's that being alone doesn't make anything easier.

It was inspired by Fallout Equestria, but bears little resemblance beyond wasteland and stable and ponies with guns.

Tagged for violence, but not gore, as I don't think I wrote anything quite that graphic. If anyone wants to complain, I will reconsider.

This is the story about a boy who tried to protect his brother by killing their abusive mother.

Parturition

A mare is dead, a foal orphaned. This is the price I paid for love.

With the heavy steel door closed behind me, I was left all alone in the pitch darkness of the world outside. I lay down, closed my eyes, and waited for the wasteland to claim me.

I waited to die. But as I would eventually come to understand, I had only just been born.

A light came on in the distance. At first it was only a dim glow, but it grew brighter as I watched it. Then suddenly it became a blinding glare. Even when I closed my eyes, I could still see the glow through my eyelids. The light was warm. I felt its glow on my face, and it slowly spread down over me.

I didn't know what it was, if it was some element of the wasteland there to claim me, or if perhaps I had died and not yet realized it. But the warmth of that light made me conscious of the coldness of the stone floor beneath me. I stood up and peered at the light through squinted eyes. Curiously, I began moving toward it.

I was in some kind of corridor—no, the stable had corridors; they were straight and orderly, and they had been constructed with purpose. This floor . . . this ground I walked on was uneven, as were the walls and ceiling above me. I was in a tunnel, a canal that bridged the sealed world of the stable with the open wasteland.

I emerged out into the full light, and as my eyes became adjusted to it, I saw at last what that light was: the sun, cresting over the distant horizon. It was the dawn, the birth of a new day. The sky was awash in brilliant red and orange hues, and below it, before me, was the wasteland.

And all of it was so very empty.

I stood above the wasteland halfway up the side of a mountain, into which the stable, where a dozen generations before me had lived their entire lives and never seen the light of day, had been built. Everything I had ever known, everything I had ever cared about . . . my whole world was behind me. And ahead was an empty, lifeless void where the only movement I could see were small tufts of dust that became swept up in the wind, danced around in the air briefly, and then disintegrated into nothing.

I glanced back at the mouth of the cave that lead down to the stable, and I briefly imagined running back there to pound against the door and beg and plead to be allowed back in. But I knew that would be futile. So I steeled myself with the certainty that the stable was left a better place without me.

My wings bristled and spread out at my sides as I looked ahead at the wide open world. The stable had been constructed to allow sufficient room for pegasi to fly along corridors, or up and down between levels by way of the atrium which ran the entire height of the stable. But I knew in that moment—as I stood there on the side of that mountain with my wings outstretched, feeling the natural breeze under my feathers, feeling how the fine control muscles adapted the shape of my wings all on their own to fit the changing winds—I knew that the stable had not been enough room for a pegasus. I hadn't had any idea of the very simple wonder that I had been deprived of my entire life.

So as I launched myself out into the open air and glided out over the barren, dusty hills, I resolved to leave it all behind me: I would simply forget about it all. Accept that I had lost what I loved most of all, and move on with my life. I had no idea where I was going, only forward.

I could never go back.

Don't Talk to Strangers

I fell.

One moment I was soaring casually, held aloft on seemingly nothing but the warm rays of sunlight that shone down upon me. And then in an instant, the wind's tenuous embrace was broken, and I was falling. I fell toward the earth below, plucked right out the sky. I had dared to defy gravity, and it now aimed to pummel me into the ground to remind me that I had no place in the heavens above.

A snare had caught my wing, twisted it into an unnatural angle and held it pinned to my side. I gave nearly all my breath to a panicked scream as I plummeted helplessly toward the ground. The wind rushed past me with a deafening roar while I spiraled out of control, and I had to fight for each breath. Blood rushed to my head and made my vision hazy to the point that I could only distinguish sky and ground as alternating light and shadow tumbling across my field of view.

My good wing managed to bite into the air and pull me out of the dive into an awkward, utterly graceless corkscrew descent. I sucked in a deep breath, and tried desperately to keep myself stable while the world righted itself around me, and the throbbing pressure inside my head subsided. As I neared the ground, however, my wing lost purchase, and I stalled. I dropped the last few yards at a shallow slope, and I was carried forward only by my lingering momentum as I crashed into the hard-packed earth.

Clouds of dust swirled up all around me as I tumbled over and over again until I finally came to a rest, lying uncomfortably on top of my tangled wing.

With a heavy groan, I pushed myself up enough to roll onto my other side, bringing some small relief to my wing as circulation returned to it. I simply lay there, panting for a moment before I tried to free my wing, and I got my first clear look at what had snared me.

I'd been caught by a long cord with weighted spheres at either end. It had wrapped two full times around my torso, and the ends had then twisted together to hold me. Struggling against it had only tightened the ends, and I had to pull them with my teeth, constricting the cord around my chest, in order to untwist them.

"He came down over this way!" a voice called out from somewhere over one of the hills I had landed among. Not long after, the figure of a pony appeared on the hilltop. "Down here!" she called.

I finished untangling myself from the bolas and stood up as she ran down the hill to meet me. She wasn't alone, and I suddenly found myself surrounded by a half-dozen ponies. All of them looked to be in poor health, and they all carried various dangerous-looking implements with them—knives, a sledgehammer, and other things . . . the mare in front of me wore heavy-looking iron boots around her forehooves. Given the bulk in her shoulders, she looked to be very practiced at wearing them.

Among them was a unicorn, smaller and leaner than the rest. He looked to be about my own age. His coat was a pure white—or it surely would have been if not for the dirt and rust-colored stains that mottled it. A number of scars further marred his coat, mostly on his forelegs and shoulders. Strapped across his back was a sword. While the others closed in around me, he stayed behind them, stalking back and forth, while he regarded me through one eye.

"What a lousy catch, Trapper!" the mare before me shouted as she smacked the pony next to her with the back of her iron-shod hoof. He stumbled aside and rubbed gingerly where she had hit him. "He's got nothing on him but that fancy shirt," she said, referring to my uniform: a standard-issue pale blue shirt.

"It's not like I could see what he had on him that far away! I got him down in one shot though. Don't blame me if he ain't got nothing."

The mare loomed closer over me. "Hey, you was flying through our turf. You gotta pay up. So come on. What you got?"

"I don't have anything," I whimpered. "I'm sorry. I didn't know this place was yours. I'll just leave. I won't bother you again. I promise."

She and her friends laughed at that. All except the unicorn at the back. He continued pacing slowly. There was a curious elegance and rhythm to his movements, almost as if he were dancing.

"You don't seem to get it," the mare said as she put her iron hoof on my chest and pushed me back half a step. "You gotta pay with something. So think real hard about what you can come up with. If you don't have something, we're gonna have to beat it out of you."

I trembled, kneeling before her. "Please! I have nothing! I'm all alone! I don't know where I am or where to go!"

My pleas were again met with laughter, and I looked up at the mare in front of me as she raised her hoof, preparing to bring it down on me. Then suddenly the laughter stopped, and she stood stock still. Protruding from her throat was the tip of a sword.

The sword pulled free of her neck and her lifeless body crumpled to the ground in front of me. Behind her stood the unicorn with his bloody sword hovering in his crimson magical grasp.

All around me there were sounds of movement, yells, curses, and screams. But I simply knelt there in the middle of it all. All I could see was her bloody throat, and his joyful smile.

Someone was shaking me. "Hey! Snap out of it!"

I blinked and pulled myself away from that gory scene. Looking up, I saw that unicorn standing next to me. His sword was back in its sheath, and he was covered in blood, though none of it was his. He smiled at me.

"There you are. Don't look so upset; I just saved your life."

He'd done it for me.

Slowly, I stood up. My legs were shaky at first, but I got them under control.

"You . . . killed her," I said breathlessly. "But wasn't she your friend?"

He shrugged. "I wouldn't go that far; I've only been running with her gang for the last few months. No, I haven't had any real friends in years—not for as long as I've been out here. But for you . . . for you, I'd lay waste to a hundred friends."

I shuddered at the thought. But he had saved me. And as I glanced back down at the lifeless body on the ground, I realized I had to help him now.

"We need to hide the body," I said.

"Hide the body?" he repeated with a laugh. "Why in the world would we need to do that?"

"So nobody can prove what happened. So you won't get in trouble for it."

He stared at me blankly for a moment, then erupted in laughter once again. "Oh, you really have no idea, do you? There's no law out here, brother. Nobody cares that she's dead, and nobody cares that I killed her—except for maybe the rest of the pack I chased off, but they're probably more upset that all of them together couldn't handle little old runty me." He did a short celebratory dance. "I chased them off for now, but when they're done licking their wounds they'll come back for us, so we should get moving."

He started walking, and I—having nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, and knowing that I couldn't stay there—I followed him.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Day," I said.

"Just Day?"

"Lucky Day . . ." I mumbled reluctantly.

He chuckled. "Yeah, I'll bet you've heard all the jokes ten times over by now. My name's Rake. I've been waiting a long time to meet you, Day."

The sun had set, and Rake and I sat on opposite sides of the small fire he had built out of dead tree branches and ignited with a magical flame from his own horn. I watched him silently through the flickering flames while he casually poked at the fire with his sword.

He looked up, his eyes meeting mine through the orange flames that danced between us. "You've been quiet," he said. His lips drew back into a smile. "I can see it in your eyes though: you're full of thoughts, questions. You've got a spark of intelligence in you that most of the riff-raff out here lack."

I wasn't sure what to say to that. "Thanks?"

Rake laughed. "You're even polite! I miss that. We're alike, you and I; we both come from civilization. Look at you: you're still clean as a newborn foal!" He stood up and moved around to my side of the fire, and then sat down next to me. "Where are you from, my little pony?"

I leaned away from him slightly, a little unnerved. I looked down at my forehooves and fidgeted with them.

"It's a big underground shelter built inside a mountain. We just call it the stable."

"Stable . . ." he whispered the word, and his face lit up in a broad grin. "What a perfect name for a civilized society: stable. Everything's static, always stays the same, never falls apart, and every day is exactly the same as what came before. But here you are in the un-stable—the chaotic, crumbling wasteland where you don't know what tomorrow will be; you may find food and shelter, you may be attacked, or maybe you'll trip on a rock and break your neck." Rake leaned in toward me, uncomfortably close with his broad, toothy grin. "Tell me: what are you doing out here?"

I squirmed and looked away. "I . . . I was exiled."

Silence followed, and after a moment I turned back. To my surprise, Rake was looming over me, and his eyes seemed to glow with excitement. "What for?" he asked. "What did you do that was so bad as to warrant throwing out of your safe little home for?" He seemed as though he already knew the answer, and he just wanted to hear me say it.

I sighed and mumbled, "Murder."

"We really are the same," he said in a whisper of barely-restrained glee. "You come from an underground shelter; I came from an ivory tower far away from here. We had our own little pocket of civilization there—our own stable—with walls and guards to keep the rabble out, law and order to keep us in. But just because we're 'civilized'"—he gestured quotes around the word and said it with a sneer—"doesn't mean it's all sunshine and rainbows." He grinned. "I see the look on your face; you know what I'm talking about.

"For me," he said, "it was my sire. He came at me when I was just a little colt—didn't even have my cutie mark yet. I fought, I cried, I begged him to stop, but he told me to be a good boy and stay quiet. When nobody complains, everything is perfect, right? If there's a problem, it's because you're the one making noise about it. Just shut up and—"

"And get along." I didn't mean to say it out loud, but what Rake was saying was so familiar, so terrifyingly familiar, that it brought my voice out as if in some instinctive need to harmonize with him.

"Exactly! You get it! And you're here now, so I know you'll understand: I killed him. I rammed my horn right into his throat. He bled all over me. And when I went for help, they threw me out for being a troublemaker—I was clearly too dangerous to be around civilized ponies like them; if I had wanted a nice, safe home, I should have stayed quiet like daddy wanted." He laughed. "So what about you? Whom did you kill?"

"N—nobody . . ." I turned away again. I didn't want him to see me fighting back tears.

"Oh come on. You were exiled for murder, same as I. Somepony's dead now. So who is it?" He leaned in closer to me. I could feel his breath on my neck. "You can tell me. We're the same. Don't you see? We're brothers."

I wheeled around and pushed him away. "You are not my brother!" I shouted.

Rake had fallen onto his back when I shoved him. He lay there, looking up at me. He still had that eager grin on his face that he'd had ever since I'd first told him about the stable.

"Okay. I get it," he said calmly as he rolled onto his side and propped his chin on his forehoof. "It's all been a big shock. You're not ready. I was the same way when I was first born into the wasteland."

"Stop. Just stop," I said as I moved around to the opposite side of the fire from Rake and lay down there. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.

Rake kept talking while I drifted off, though. "We're more alike than you want to admit," he said. "You're scared because you see in me what the wasteland will turn you into. You can try to fight it—I did at first. But the wasteland won't nurture you. And if you want to survive—and, like me, you wouldn't be out here in the first place if you didn't—you'll eventually have to accept that your old life ended the moment you set foot out here. But remember this: The worst that could happen is behind you now; you've been born—that's the most traumatic thing you'll ever go through. One moment, you're safe and secure, all warm and loved, and the next thing you know, your entire world crashes around you and forces you, kicking and screaming and covered in blood, into a new life. Whatever comes after that is nothing by comparison.

"Happy birthday," he added in a whisper.

Tired as I was, and despite my best efforts to fall asleep, I found myself turning over restlessly on the cold, hard ground well into the night. After some time, I rolled onto my back and simply stared up into the dark abyss that was the night sky. Cold and featureless, it loomed over me, and I imagined it reaching down with inky black tendrils to carry me up into the void where I would simply cease to exist.

But as the campfire died down, as its glare receded, and my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw little points of light in the sky. They appeared gradually to me, first only the brightest ones, but slowly, as the fire went out, fainter ones began to appear until the entire night was full of them. I had never seen the stars before.

They were beautiful. And I found myself no longer imagining the sky as an empty void that would swallow me whole, but instead as a comforting blanket that had been cast over me, which I could wrap myself in for protection.

"You're shivering."

Rake's voice startled me, and I sat up to face him. It took me a moment to realize it, but he was right: I was shaking in the chilly air. He poked a hoof at the charred remains of the fire. "There isn't enough wood around here to keep a fire going all night," he said as he stood up and moved around toward me.

I edged away from him as he sat down at my side. "W—what are you doing?"

"You're cold. We should huddle together for warmth," he said with a grin. "Don't worry, I won't bite . . . not unless you want me to." He chuckled, and I forced a laugh with him, but I had the distinct feeling that he wasn't completely joking. "Shh. Just relax," he said as he leaned against my side.

He was warm, and my shivers abated briefly at his touch. Slowly, I settled back down to the ground, and Rake did the same alongside me. He wriggled a bit, rubbing his side against mine as he got comfortable, and then I felt his head nestle in against my neck.

"You smell clean," he mumbled softly. "I miss that smell."

I shifted uncomfortably at that, but there was something strangely comforting about feeling his body against mine—something beyond the simple warmth it provided. In a way, Rake felt familiar. He hadn't been completely wrong when he said I was afraid that the wasteland would turn me into him. But lying there with him, under that blanket of stars in the night sky, I found a moment of comfort, of something familiar and oh-so precious to me. And despite any misgivings I had, I wanted nothing more than to cling to that familiar comfort.

I glanced up at the stars one last time, and closed my eyes.

Look Both Ways before Crossing the Street

Rake and I continued walking in the morning. I had no idea where we were going, and I doubted if Rake had anywhere in particular in mind; he strolled along as I might have while going for a walk around the stable's atrium.

Every so often, I'd hear the loud, faroff crack of a gunshot. The sound seemed to come from all around us, and distant echoes lingered in the air as ghostly reminders of that initial sound that had lasted only a fraction of a second.

I had tried looking around for the source of the gunshots, but I couldn't even tell what direction they were coming from. When I looked to Rake though, I saw that he was simply continuing his leisurely stroll. So I tried to not worry about it—he had to know better than I would if we were in any danger.

After some time had passed, when I had started to tune out those gunshots, Rake came to a stop and said, "We're being followed."

"Where?" I asked as I glanced over my shoulder nervously.

"Sniper. Somewhere out on the horizon. She's been stalking me for weeks."

"How can you tell she's after you?"

"Because," he said as he turned to face me, "that last shot clipped my ear."

My eyes went wide as I saw: the tip of his right ear was missing, and blood ran from the jagged edge down the side of his face and dripped off his neck.

Another crack thundered through the air, and I dropped to the ground, covering my head with my forehooves. Rake laughed down at me.

"Relax. She's not gunning for you. And if she wanted me dead already, I wouldn't be standing here talking about it. There's no use cowering like that—the shot would hit you before you heard it." He put a hoof to his bleeding ear and flinched. "I know that for a fact."

Cautiously, I stood up and started looking around the horizon. I still didn't have any clue what to look for. It was a futile effort, and I knew it, but I couldn't simply stand there as Rake was. "You know who it is?" I asked.

"I know what she is," he answered. "She's not a pony. She's a reaper—Death's own agent, here to remind me that my days are numbered. Death comes for everypony eventually. He's the only thing that you can count on out here or anywhere else."

"But how do you even know it's a she? I mean, have you seen her?"

Rake shook his head. "I don't have to. And she's smarter than that—I'd kill her first if I could see her. It would have to be a she, though. Lots of ponies have tried to kill me, but they all made the same mistake: they let me get close." His horn lit up and he floated out his sword to make a few slashes and stabs through the air at imaginary—perhaps remembered—adversaries. "No. The only one who could ever kill me would have to do it from far away—the complete opposite of how I fight: I'm fast. I feel my heart racing. I get blood on my hooves. And they all see me coming." He returned his sword to its sheath. "The one who kills me will take her time. It will be cold, calculated. She'll hold her breath and slow her heart when she kills me. And she won't dirty her hooves with my mess. It'll happen when I least expect it. It would have to be a she—everything else about her is my exact opposite, so that must be too."

I stared at him. "Rake . . . I . . . can't you do something to stop her?"

He took his hoof away from his ear and looked down at his bloody hoof. "I'll die eventually. And I'll be powerless to stop it when it happens. It'll probably be painful. If I'm lucky, it'll be quick." Rake closed his eyes and leaned his head back as he took a deep breath in, and let it out in a calm, relaxed sigh. He smiled. "Until then, I'm alive."

Rake began laughing loudly as he danced around me in a circle, adding little bounding leaps and twirls. "I'm alive! I'm alive!" he kept shouting. "And I have you to thank for reminding me!" he called out to the horizons. "My sweet little angel of death! My one true love! Oh, how I long for your kiss!"

"Rake! Stop it! Y—you're scaring me!" My ears drooped, and my wings bristled as I backed away from him slowly.

He took another slow breath and smiled at me. "Death can come at any time. We've only got the here-and-now we can know for sure that we'll be alive for. So let's enjoy it while it's here: I'm alive! You're alive! This is the best time of our lives because it's now! Don't you feel alive?"

While Rake delighted in knowing that his death was coming but not yet here, I was left feeling as though mine had missed me; my reaper had passed over me and left me to roam the wasteland in a state of limbo. Only an innate sense of basic survival kept me going.

"I feel more hungry than alive right now," I said.

As if on cue, Rake's stomach groaned in agreement with me. He shrugged and started walking again. "Well, we'd better keep moving then. Food isn't going to come find us."

We kept walking for most of the day. Those far-off gunshots rang out every so often, but increasingly rarely as we continued, until I could almost forget about them—maybe it was just a stray shot that clipped Rake's ear, and we weren't really being stalked. It was easy to convince myself of that.

I had to stop frequently to rest; my hooves were beginning to crack. And though I was clearly slowing Rake down, he didn't seem to mind. He knew exactly what I was going through, he told me; it would take time, but I would learn to live again in the harsh outside world.

I could have taken flight to take the strain off my hooves, but Rake told me to conserve my energy, and he had a point. Flying took a lot of energy, and I was exhausted, hungry, and thirsty in a way I had never felt before; I had heard the expression—and had even used it myself on occasion—"dying of thirst," but after at least a full day since my exile without anything to drink, I realized what it actually meant, and I dreaded to think what would happen if we didn't find some water soon.

So it came as no small relief when we reached the crest of a hill and came to a stop as we looked out at what lay ahead of us: Down the hill and across an old, cracked, and pothole-ridden road was a small collection of buildings.

We couldn't see movement down among them, but the place had an appearance of life to it: there were stacks of wooden crates in front of one building with a faded sign proclaiming "general store," and next to one of the other buildings was a patch of tilled soil in which small clumps of plants managed to grow.

Rake stopped me before I even started to move toward it. "I know what you're thinking: it looks inviting, doesn't it? Well, thinking like that will get you killed."

I stepped back. "So what do we do?"

His horn lit up with his red aura and his sword floated out at the ready. "You wait here. I'll go in and check it out. When it's all clear, I'll signal for you to come down."

"Wait. You're not going to hurt anyone . . . are you?"

"If I have to." He shrugged. "Which is probable. Most ponies need some convincing before they part with supplies, and usually a lot more convincing when only one pony's asking for them."

"Y—you can't! I mean . . . can't we just talk to them? Ask them for help?"

Rake turned to face me. His look was grim. "There's no room for trust out here. We take what we can get, and if somepony else gets hurt, then too bad, but it's us or them. I'm here now only because I made a habit of choosing myself over others. And you did the same, in case you've forgotten. Is it right? Is it fair? No. But this is the world we live in now, not the ivory towers we used to."

I stood there, mouth agape, but with nothing to say. I was tired and sore and dehydrated. And though it made my stomach twist into knots to think that Rake might hurt or even kill somepony just to get me some water, I wasn't in a place to argue with him. So I closed my mouth and lowered my head with a sigh as I sat down to rest my hooves.

Rake made his way down the hill and then broke into a gallop toward the settlement. He reached the middle of the road, and then suddenly he collapsed. It was like watching a marionette with its strings cut—his whole body simply went limp all at once. And a couple seconds later, I heard the crack of gunfire.

"Rake!" I screamed as I ran out to him.

His neck was a mess. Blood bubbled out through the hole in his throat. His eyes locked onto mine, and his mouth moved as he tried to say something, but he only managed a sickening gurgling noise from his throat. He stopped trying to talk, and instead drew his lips into a smile just before his eyes rolled back. I watched as the light went out of him.

And then I was alone. I stayed there, kneeling over him, just staring down at his face and the empty smile left on it. Even as his blood pooled around my hooves, I didn't move. I had been following him. Without him, there was no place for me to go.

I might have stayed there with Rake until I myself died of dehydration or exposure, except that somepony else showed up. I hadn't even heard her hoofsteps as she approached. A shadow passed over my face, and I looked up to see her: She was expressionless, and her eyes were cold. She wore a brown leather duster, tattered and muddy as was the rest of her. Her dirty mane hung off either side of her neck in tangles.

Her horn was lit up with a bright green aura which carried a long rifle in the air beside her. She held it pointed at me.

"Get up," she said.

I did as she told me, and she slung her rifle across her back. Without ever taking her eyes away from mine, she stepped around Rake's body while carefully keeping her hooves out of his blood. She wrapped her aura around his sword and took it off him.

"Start moving, little bird," she told me. And I moved toward the settlement at her direction.

Get a Good Night's Sleep

I had been locked inside a small shack. It was dark; the holes and cracks in the walls through which small rays of sunlight filtered in were my only sources of light. Not that there was anything to see. It did at least give me a sense for the space of my confinement, though.

I was left alone in there all day. I didn't bother trying to escape; the wood looked flimsy, and I probably could have simply kicked the door open and made a run for it, but there was nothing for me out there—it could be no better than where I was. So I stayed. I huddled in the back corner and waited quietly. What I waited for, I didn't really know. I only waited.

When night came, my cell became pitch black. It was as though that inky abyss that I had seen in the sky the night before had returned to come down and embraced me with its cold, amorphous emptiness.

I tried to sleep, but only tossed and turned and shivered all through the night.

The morning came, and with it the first rays of light pierced through the darkness I had been wrapped in. The light hurt my eyes, and I turned to face the corner to hide from it. But I couldn't escape the light.

The door opened and the sun came flooding in. I turned my head to look. Squinting against the blinding glare, I could make out only the silhouette of a pony.

The figure entered and closed the door behind itself. Everything went dark again until my eyes readjusted to it. My visitor was an older stallion. His mane was thinning, and he had a gaunt face with sunken eyes.

"I ain't never seen two raiders all by their lonesome," he said at length. His voice was raspy and guttural, and he slurred a little as his tongue and lips slipped against gaps in his teeth. "You boys come here to scout us out, hmm? You got friends waiting for ya? Speak up, boy."

"I'm not a raider," I wheezed. My throat was dry. I bowed my head and splayed my ears. "There's nobody else. I'm alone. I'm sorry we tried to attack you. I didn't want to, but we were hungry and thirsty. So thirsty . . ." I looked up at him pleadingly. "Water . . . please . . ."

"You think I got water to spare? Certainly not for no damn raider who'd just as soon kill me an' mine to take it. If you wanna keep breathing, you'd best start telling the truth."

"I am! Please, I swear! I'm not here to hurt anyone!"

He snorted and turned back to the door. Again the light blinded me, and I raised my foreleg to shield my eyes from it as he stood in the doorway, looking back in at me.

"We'll get what we need out of you. You just sit tight, little bird."

And then the door closed, and I was alone in the dark.

The door opened, and I was again blinded by the light from outside, which had only grown in intensity since I had first been visited. The door then closed with a loud slam, and while my eyes were still readjusting to the darkness, I rose to meet my captor. But before I could even see, I was shoved bodily back down to the ground.

"Don't you look me in the eye, you raider filth!" The voice was different—a mare's. Her tone was gruff and teeming with contempt.

"I'm sorry!" I whimpered hoarsely as I kept my eyes down and put my forelegs up to guard my head.

"You ain't sorry enough!" she bellowed. "Stand up. I said stand up!" She punctuated her demand with a kick to my ribs when I didn't get up fast enough for her.

I had barely gotten to my feet when she charged me. She pinned me up against the wall and pressed her face close to mine. I struggled weakly, gasping for breath as she choked me with a foreleg pressed against my throat.

"How many of your raider friends are out there, roaming around looking for an easy target?" she asked, showering my face in her rotten breath and spittle.

"I don't . . . I'm not a . . . can't . . . breathe," I choked out.

I began to feel dizzy, and was near to passing out when the mare released me. I collapsed to the ground, coughing as I took in deep breaths of the stale air. As I tried to hold myself upright, I felt aware of her presence looming over me. And just as I began to catch my breath, she pulled me up by my foreleg and hurled me against the far wall, where I crashed against it and crumpled back down to the floor. I didn't try to get up again. I only lay there, breathing as steadily as I could manage, and waited for the next blow to come.

But it didn't. I shielded my eyes once more against the blinding glare as the door opened again.

"You think about that for a while, little bird," the mare said as she closed the door.

While waiting for the next round of interrogation, I could only lie on the cold, hard-packed dirt floor and watch the small rays of light that filtered in through the cracks in the wood as they slowly moved from one side of the shack to the other over the course of the day.

It was late in the evening, almost when those rays of light would vanish and leave me in complete darkness until morning, when I heard hoofsteps. Then one of the rays of light flickered. I sat up and faced the door, and I waited.

And nothing happened.

I saw one of the rays from along the side of the shack go dark, as though obstructed. It was from one of the larger gaps where the corner of a wooden plank was missing. When I turned to look at it, I heard a small gasp and the obstruction moved away.

"H—hello?" I whispered cautiously. "Is somepony there?"

There was silence for a moment, and then the ray went dark again. "You don't look like a raider," came a voice. It was a young voice—a colt's—filled with the insatiable curiosity of youth and the calm absence of fear that accompanies such innocence.

"I'm not a raider," I said as I moved closer to the wall.

"Ms. Grift says you are. Says you and another was fixin' to raid us 'fore she killed the other and caught you." He paused. "Papa says raiders have teeth like knives, and they got ugly scars all over, and they got mean things for cutie marks, like skulls and blood and stuff."

I put on a big, toothy smile. "My teeth aren't sharp. See? And I hardly have any scars. And look at my cutie mark"—I turned to the side—"only a puzzle piece."

A soft humming came from through the wall as the boy apparently took some time to consider the evidence presented to him before declaring, "Okay. You're not a raider."

I breathed a sigh of relief that someone finally believed me. I told him my name, and he told me his. "Do you have your cutie mark yet, Slate?" I asked.

"Not yet." His answer didn't sound embarrassed, nor was it tainted by impatient anxiety. He was still quite young, and with plenty of time to figure out what he would be. "Papa says he'll let Ms. Grift teach me to shoot to see if I have any talent for it. Says he'll be real proud if I get a bullseye or crosshair or something for a cutie mark."

I reached up and put a hoof against the wall that separated us. That was no way for a little foal to be growing up. I felt my heart sink down into the pit of my stomach. I wasn't in a place I could do anything about it, though.

With my jaw trembling, I said the only thing I could bear to say in way of encouragement to the curious little boy, "I'm sure you'll find what's right for you."

There was a pause, and then he said, "I have to go now. Bye." Dim light shone through the small hole again.

"Wait!" I cried out, and the boy's shadow returned. "I . . . I'm so lonely here. Please don't go."

He hesitated. "Momma's calling. She'll hit me if I don't come home right away."

Cringing, I pressed my face against the wall and sighed. "Go. Go on then. If she gets mad, tell her it was my fault. Tell her to punish me instead for keeping you."

He didn't say anything more. I heard only the rapid beat of his hooves as he scampered off home.

It was later that night when the mare from earlier stormed into the shack, nearly knocking the door off its hinges as she flung it open. I stood up in alarm, but before I could say anything I felt her hoof against the side of my face. My head wrenched to the side, and I stumbled over onto the ground. Instinctively, I curled into a ball, and she started kicking me, mostly in the back, which was already bruised and sore. She rolled me over and stomped on my gut once before she finished. I nearly passed out, choking for breath with the wind knocked out of me. I would have thrown up if my stomach hadn't been empty. As it was, though, the dry heaving only made it harder to breathe.

The whole time she never said anything. And neither did I. We both knew why she was there. And after she left me, coughing and gasping, spitting blood from a split lip, I slowly drifted off to sleep.

It was the most restful sleep I'd had since leaving the stable.

Always Tell the Truth

I awoke sometime the next day. My back ached and protested every movement I made. The taste of blood lingered in my dry mouth, and I felt nauseated as I pushed myself up into a sitting position. My split, swollen lip stung as I smacked my lips in an effort to get some saliva flowing in my mouth.

It was then that I noticed the pony sitting in a chair in the corner of the shack. She was the one who had taken me here, the one who killed Rake. Ms. Grift, Slate had called her. She didn't move, didn't speak. She only sat there and stared at me.

"Wh—" I winced and gingerly held a hoof to my lip. "Why?" I asked hoarsely.

She remained still for a moment before her horn lit up with a bright green aura, and she floated a bottle of water over to me. I took it and began to greedily drink it down, stopping only when my rehydrated throat seized and I doubled over in a coughing fit. It passed, and I drank the rest of the bottle in smaller sips.

"What happened to you, little bird?" she asked, pointing a hoof at my split lip.

"N—nothing. I fell down," I answered in reflex.

"You fall down a lot, don't you, little bird?"

I looked across at her in the dim light. Her face was expressionless, as though it were only a mask.

"What do you want from me?" I asked her.

She didn't answer, only kept staring at me.

"Why . . ." I grunted as I stood up, "why did you take me here? Why did you kill Rake? . . . Why not me?"

"Why not me?" she echoed. The corners of her lips drew back into a faint smile, though the rest of her face remained frozen. "Did you want me to kill you instead? Your life for his? Or do you only wish I had killed you too so you wouldn't be left to ponder why you should be so lucky?"

"I—"

"Snipers aren't like any other kind of combatant," she said without giving me time to answer. "When you're up close and personal there's at least a chance the other guy can know you're there and fight back. And when he fights back, then it's you-or-me and there's a sense that whoever comes out on top deserved it. Or even in a firefight—and especially if there's a lot of you shooting—it can be hard to be sure who shot whom."

She shook her head slowly. "But a sniper isn't like that. A sniper crawls on her belly a mile away while you go about your daily business completely unaware. She watches you through her scope, learns your habits, learns how you move; your head bobs to the left slightly"—she made an exaggerated nod of her head—"when you put weight on your left foreleg; it's slightly shorter because you broke it when you were little which stunted its growth briefly."

Suddenly self-conscious, I rubbed my right fetlock over the part of my left leg where, as she had correctly described, it had been broken when I was a colt. "How can you know that?" I asked, more than a little afraid to hear the answer.

"Sniping isn't just about good aim," she continued, ignoring my question. "Over such long distances, you have to know how the winds change, how the air gives the bullet lift. It takes a few seconds for the bullet to travel the distance, so you can't aim right at your target—he won't be there anymore. You have to know where he will be, and you have to know it better than he does.

"When I look through my scope, I see the future, and then I make it happen." Slowly, she stood up from her chair. Her eyes seemed to glow in the darkness, holding me fixed under her gaze. "Why are you alive, little bird? You're alive because your death was not in the future I saw. Your friend's was. That's all."

She walked toward me slowly, and I felt as though I were shrinking under her. Her eyes filled my vision, and I couldn't turn away. I could barely breathe as she stared at me.

"And so here you are, little bird. You're all alone, alive, but for no reason. 'Why?' is a question you should ask yourself, little bird. Why do you still live? Why do you choke down a bottle of water when all that will do is prolong a life you have for no reason?"

"I . . . I have . . . I'm not . . ." I stammered.

Dizziness gripped my head, and then I felt the ground rush up to meet my face. I lay there for a while, and although I knew the ground to be cold and hard, I had the sensation of floating, as if I were curled up on a soft cloud in the warm sun, drifting lazily through the sky. But my eyes were open, and all I saw was darkness all around me, dim little points of light that hovered in the background, and those eyes that stayed fixed on mine.

I groaned and sat up slowly, holding a hoof against the pounding headache in my temple.

Grift was sitting in her chair in the corner, watching me.

"Do you know what a lie is, little bird?" she asked.

"It's when you say something that's not true." I winced a little as the sound of my own voice aggravated the pounding in my head.

"So when a little boy tells his mother that he's late for dinner because the prisoner made him late, that would be a lie?"

"No," I answered. "It's true. It was my fault. I asked him to stay. I shouldn't have."

"And when the boy says the raider threatened to break out and kill his family if he didn't stay?"

"He . . . said that?"

"Would that be a lie?"

I grimaced and bit my lip. "It doesn't matter. I . . . I'm the one to blame, not him."

"Careful, little bird." Grift leaned forward in her seat and locked eyes with me once again. "Lies like that are how you lose yourself."

"It's not a lie!" I pleaded.

"Please," she snorted. "You think I can't see a lie like that from a mile away? I know lies. Everything I say, everything I am—lies. All lies." She sat back and drew her lips into a faint smile. "Why do you wear this mask, little bird? Why did you let her beat you like that?"

"He didn't deserve it," I mumbled.

"And you did? What did you do that was so terrible as to warrant a beating like that?"

"It doesn't matter. He's just a little kid! I'm bigger. I can take it. So he shouldn't have to. He never should have had to . . ."

"So many masks you wear, little bird: raider, murderer, protector, victim . . . how many more will you wear? And how many masks do you let others put on you? Masks may be comforting, empowering even, but what happens when you find that you can no longer take off your masks?"

Grift stood up and moved to the door. She looked back at me over her shoulder. "We are what we pretend to be, little bird," she said as she opened the door and left.

I had to shield my eyes from the blinding glare of light from outside. A minute passed, and my eyes slowly adjusted until I could see that there was nobody to stand in my way; Grift had left the door wide open, and after I took a quick look around the shack to confirm that I was alone, I cautiously approached the doorway and looked outside.

The dry, dusty air of the wasteland was still and quiet.

I lingered there on the threshold for a few minutes. Glancing over my shoulder, I looked back at the darkness behind me. It was somehow inviting, comfortable. My life in that darkness had had a certain sense of stability to it. My world was small in there. I had come to understand my place in it, what was expected of me. Ahead, though, was the wide open wasteland. To venture out would be to once again give up everything I had come to know about my own life, my place in the world. If someone had been there to tell me to leave, I would have without question. I didn't need to know where to go, only that I was unwanted where I was. But there was no one. I was alone and uncertain. Control of my own future rested in my hooves, and I could only fidget with it nervously, as though it were a delicate sculpture, and if I handled it wrong I would smash it to pieces.

"H—hello?" I called out hesitantly.

No response.

In the back of my mind, I heard Rake's voice repeating something he'd told me around the campfire on that first night: "You've already been born; whatever is yet to come can't be any worse than that."

Slowly, I walked out into the daylight. I circled around the shack, and my eyes casually wandered across the other buildings around me. They were simple one-room structures, constructed in haste with obvious little expertise. I began peeking through windows and doorways, but each building I looked in was empty. Only bare walls and dirt floors remained. All was quiet; nothing moved.

Then I came to the last building on the edge of the small settlement. It was the one with the garden next to it that I had seen from the hilltop. Only now I saw that the garden was overrun with nothing but dead and dying weeds.

That building was not empty. Inside it were the long-dead skeletal remains of a family—two adults and one small child. They were huddled in the far corner where dark brown stains streaked the walls and pooled on the floor.

A chill ran up the back of my neck as I cautiously stepped inside their home. Above them there was a scrap of paper, held to the wall by a rusted knife. I felt myself drawn toward it, but I stopped dead in my tracks when I got close enough to read it. That chill on the back of my neck became searing-hot, as though I could actually feel Grift's aim settling upon me there. I turned and ran as fast as my aching, starved body could carry me.

"I'll be watching you, little bird," the note had said.

Come In out of the Rain

Was it all just a dream?

How long had it been? Three days? Two? Four? I couldn't tell anymore.

Maybe that was it—it was all just a bad dream. I was still sound asleep in bed, warm and comfortable, and soon I'd wake up and everything would be exactly as it always was. And it would stay that way forever.

Or maybe I actually had died the moment the stable's door closed behind me. Maybe everything since then has been my own personal hell. I was cold and alone in a barren wasteland that went on forever and sapped more of my will to continue with every step I took.

Or maybe I was alive. Somehow, that sounded worse to me. The infertile earth below me beckoned, invited me to lie down and let it claim me. Grift had been right: there was no reason that I should be alive. I didn't belong there. I didn't belong anywhere—I was a puzzle piece cast adrift in the wind, carried away from the rest of the puzzle. A piece that would never find its place again—the one and only place in all the world where it had ever fit was lost to it now.

How long had I been walking?

I stopped, stood still. Below me was the cold ground. Ahead was the sun, nearing the horizon; it set the sky ablaze in bright orange and red hues. I squinted against the light, and I raised my foreleg to block out the sun.

"Don't you feel alive?" asked a voice in my mind. It was Rake's. I imagined him out in front of me, silhouetted against the setting sun.

He's dead.

He had known how he would die, and who would kill him. He just hadn't known when. But he knew it would come eventually, and he lived every moment in the present because it was the only time he was certain he would have. More than that even, he took joy in knowing that his death was coming, because that only meant it wasn't there yet—it reminded him that he was alive.

I kept walking. I had nowhere to go, only forward, but that was enough.

I was alive.

I followed my vision of Rake into the slowly setting sun while clouds rolled in overhead. I followed him through the growing darkness until we reached a small village, abandoned in ruin. The rows of old, decaying houses looked to me as the carcass of some great beast that, despite all its ferociousness, had still succumbed to death in the end. The rotting wood houses were all that remained of it now—bones slowly turning to dust over the years of neglect.

And I was a vulture, there to pick over whatever meager scraps might still cling to those weathered bones.

I pushed on the door to the first house I saw that still had a roof over it. The door fell off its hinges with a loud thud, throwing up a cloud of dust around it. The hardwood floor underneath it creaked as I entered.

Inside the house, I saw the living room on my left. It had the typical amenities: plush carpet, a large sofa with matching armchairs arranged around a coffee table, and bookshelves along the walls. The carpet was black with mold. The sofa and chairs were likewise covered in fungus. And the books on the shelves had all disintegrated into piles of mush.

The kitchen was on my right, and I headed in there. The floor creaked with each step I took, and before I even reached halfway into the kitchen, I found myself falling. The floor gave out and dropped me down into the cellar. The house then buried me under its own rotting carcass as it fell in after me.

I could barely move. Dust stung my eyes, and I could only blink to try to flush it out. Not that there was anything for me to see; I was in darkness under the debris.

I heard movement—hoofsteps and the dull clatter of wooden planks being tossed aside.

"Help!" I called out. That one cry was all I could manage, though; the weight pressing down on my chest made it too hard to breathe in deeply enough for another yell.

"Where are you?" came a muffled reply.

I was able to move my foreleg enough to bang my hoof against the debris. I heard movement, hooves scrambling over the pile on top of me.

"I'm coming! Hold on! I'm here! I found you! I'll save you!"

I kept banging until the weight started shifting off of my chest. I sucked in a deep breath, and immediately began coughing as the dust stung at my parched throat. The debris covering my head was lifted away finally, and I looked up into a bright white light shining down on me. My eyes adjusted, and I saw that it was a small flashlight on a headband, worn around the head of a mare. She was looking down at me, her eyes fixed in a distant stare, as though in a moment of waking up from a pleasant dream only to see that dream shattered.

"Hold still," she said after clearing the expression from her face with a shake of her head. "Let me finish getting you out of there." She continued pulling rubble off me until I could finally crawl my way out from under it.

I limped over into the corner of the room and sat down there while I tried to settle my cough. The mare started toward me, and I shrieked, "What do you want from me? Leave me alone!"

"Easy . . . easy. I'm not going to hurt you," she said, holding her position. I had a better look at her then; she was a bright blue pegasus, and her mane and tail were black with white streaks running through them. She had her mane in one long braid that hung off the side of her neck by her shoulder, and she wore what looked like a uniform. It was a navy blue with polished metal buttons, and she had a silver shield pinned on it. She carried heavy saddlebags stuffed to the brim, and at her side was a rifle at the ready on a harness across her back.

She reached into one of her bags and pulled out a canteen. "You look like you need some water. Will you let me bring it to you?" she asked, holding out the canteen.

I glanced back and forth between her and the canteen. Cautiously, I limped out to meet her. I took the canteen from her and carried it back to my corner where I opened it with trembling hooves, and started sipping at it slowly.

"Thank you, ma'am," I said hoarsely.

"My name's Starry Night," she said. "What's your name?"

"Day. Lucky Day, ma'am." I finished off the water, and clutched the canteen tightly while I watched the mare—Starry—from my corner. She kept her distance.

"Are you all alone out here? Where do you come from? Are you lost? Do you need help getting home?"

I shook my head and clenched my teeth. "I can't go back. I don't have a home."

"What happened? Were you attacked?" When I didn't answer, she reached back into her bags and pulled out a small packet. "You look hungry," she said, holding it out to me.

I looked at the packet and felt my stomach groan at the promise of food. I started to reach for it, but then hesitated. Starry put the food packet on the ground and backed away from it.

I took the opportunity to reach out and grab it before quickly retreating back into my corner. I tore into it with my teeth. Inside was a dry brick of corn meal. It was completely bland, but I devoured it as the best meal of my life.

After I finished licking the crumbs out of the wrapper, I saw Starry watching me quietly. "Thank you, ma'am," I said. "I haven't eaten since . . . a long time."

"I can tell," she said. "And please, call me Starry. Are you ready to tell me what happened to you? I want to help."

I looked down at my hooves. "I was exiled."

"Did you do something wrong?"

I gritted my teeth and shook my head. "I had to do it. I didn't have a choice."

"It's okay. Just tell me what happened."

"It doesn't matter," I said, sighing. "I can't go back." I looked back up at Starry, and I could see that she wasn't about to just let it go. So I told her, "I killed . . . I killed someone."

The moment following my admission stretched on in silence. Rake had been excited to hear why I had been exiled. Everyone else I had met so far probably wouldn't have even cared; from all that I had seen up to that point, it seemed to be a given that everyone out here was a killer. But there in that dark basement, there was this mare—there was Starry, and she was different.

"You had to do it?" she asked. "Were you being attacked? Were you trying to protect someone else?"

"Please, ma'am. I don't want to talk about it. It was horrible. There was so much blood . . . everywhere . . ."

"It's okay," she said. "Where are you from? You're not from around here, are you?"

I told her about the stable—that we spent our whole lives underground, and never even saw what went on outside. "I've never been so hungry or thirsty in my life," I told her. "I'm scared. I don't know where to go or what to do. I don't even know how I'm still alive."

"You've been through a lot. Just take a minute and calm down. It's okay. You're safe with me. Think you can manage a short flight after you've rested for a bit? I know where we can get you more food and water and a warm place to sleep tonight."

Shaking, I asked, "Why are you helping me?"

"Protect and Serve," she said, pointing to the shield on her uniform. "It's what we live by back at Precinct One-Seven-Three."

"Is that where you want to take me?"

"It's not," she said hesitantly. "It's all the way out in the coastal ruins—several days from here by wing, and I . . ." She cleared her throat. "I can't go back there . . . yet. I'm on an important mission. But there's a place nearby where I've been staying. I'll take you there, okay?"

It took me a minute to consider her offer, but I nodded. Starry was the nicest person I had ever met. Somehow, that didn't make me feel completely at ease with her, but after all I'd been through, and how everyone else had treated me so far, I knew she couldn't be any worse. At the very least, I had a direction to follow. That would keep me moving forward for a while.

I was stretching out my wings to see if I could manage a short flight when a loud boom sent me diving to the ground with my forelegs drawn over my head. It was Grift, I was certain of it. She was out there, stalking me as my own personal reaper, just as she had done with Rake.

"It's alright," said Starry. "It's only thunder. It can't hurt you."

Thunder. It was a word I had only ever heard in school when learning about how the outside world used to be. But for the first time I had heard actual thunder. And I heard it again as I opened my eyes to look up through the hole in the ceiling that I had fallen in through, and I saw the dark sky flash white briefly, followed only a few seconds later by another loud rumble. As I sat up slowly, it began to rain. And then it poured.

Starry looked up at the rain and sighed. "We can't fly in this. Best we can do is to find some shelter for the night, and tomorrow we can head out."

"Don't we have enough shelter here?"

Starry shook her head. "Half this house fell in on you. The whole thing is probably still unstable. We need to find something that'll last through the night. Let's get you out of here."

"Do you need help getting up?" she asked over her shoulder as she spread her wings, poised to fly up through the hole.

I gave my wings a few test flaps. "I'm alright, ma'am."

She nodded and launched herself up through the pouring rain. I followed, and we were both soaking wet before we even set foot on solid ground. We ran up along the street, looking for somewhere safe to spend the night.

"Here!" Starry called, and she lead me over to a small alley between two houses. A wall had fallen away from one house to lean against the other. We crawled in under it hastily. "What do you think? Looks sturdy enough for tonight," Starry surmised as she looked up at the wall leaning over us.

"Well, at least if it does collapse, it won't be as bad as an entire house," I agreed as I looked it over.

Starry took off her bags and her rifle harness and piled them under the low end of our shelter while I lay down against the wall of the neighboring house. It had been a hot day, but the dark was cold, and dripping wet as I was, I began to shiver.

"Here," said Starry. I looked up to see her standing next to me, and that she was offering me a dry blanket. She was shaking nearly as much as I was.

"What about you?" I asked.

Starry only shook her head and thrust the blanket toward me. "I'll be alright. You need it more."

I thanked her and took the blanket. It was tattered and dusty, but it was soft and helped stop my shivering. I watched Starry as she returned to her bags and pulled out a metal flask in her shaky hoof. She took a long draught from it, and then breathed out a relaxed sigh. Her shivers calmed after a few moments as she lay down and continued to sip from the flask.

There was a brief flash of light from the sky above, and I heard Starry start counting quietly, "One one-thousand . . . two one-thousand . . . three—" She was cut off by the loud boom of thunder, and was silent until the next flash when she started counting from one one-thousand again.

"Ma'am? What are you counting?" I asked.

Starry kept counting until the next crash of thunder before she answered, "I'm counting the seconds between the lightning and thunder. The longer it takes to hear the thunder, the farther away the lightning was." She glanced over at me. "It's not bothering you, is it?"

"No, ma'am. I was just curious."

She nodded slowly and took another drink from her flask. "When my son was little, the thunderstorms scared him. So I used to sit with him and we'd count together. It kept him calm and made him feel safe to know how far away it was." Starry closed her eyes and laid her head down on her forelegs. She continued to mumble to herself until eventually she slumped over onto her side and began snoring loudly.

I looked out into the darkness and waited for a flash. "One one-thousand . . ." I began counting.

I had always liked listening to the rain in the stable's atrium. The sprinkler system at the top would, on a regular basis, shower the orchard below. I loved the sounds it made: Near the top it was a slight hiss with a metallic squeal as the sprinkler blades spun to spread the water out. Halfway down it was almost silent. And at the bottom, leaves rustled, and rivulets of water dripped off them and through the grated ceramic floor into the soil underneath.

In my free time, I would sit under one of the trees and simply listen to the rain. Sometimes a leaf would fall down, and I would watch as the water collected in it drop by drop. Thinking about the rain in the stable actually brought a small smile to my face as I sat there in our little shelter, listening to the downpour. It made a sound like the hiss of static that would crackle across the stable's P.A. system just before an announcement. But this hiss was more than momentary; it droned on with no announcement to follow it. I kept waiting to hear the overseer's voice to remind me that I was a vital part of the civilization, that I had to get along with everyone else so everything would function right. But I didn't have anyone to tell me that anymore.

I felt a strange, calm sort of dissonance about my situation. Cold, bruised, soaking wet, and alone—save for the passed-out mare across from me . . . the stable was all but a distant memory . . . and I felt fine. Life as I'd known it was over, but it was only a matter of accepting that and moving on. I'd be okay.

Wipe Your Feet

The morning came, and I awoke to the first light of a new day being cast upon me. The rain had ended during the night, and the sky was clear and bright with vivid red hues along the horizon. A thin mist hovered above the wet ground and made our surroundings seem as though they were only the tops of vast structures poking through the clouds high above. All around us there wasn't a sound to be heard, nor a hint of motion aside from the slow, gentle swirling of the thin mist.

Peaceful and magical as the scene all around us may have been, I had been wandering for long enough to know better than to expect it to last long. Starry had said she would take me to where she had been staying, and I was eager to go somewhere safe. I looked over at her; she was still fast asleep, sprawled out in rather unflattering pose.

I approached her cautiously. "Starry, ma'am?" I pushed on her shoulder gently.

Starry's eyes snapped open and she sat upright, banging her head on the low ceiling of our shelter. "Ah! Son of a . . ." she muttered as she rubbed her head while squinting. "Ugh . . . what's going on?"

"Sorry to wake you, ma'am," I started to say, but Starry held up a hoof and shushed me.

She groaned and lay back down, covering her head with her forehooves. "Keep it down, will you."

I tried again, keeping my voice to a whisper, "Sorry to wake you, ma'am."

"Starry," she muttered.

"Starry. Sorry. It's just that I think we should maybe get moving. It's light out now and—"

Starry held up her hoof and hushed me again. "Shut up, kid. Just . . . shut up a minute." She sighed and groaned softly as she slowly sat up again, keeping one hoof across her face to block out the light while she fumbled around her uniform's pockets for her flask. I sat there quietly and nervously chewed on my lip while I waited for her to tell me what to do next.

She managed to get her flask out and took a drink from it while keeping her eyes closed. After taking a few slow breaths she peeked at me through one eyelid. "My head's killing me. Can you get me the aspirin bottle out of my saddlebag?"

Opening my mouth to answer, I caught a brief glare from Starry and only nodded quietly before leaning over to rummage through her bag. There was a lot of seemingly random junk in there, most of which I wasn't even sure how to describe. I didn't have to dig very deep, though—the bottle she asked for was close to the top, and I pulled it out for her.

Starry snatched it out of my hooves before I could offer to open it for her, and she popped the cap and shook out a tablet into her hoof then chewed it and washed it down with another draught from her flask. She sat there with her eyes closed for a minute before capping her flask and the bottle and putting them away.

Opening her eyes all the way, she took a deep breath and smiled at me. "Thank you, Day. Come on," she said. "Let's get moving."

What Starry had called a "short flight" turned out to be an all-day flight. It would have been a faster journey, but I had never had to fly for more than a few minutes at a time inside the stable, and so we had to stop and rest frequently. I was also still exhausted from my time alone in the wasteland before Starry had found me, which slowed me down further.

Starry never seemed to mind, though, and she regularly checked with me if I needed to stop, and she kept her eyes out for safe places to land. She shared more of her food and water with me to keep me going, and eventually, when the sun had made its way across the sky and began casting rich purple hues over the distant horizon, we came in for a final landing.

Starry called it a town, but it seemed as vacant as everywhere else I'd seen so far. There was one large building surrounded by a couple dozen small shacks that looked to have been hastily thrown together from assorted scraps of wood and metal sheets. All of them appeared to be vacant. The large building, however, which we set down in front of, did have an appearance of life to it. I could see a warm yellow light shining through cracks in the walls and around the boards that had been nailed up over what had once been large picture windows all across the front of the building. The second floor looked to have been built more recently than the rest of the structure, though with more care and expertise than the surrounding shacks. Above the door was a broken neon sign whose dim letters read "Mum's Diner."

I followed Starry as she lead the way inside. The interior was spacious, though filled with tables and chairs, with booths arranged along the walls. At the back were two doors, one of which was behind a counter that sectioned off that corner of the room. The place was empty except for a dusty-brown earth pony who sat in one of the corner booths. He was slumped over the table, passed out, with several empty glass bottles scattered around him.

"There you are!" sang a pleasant voice. I looked to see a vibrant green unicorn mare enter from the door behind the counter. Her blue and white mane was styled into long curls that bounced as she reared up to put her hooves on the countertop and smiled at us. "I was starting to worry y'all weren't gonna make it back. Ooh! And you brought a new friend with you!"

Starry took up a seat at the counter, and I sat next to her. The mare behind the counter, who introduced herself as Chrysanthemum, already had a bottle and a glass floating out in her chartreuse aura. She filled the glass and set it down in front of Starry, leaving the bottle as well, and then she turned to me.

"How about you, hon? You look like you could use a stiff drink too."

I shook my head. "No . . . I'm fine. Thank you, ma'am."

She laughed. "Ma'am? Oh, honey, don't be so formal with me. Just Chrys will do fine. We're all friends here. Just don't go and think you can start using your pretty looks on me. I can tell you and Starry got something special going on between y'all."

Starry choked briefly as she nearly spit out her drink with a barely-stifled laugh.

"Wait. You mean . . . you think . . . me and Starry?"

"Well of course! You two belong together, and I should know—it's what I do," Chrys said, getting down off the counter and turning to the side to show off her cutie mark: a pair of roses, their thorny stems curled together around their petals in the shape of a heart. "I'm a matchmaker."

"Matchmaker?" I asked skeptically.

"Well, what did you expect? A talent for hitting on cute young stallions?" She winked. My ears blushed.

Chrysanthemum's giggling stopped abruptly when the lights inside the diner flickered, then went dark. Everypony was quiet for a moment before I heard a resigned sigh from Chrys. "Well, guess the power's out until I can get somepony to fix the generator again," she said, her face illuminated by the soft glow of her chartreuse magic as she levitated several candles and a matchbox out from behind the counter. She pulled out a couple matches, skillfully manipulating them in her aura, struck them, and then lit the candles two at a time while she arranged them around the diner.

"Generator?" I asked.

"Yeah. This old hunk-o'-junk portable spark reactor I picked up in a trade years ago," Chrysanthemum said as she blew out the matches. "Why? You know something about fixing 'em?"

"Well, we had a spark reactor back at the stable; it provided power to run the whole place. I used to work in maintenance, and during my downtime I liked to study it, but I've never actually laid hooves on one . . ."

"They only let the senior engineers work on that?" Starry asked. I looked over at her; the flickering candlelight cast a warm glow across her face and made the shield pinned to her uniform twinkle.

I shook my head. "It wasn't that. It just never came up, is all. That reactor has run perfectly since it came online. Nopony even really thinks about it anymore. I just liked spending time learning about it because it looked like a really challenging puzzle, especially since I couldn't actually touch the pieces."

I saw Chrysanthemum's smile shining in the dim light. "Well, here's your chance, then. Come along, I'll show you where it is so you can get to wor—"

"Hold on a second there," Starry interrupted, tapping her hoof on the counter. "Day, you should always agree on payment before you do work for somepony."

"Oh, Starry, hun, you honestly think I'd try to take advantage of him?" There was a brief pause while Starry gave Chrysanthemum a look that seemed to say "are you seriously even asking that?"

Chrysanthemum laughed. "Well, maybe, but can you blame me? There's so much to take advantage of. Isn't that right, stud?" She winked at me. "But it's true: let's be professional about this." She leaned over the counter in front of me, propping her chin up on a forehoof. "So what's a handsome stallion like you charge for his services?"

My ears blushed. "I, um, I don't know . . ."

"Hmm. Okay, here: you get my juice flowing," she said in a sultry tone, "and I'll set you up with a week's worth of food and water. How's that sound?"

Trying to ignore her innuendo, and not really having any idea if that was a fair amount, I glanced over at Starry. She gave a small nod, so I accepted. "Alright. I'll get your juices flow—" I realized my slip, and instantly my face flushed hotly. Starry nearly choked on her drink again as she started laughing. "The juice—power! I'll get the power . . ." I tried desperately to correct myself, but between Starry's raucous laughter and Chrysanthemum's cheeky grin while she simply stared at me, I knew it was too late to take it back. I slumped onto the counter, hiding my face under my fetlocks. "Just show me where the generator is," I mumbled in resignation.

While Starry stayed at the bar, Chrysanthemum showed me to the spark generator. It was outside, around the back of the diner. After checking to make sure I had everything I needed, she left me to take care of it on my own, leaving behind a set of tools she was letting me borrow.

And then I was alone. I sat down and, for just a minute, simply listened to the silence. The air was still. There was no sound of fans echoing through air ducts, no mechanical hum nor squeals. No other ponies. It was never so quiet inside the stable.

I had the faintest twinge of fear in the back of my head that there might be some kind of monster out there in the darkness. Something stalking me, waiting for the right moment to strike. But I put that thought out of my mind with a shake of my head. The settlement around Mum's Diner was wide open; if those sorts of things lurked around here, they'd have some kind of defenses set up. And Chrysanthemum would have said something. And if Grift were stalking me as she had with Rake, there was nothing I could do about it.

Taking a deep breath, I turned my attention to the generator. It had certainly seen better days, but it was basically the same as the reactor in the stable. This was a lot smaller, and probably never meant to last this long, unlike the stable's reactor, but it operated on the same principals, so I was sure I could figure it out.

It had been easy to dismiss the fear of monsters lurking in the darkness. What ended up being much more terrifying, though, was when I opened up the generator. I realized that, despite all the studying I'd done, this was all new to me. I wasn't sure if I could do it, and afraid that if I couldn't, it would mean I'd be useless out here. If I was useless, there wouldn't be a place for me. If there was no place for me, where would I go? What would I do? I wondered if Starry would even still want me around.

The first several minutes I spent just sitting there, staring at the generator's internals. Then I started worrying what would happen if somepony came out to check on me and saw that I hadn't even started yet. I almost started wishing for a monster in the darkness. But I took a few deep breaths and focused on the task in front of me. I could do it. I just had to look at the puzzle. The first step was always to take it apart. So I started taking pieces out, laying them on the ground around me in a careful order, keeping all the bolts and screws and fastenings arranged so that they'd all go back in exactly the same place as they had been.

As I got deeper inside the machine, I started finding where seals had worn out and where belts had gone slack. The generator was in bad shape. There were no spare parts to fix it with, so I had to make do with the pieces as they were. Where seals had broken, I replaced the parts without them, fastening bare metal together as tightly as possible in hopes that it would reduce the leakage. I moved other parts by bending the frame they were mounted on in order to keep the belts tight. I did what I could to make the worn out parts fit together as seamlessly as possible.

In the end, after I closed everything up, I realized how silly it had been to be afraid of working on it. It had been my job for years back inside the stable. I had known what I was doing. I had only needed to remember that.

I ran my hoof along the casing, marveling at all the work that had gone into making such a thing in the first place, and then I decided to see if I'd gotten it working or not. The thing squealed, clunked, and groaned when I turned it on. It was a tired, pained noise, far from the steady hum of the reactor back in the stable. But it ran. For a brief moment, I actually smiled as I listened to it running. I'd gotten it to work. Even if it wouldn't last more than a few weeks, if that long, it was better than nothing.

"I can do this," I said aloud to myself, breathing a sigh of relief.

I felt a sense of pride in my work. It was one of the few things I'd actually enjoyed in my stable life. Unlike the other engineers in maintenance, who'd often show up late, leave early, and would only go out on service calls when they felt like it, I spent as much time as I could doing work. It felt good to fix things, to put them back together into a complete whole. Almost nopony else seemed to appreciate that as I did . . .

Stay Where I Can See You

The lights were back on inside the diner, and Chrysanthemum had already put the candles away by the time I returned from repairing the generator. She and Starry were busy trading, so I set the tools down on the counter and sat quietly next to Starry, watching them barter over the assorted salvage that Starry had apparently collected in her bags. In the end, Starry offloaded her collected scraps for a couple bottles of scotch, a few gallons of water, and a supply of ammunition.

I watched as Chrysanthemum lifted the items she had accepted in trade with her chartreuse aura and quickly sorted them into each of a few bins she had behind the counter. Curious, I asked, "What are you going to do with all that? Does it have some value to you?"

"Well, they're not really worth anything to me," she explained. "But they're worth something to somepony. There are some traveling merchants who come through here every so often, and I trade things like these to them for food, water, ammo, and other supplies to keep the town alive. They carry it off with them, and, presumably, somewhere along their routes, they meet somepony that actually needs this crap." Everything had a place in the wasteland, apparently. Even the seemingly useless pieces of garbage. Chrys levitated out a pair of saddlebags loaded down with more water and a couple dozen of those packaged food rations that Starry had shared with me. "Thanks for getting the generator running again. Here's your payment, as agreed. I'm throwing in the bags since you don't have any and you'll need it to carry this much around. If you ever want more work, you know where you can come," she said with a wry smile and a wink.

"Thanks. I'll, um, keep that in mind," I said clearing my throat. Starry and Chrysanthemum shared a brief laugh, which I tried to ignore. Something else she'd said had caught my attention, however.

"What did you mean about 'keeping the town alive'?" I asked.

"There's no real source of food or water around here. If it weren't for me and this diner, there'd be nopony here," Chrys explained.

"You mean you built this town?"

Chrysanthemum laughed. "No. I only inherited the diner after Mum passed on. That wasn't her real name, by the way, just what everypony called her on account of the diner's sign: a tradition I don't intend to continue." She stressed that point with a glare. "And she only moved into it as a place for herself. But when she started renting rooms for traveling merchants, it became a regular stop for them. Soon other wanderers started putting up their own shacks nearby; there are a few city and factory ruins in the area, and they made their livings by bringing that stuff back here to trade to Mum who'd trade to the merchants." She smiled. "Mum took me in when I was just a little filly, orphaned and wandering alone. I didn't even have my cutie mark yet—not 'til after I started setting up dates between the townsfolk." She let out a wistful sigh, looking around the diner slowly. "That's when it became a real community, y'know."

I glanced around at the empty diner. "So where is everyone?"

"Well, I know it doesn't look like much now, but that's only because they're all out scavenging. Just you wait 'til they all come back with their hauls. You'll see how alive this place really is. Especially when one of the traders come through," Chrys answered with a cheerful smile. "But what about you, hon? You look like you've been having a pretty rough time on your way here. You need a warm bed to sleep in? I know you don't have anything to trade for it aside from the food and water I just gave you, and I ain't about to go and start taking that back; wouldn't be fair." She leaned across the counter at me and batted her eyes. "Maybe we can find some alternative payment."

"Day can share my room for now," said Starry after she finished off her drink.

"Ooh! Sounds like fun. I know you two will make a perfect couple!" Chrysanthemum snickered.

My ears blushing, I slid out of my seat and followed after Starry. She didn't respond to Chrysanthemum, and only headed for the door at the back of the diner and started up the stairs that it led to.

"Don't worry about being too noisy! I'm a heavy sleeper!" Chrysanthemum called after us. I tried my best to ignore her and hurried after Starry.

At the top of the stairs was a short hallway with a couple doors on either side. Starry went to the door right by the landing. I noticed that the door had a half-dozen extra locks installed on it. A quick glance over the other doors in the hallway revealed Starry's room to be the only one so thoroughly secured.

"Don't worry about Chrys," she said quietly while she started unlocking the door.

"Huh?"

"What she said about us as a couple. She's been trying to set me up with somepony since I first got here." Starry stifled a short laugh. "She's a nice mare, but she moves fast. You don't have to take her too seriously, though." She finished unlocking the door and led me inside.

Starry slipped off her saddlebags and tossed them onto the bed in the far corner, then unfastened her rifle harness and let it drop to the floor. Meanwhile, I stood still in the doorway, my jaw slacked as I just let my eyes wander around the room. Virtually every inch of every wall was covered with various documents—notes, blueprints, maps, and the like. Some things were marked or highlighted and had barely-legible notes scrawled alongside them. Strings of different colors ran between the pins that held up each document, creating a network of connections that spanned all across the room as if to parody the web a spider might weave if she were in the midst of a fever dream, or psychedelic nightmare, or both. I couldn't make sense of any of it. My eyes were drawn in every direction at once with no obvious starting point. I almost felt dizzy trying to take it all in.

"What . . . what is all this?" I asked as Starry ushered me inside so she could close the door and lock it.

"I'm . . . looking for someone. Someone very important to me." Starry paused and took a long sip from her flask. "I'm looking for my son. He went missing a few years ago." She looked around at the walls with all her notes and maps strung across them. "This is all the work I've done to try to find him."

"What happened to him?" I asked as I approached one wall and looked over the notes there. Many lines had been scratched out and rewritten several times with layers of corrections written in a dozen different inks. I couldn't make sense of anything written on it, but I assumed that Starry could read it. I couldn't find a single scrap of paper on the wall that hadn't been similarly covered over in corrections.

"I don't know," Starry answered solemnly. "I just woke up one day and . . . and he was just . . . gone." She was quiet and took another drink from her flask. "I think he was kidnapped. Possibly to be sold into slavery somewhere, but he must have escaped because when I picked up his trail, it turned away from all the known slaver settlements."

I turned my attention to one of the maps. It was a very old map, depicting great cities which no longer existed. Starry had traced out a long, meandering path that ran from one end of the map to the other. Here too she had layered corrections on top of corrections on top of notes until most of it had become unreadable.

"Shouldn't he have gone back home after he escaped?" I asked while trying to make sense of the map.

Starry sighed. "He's lost. It's my fault for never teaching him about the world, so he has no idea where he is or where he's going. But he's been surviving," she said, her voice ending on a note of cheerful hope. She came over to stand next to me and put her hoof on the map, slowly tracing along its lines. "I'll find him. He knows I'm looking for him—he leaves clues for me sometimes."

"What's his name?"

Starry smiled. "Second Chance. He likes to go by just Chance." She let out a small laugh and turned to look at me. "He'd be about your age by now. He's smart—like you. I bet you two would make good friends."

Starry stood there smiling at me silently for a moment before she sighed and took out her flask for another long sip. "After I find Chance, I'll take him back to Precinct with me. You can come too. You'll like it there; it's relatively peaceful, and we could really use a mechanic like you."

My ears perked up at that. "Are you close to finding him?"

"Closer than ever!" Starry said excitedly. She upended her flask to drink the last few drops from it. "But let's not get too eager—I've been close before, many times, but something always happened to make me lose his trail, and then by the time I picked it up again, I find that he's moved on already."

"I want to help," I said.

"Help?"

"You saved my life—and not just by digging me out from the rubble; you gave me food and water, and you helped me find shelter. You brought me here where for the first time since I left the stable, I don't feel afraid for my life. Your son is out there . . . helping you find him is the least I can do."

Starry looked at me silently for a minute before she said, "It's dangerous. You'll be safer if you stay here."

The thought was tempting: I could simply stay at the diner and help Chrysanthemum maintain the place, perhaps even improve it, in exchange for food and a room. But I remembered what Rake had told me.

"I've already been through the worst that could happen to me," I said. "I want to help you find your son."

Starry's gaze became steely. She sighed and returned to her bags. After digging through them for a bit, she came back with something that she held out to me. When I asked what it was, she answered, "It's my backup revolver. Compact, lightweight, bite-grip trigger. Be careful; it's loaded."

I stared at it in her hoof. I had heard about such things in the stable; it was an artifact from when ponies stopped getting along with each other. It was dangerous. "I . . . I can't take this," I said.

"If you're going to come with me, you'll need to be able to defend yourself, and I need to be able to count on you to back me up. It's okay if you're a bad shot—if you can make someone think twice about coming out from behind cover, that can give me time to get around him. If you want to help me, I need you to take this."

I considered that for a moment before nodding and carefully taking the gun for myself.

"Don't be afraid of it. Just remember two things: don't aim at anything you don't intend to shoot, and don't fire unless you're prepared to kill someone. Okay? We'll see about getting you some more ammo and a proper holster for it later. For now, you can keep it in the saddlebags Chrys gave you."

I nodded and stowed it away in my bag, hoping that I wouldn't need to retrieve it anytime soon.

After that, Starry gave me her spare blanket—the same one she'd given me the night before when we took shelter from the rain—and directed me to the upholstered armchair in the corner to sleep in while she took the bed. She collapsed into it with all the grace of a rockslide, and began snoring almost immediately.

The chair was comfortable—more comfortable than anywhere else I had slept in the past . . . however many days it had been since my exile. With Starry's blanket wrapped around me, and with my head on the chair's padded armrest, before I closed my eyes I looked out over at Starry and I whispered:

"Goodnight."

Be Careful; the Woods are Full of Wolves

It was the next morning. Starry and I were preparing to head out to continue her search for her son. I left most of the rations Chrysanthemum had given me in Starry's room to lighten the load I was to carry.

Starry took down one of her maps, spread it out on the table we sat at. She explained where we would be going while Chrysanthemum busied herself with organizing her stockpiles of trade goods behind the counter.

"The only place around here I haven't looked yet is this forest. It's not far from here, and based on a couple flybys I've made, it looks like there's some kind of abandoned village in there."

"That's a dangerous place. You shouldn't go there," Chrysanthemum spoke up.

Starry looked from Chrysanthemum to me and frowned. "I'm sure we can handle whatever's in the forest."

Chrysanthemum shuffled around on her hooves. "Then . . . then at least let me help guide you."

"You know your way around there?" Starry furrowed her brow.

"Y—yes . . ." Chrys stammered. "I used to date one of the merchants who came here to trade with Mum. Sometimes I traveled with him, and he made his route through the forest." She bit her lip. "It's been a while, but I'm sure I can help y'all avoid the dangers in there. And 'sides: the townsfolk won't be back for another couple days yet. I could stand to get out for a while."

"How much does your guidance cost?" Starry asked.

"Oh, don't worry about it, hun," Chrys smiled. "Consider it a favor since y'all have been such nice company."

"Alright." Starry nodded. "Thank you, Chrys. We'll be happy to have you along." She brushed a few stray hairs out of her face. "Alright, let's get ready and head out, then. We've got a long way to go."

The forest appeared as a dense wall of trees that somehow always seemed to be just ahead of us but never got any closer. The wall only grew in height until the towering trees loomed over us while still never seeming to draw any closer. Even as we'd pass one tree, then another, then a few more, the forest always seemed to be out on the horizon.

And yet, when I glanced behind us, I realized that it ran across every horizon, and suddenly we were deep in the forest, having entered it at some point along the way, but where exactly that point had been, I couldn't remember. It had simply crept up and surrounded us without our knowing.

There were no birds, no small animals—or large ones for that matter. Just trees as far as I could see. The sky above was just barely visible through the high boughs, where most of the leaves still clung to their parent branches. Underfoot were dry, decomposing leaves and scattered branches. The sound of those leaves and branches crackling and snapping under our steps was broken up every so often when a gust of wind would roll through the forest, and the tired old trees would sway and creak, as if threatening to crash down on us.

"Keep your eyes out for movement among the trees," Chrysanthemum cautioned us as she led the way. "The best thing we can do is try to . . . to avoid . . ." She stopped for a moment and put a hoof to her forehead as she cringed.

"Are you alright?" I asked.

Chrysanthemum gave a vigorous shake of her head and took a deep breath. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. Um." She looked around, her ears twitching. "Do you hear that?"

Starry and I both stood still, craning our ears around. But all I heard was the slow creaking of the trees.

"Hear what?" Starry asked.

Chrysanthemum shook her head again. "Nothing. Just a . . . ringing—ringing in my ears. It's Nothing. Come on. Let's not waste time." She set off again, a slight hurry in her step

I exchanged a glance with Starry, concerned that something might be wrong with Chrys, but not knowing any way to help. Starry shrugged a little. "Come on," she said. And we pressed on deeper into the foreboding wilderness.

"Are y'all sure you don't hear that?" Chrysanthemum asked again after a short while.

Starry and I both shook our heads.

"Do you wanna stop for a rest?" I suggested. "We've been walking all morning. Maybe—"

"No," Chrysanthemum answered curtly. "Thank you. No. I . . . I think we should keep going. We don't want to stay here any longer than we need to."

Starry glanced over her shoulder, her ears perked up. We all stood silently until Starry moved in closer to us, whispering, "I think we're being followed. We should definitely keep moving. Stay on your guard. Day, where's the pistol I gave you?"

"It's in my saddlebag."

"Well, get it out."

"But I—"

"Don't argue with me. Do it," she said sternly.

I closed my mouth and nodded quietly as I reached back into my saddlebag and dug out the pistol which Starry had given me the night before. I tucked it into the front pocket of my stable uniform, within easy reach, and Starry nodded in approval.

Chrys floated out a pair of small pistols from her own bags. They wavered slightly as she held them in her chartreuse aura. She winced briefly and shook her head again. "Let's keep moving."

Every dry leaf and every snapping twig seemed to get louder, letting the entire forest know where we were with every step we took. If there were monsters lurking among the trees, they surely knew that we had intruded. The forest felt somehow alive and as if it were very much aware of us. But for all I could see, and for all I could hear, we were alone. There was an aching feeling in my stomach, a gnawing little doubt that ran up my spine to scream in my ear: "There is something out there!" It was like being stalked by Grift all over again, except this time I felt as though she were not the only one.

As we continued further, Chrysanthemum began to stumble and waver from side to side. Her magic imploded, dropping her pistols to the ground, and she stopped to lean against a tree. She gave a dry heave and let out an agonized gasp.

"Chrys, what's wrong?" Starry asked, moving toward Chrysanthemum's side, but keeping her eyes and ears scanning around us.

"Dizzy," Chrysanthemum groaned. "Like knives in my ears." She gave another dry heave.

"Day, help her up. We're going back to the diner," Starry commanded.

As I approached Chrysanthemum, I suddenly found myself lying on the ground. It all happened so quickly that it took me a moment to process what had happened: Somepony had thrust me aside after dropping out of the trees and landing between me and Chrys.

With a flick of his hoof out from under his cloak, he threw some kind of green, glowing powder into Chrysanthemum's face while I was just getting back on my hooves. Chrys instantly fell back, choking and gasping for air, and I . . . I just stood there. I watched her writhing on the ground.

Starry was quick to act, however, and rushed toward the cloaked figure. She took a swing at his head, but he ducked under her hoof.

"Stay your aggression," came his voice from under his cowl. He hopped to the side nimbly as Starry rounded to kick at him with her back hooves but she missed again. "Your friend is gone; fiend unmasked. Look, see for yourself." Again he dodged Starry as she tried for a flying tackle, but she caught only a pile of dry leaves and twigs. The cloaked figure stood over Starry and pointed his hoof.

I looked where he pointed, back at Chrysanthemum. What I saw . . .

Chrys looked completely alien. She had a black, leathery hide; solid, opalescent blue eyes; and long, sharp fangs that stuck out from the corners of her mouth. Her horn had a similarly dangerous-looking hooked shape, and in place of the long, bouncy curls of her mane, there was instead a short, straight, silky gray mane. Delicate, gossamer wings protruded from her back, buzzing and twitching erratically.

Starry had stopped trying to fight the cloaked figure as she too looked back at Chrysanthemum to see what she had turned into. We were silent as we watched her. She stopped choking and slowly sat up. And that's when she looked down at herself and saw what we saw.

"No . . ." she gasped. "No . . . no!" She looked up at us. "I—I can't—I'm not—" She faced the cloaked figure. "You! What did you do to me?" Chrysanthemum cringed, and her horn flared chartreuse, but only for a moment before the aura imploded. "What did you do to me!" she screamed.

"Your true face revealed; your masquerade uncovered," he answered, stepping forward slowly. "Prey on us no more." He pulled back his hood to reveal his striped visage and eyes that boiled with an intent . . . an intent I'd seen before. I'd seen it in the eyes of security ponies inside the stable.

Never interfere with security; just keep your head down and get along.

Everything I'd ever known told me to stay out of it—to just let it happen and move on, forget about it. But as I looked down at Chrys, as she lay there cowering helplessly, with tears rolling down her cheeks . . .

"Wait! She's our friend. She's done nothing wrong!" I pleaded with the cloaked zebra.

He stopped and turned to face me, his head tilted to one side. "I didn't think ponies spoke our language. But that changes nothing." He pointed a hoof at Chrysanthemum. "Do you see what she is?"

"I see that she's afraid!"

"What are you?" Starry demanded, looming over Chrysanthemum.

"I'm Chrys! The same Chrys you've always known!" she pleaded. "Starry, please! I'm me—I'm still me . . . I've always been me . . ."

"She is a monster. I must keep her, however. There are more to find," the zebra said.

"I'm not a monster!" Chrysanthemum cried, burying her face in her hooves. "Not a monster . . . not a monster . . ."

"Stop! Both of you!" I shoved past the zebra and Starry to stand between them and Chrysanthemum, my wings flared out. My temples pounded with every beat of my heart. Each thundering pulse was like a loudspeaker inside my ears: "You have to get along. . . . It's important to get along," it rang, commanding me to mind my place, not stand in the way, and to let Security do its job. Inside the stable I would never have dreamed to stand between Security and somepony I barely knew. But seeing Chrys like that—like a small, innocent, helpless little foal . . . I fought against the pounding in my head, the pounding which told me to stand by and just let them do what they wanted. I had to protect her.

"I won't let you hurt her," I said. With the way my heart was racing, I felt as though I might pass out. It took all the effort I had just to keep my knees from buckling.

Starry, to my surprise, backed up a step. Her eyes were wide as she stared at me. The zebra didn't back off, though. "She feeds on my tribe!" he shouted. "She—her kind, feast; we suffer. I will see it end!"

"No! I don't! It's not me!" Chrysanthemum yelled back. "I . . . I'm not part of . . . that . . ."

I glanced back at her over my shoulder and watched as she shakily got back on her hooves. "Part of what?" I asked. "Chrys, what's he talking about?"

She looked around cautiously and trembled. "We're not safe here. Please, I'll . . . I'll tell you everything, just . . . we can't stay here." She cringed as her horn flared impotently again. "And I need my magic! I can't . . . I can't be like this. I feel . . . wrong."

The zebra hesitated. He lowered his eyes for a moment before he reached under his cloak and brought out a small cloth rag. "Wipe away the dust; magic will come back to you. But betray us not."

I took the rag and turned to face Chrysanthemum. She tried to reach for the rag with her magic, but it again imploded on her. "Here, let me," I said, reaching toward her, but I hesitated when she ducked away from me. "It's alright, I won't hurt you," I reassured her.

She took a shaky breath and nodded, closing her eyes. I sat down in front of her and got a closer look. I could see the green powder that the zebra had hit her with. It sparkled like glitter in the dim light that trickled through the forest canopy. Gently, I started wiping it off her face. She grimaced, and I wasn't sure if it was because of my touch or if maybe the powder was hurting her, but as I got to her horn and cleaned the little green flecks off of it, her face relaxed.

I sat back and smiled at her. "I think that's all of it. Can you use your magic now?" I asked.

Chrysanthemum opened her eyes and looked at me. She blinked a couple times before her horn shimmered with her bright chartreuse aura. Her magic flashed around her, and she stood there, looking as she always had, with her vibrant green coat and her blue and white mane styled in long, bouncy curls. She looked down at herself and let out a sigh. "Thank you, Day," she said, smiling back at me.

She winced suddenly, putting her hooves to her ears. "That noise! Make it stop!"

"What noise? What are you doing to her?" I turned around to face the zebra.

From under his cloak, he brought out a small polished stone, set with a yellow gem and with arcane runes etched into it. "It must be the effect of the repellant talisman I made. She's the first I've seen react to it."

"So turn it off!"

"It can't be turned off. Not without destroying it."

"Do it!"

"It's the only one I have. It took months to make. We'll need it to find others like her: the ones who have been tormenting my tribe."

Behind me, Chrysanthemum let out an agonized groan.

"It bothers her only when she wears her mask. She can go without it."

"Chrys?" I turned back to her. She was doubled over, clutching at her ears as she writhed on the ground. "Chrys, if you change back, it'll go away."

"No!" she yelled through gritted teeth. "You don't . . . understand." She spat out her words between pained gasps for breath. "This hurts . . . but that other . . . body feels . . . wrong! I can't!"

"Suffering like this, you can end it any time. Yet you endure—why?" The zebra looked Chrys over with a skeptical gaze.

Chrys forced herself to stand so she could look the zebra in the eye. "If you had to spend your whole life trying to escape what you were born as . . ." She grimaced, and for a moment she looked ready to pass out. Her normally vibrant color had turned pale, and beads of sweat ran down her face and neck. "What would you suffer just so you could be yourself?"

The zebra was silent for a moment, and then furrowed his brow. "Whispers in my ear. You who could be anything, how can I trust you?"

"Please, sir," I said, my head bowed and my ears splayed. "Chrys has been kind to me since I met her. She's helped others, and she's helped me. Please, don't make her suffer."

Behind me, Chrys lay back down. She clutched at her stomach as convulsive dry-heaves wracked her body.

The zebra looked at me, his eyes wide in shock. After a moment, he glanced down at the talisman in his hoof. He sighed and dropped it on the ground, then stomped it under his hoof. The gemstone cracked with a small flash of light.

Almost instantly, Chrys's pained groans stopped, and I watched as she shakily got back to her feet. Her color returned slowly as she wiped the sweat and tears from her face. After a few slow breaths to steady herself, she looked up at me and smiled. And then she hugged me.

I winced slightly as she threw her forelegs around my neck and nuzzled my cheek. "Thank you," she whispered then looked over at the zebra. "I'm so sorry for what they're doing to y'all." She took a deep breath, and I felt her embrace tighten around me briefly before she let go. "I said I'd tell you everything, and I will. But we have to go somewhere safe first."

"Somewhere safe indeed," he replied. "Follow me and do not stray. We'll go to my home."

"Hold on, now," Starry said as she pulled me aside. "Day, you know we can't go around solving everyone else's problems; we have our own to deal with."

I looked up at her. "But, ma'am . . . Starry . . . this is our problem, isn't it? Chance was here, wasn't he? There's something out there, and Chrys is the only one of us who knows anything about it."

"So let her stay and deal with it. We'll go back the way we came and . . . and we'll try to find where he went next." Starry sighed and pulled out her canteen for a drink. "It'll be a setback, but it's not like it'd be the first time."

I fell back a half-step. "Just . . . leave?" I glanced back over my shoulder at Chrys. She stood cautiously away from everypony else, with her back against a tree. I felt a tightness grip my chest like a claw pulling on my breastbone. "We can't just abandon her! She's our friend!"

Starry took another sip. "I don't even know what she is anymore. And we certainly don't owe this zebra anything."

I backed up another half-step. I felt as if I were going to be sick. No matter what I did, it would mean losing somepony: If I went with Starry, we'd leave Chrys behind. If I stayed with Chrys, Starry would leave me. I'd already lost everything from the stable, I had just started rebuilding my life outside, and now I was about to start losing it again.

My legs tingled with hundreds of little pinpricks, and I struggled to keep my breathing steady. After a glance over my shoulder at Chrys, I gave Starry my decision. "I can't leave," I told her. "I won't leave." I sighed and hung my head, knowing that I'd be moving on without Starry.

"Day . . ."

I looked up at Starry. The shield on her uniform glinted in the cold, sparse light that filtered down through the trees.

She took another drink from her canteen. "Alright, Day." She sighed and approached the zebra. "I'm looking for a pony who might have come through here recently. If we help you, can you help us?"

"This, I do not know," he answered with a shake of his head. "Masked hunters live in shadows. Your friend will explain." He nodded toward Chrys, and then continued, "Make hunters hunted; make free my tribe, only that—" He stomped his hoof. "Will make clear your way."

Starry gave a slow nod. "Okay . . . that sounded enough like a 'yes' to me. Lead the way. Come on, Day; let's get moving. Chrys, or whoever you are—"

"Starry, please! I'm still me. I'm the same Chrys you've always known."

"You'll go ahead of me where I can keep an eye on you," Starry said with a note of finality in her voice. Chrys didn't argue. She hung her head and took her place behind the zebra while Starry and I followed behind her, and we started walking through the forest again.

During the walk, the silence was broken only by a few brief moments of conversation. The zebra introduced himself as Kijiba. And Starry remarked how strange it was that I could speak the zebras' language. Zebras made up a large portion of the stable's population, I explained; everypony there spoke both languages fluently. Perhaps it was the just the mood we were all in, or maybe Starry thought better of asking more about the stable, but whatever it was, the conversation ended there.

Keep Making That Face and It'll Get Stuck That Way

After a while of traveling deeper still into the forest—all the while, glancing over our shoulders and listening for another ambush—the dark, stoic trees that loomed all around us gave way into a clearing. The light of day was a welcome sight as we emerged from the forest canopy's shadow.

The clearing was populated with a number of huts built from wooden boards and thatched roofs. The huts looked old and poorly maintained; on every one of them I could see mold growing on rotten wood and holes in the thatching.

Each hut had its own small—I hesitate to call it a garden—they were more like small patches of tilled soil where meager amounts of various wheats and grains grew amid tangles of weeds. The village was quiet and deathly still, such that the slightest movement caught my eye as we passed along the outskirts: From behind a broken window shutter, a zebra foal's curious eyes peeked out to watch us before his mother pulled him away into the shadows. Another zebra glared at us from behind his small plot of crops. His face was gaunt, with dark shadows under his eyes. Through the stalks of grain he was tending, I could see that his body was practically emaciated, as though he could barely grow enough to feed himself.

There were other villagers about, but those who didn't retreat into their homes greeted us with the same cold, spiteful glares. Yet it didn't seem as if our presence had at all interrupted their normal activities; it was as if their whole lives were spent exchanging looks of pure contempt and barely-restrained malice toward one another.

"Do not pay them heed," Kijiba said. "Their stares are as much for me," he continued, "as they are for you."

"Why?" I asked.

Kijiba didn't answer right away. I almost thought he was ignoring the question before he spoke up. "I am . . . unwelcome. Traditions, I follow not. So they think me mad."

"Why don't you leave?" Starry asked.

"And where would I go? This has been my only home. Here is all I know," he answered bitterly. "My home, my people; even being unwanted—" He glanced back at us over his shoulder. "Could you leave your home?"

Nopony said anything more, and Kijiba continued leading us in silence. But I had to wonder about my own home—or, rather, the fact that I didn't have one anymore. What Kijiba had said was right; even unwanted, I could never have simply left. It had been the circumstances that had forced me to leave, and I would give anything to go back. Well, almost anything . . . I couldn't take back what I'd done. It had been too important, and I couldn't have lived with myself if I hadn't done it.

I just hadn't expected I'd have to live with myself after I had done it.

I had to leave my old life behind and find a new one for myself. In a way, I had died when the stable door closed behind me, but instead of passing on, I was left to wander the wasteland as a ghost, lost and searching for . . . something. I needed to accept that my life had ended in order to move on. Or as Rake's voice in the back of my mind reminded me: I had been reborn.

And I tried to move on. But somehow it seemed as if the wasteland were always conspiring to remind me of what I'd done . . . of what I'd lost.

As we walked on, we passed by a mare, but unlike the other inhabitants of the village, she didn't keep her distance and instead approached me. She wasn't old, but her face was wrinkled, and her mane drooped listlessly over one side of her neck. Her left eye was bruised and swollen shut, and she favored her left foreleg as she walked. Her good eye caught mine, and I stood still while she came closer until her face was right in front of mine. I grimaced at the smell of her breath but held still in her gaze.

"What is this that, with my eye, I do see? Some little bird, fallen out from his tree?" The mare scowled at me. "Fly home, little bird, back home to your nest. For you, do you not think, that would be best?"

"I . . . can't go home," I told her. "They won't let me come back."

Her wrinkled brow furrowed as she glared at me. Without saying anything more, she simply snorted and pushed her way past me.

I stood there in a bit of a daze. Something about the encounter with that mare had felt very unsettling, and left me with a cold shiver running down my back. I snapped out of it when Kijiba came back to get me.

"Is something the matter?" he asked.

"That mare," I said, pointing toward her; she hadn't yet gotten very far with her limp. "She . . . was telling me to leave."

Kijiba looked past me at the mare. He harrumphed. "Ignore her. Her husband disappeared a few days ago. Right after she got that limp and black eye."

My eyes went wide at that. "Are you suggesting her husband did that to her? And that . . . she . . ." I leaned in closer to Kijiba and lowered my voice to a whisper.

"Did she murder him?"

Kijiba's eyes narrowed, and he pursed his lips, taking a moment before he answered. "It's not safe to talk here. Let's keep moving. We can speak more freely at my home."

I nodded, and we continued on.

Kijiba's hut was noticeably different from the rest of the village. It was built into the hollowed out trunk of a massive old tree, had no outward signs of decay, and not only did he have what I would call a proper garden, but there was also a flower garden with an entire rainbow of colors growing in it.

Inside the tree was only a single room. The air was thick with the scent of moldy pages, mixed with the fragrance of dried flower petals.

The room was crowded with all four of us, but there was space enough to move around comfortably, if only barely. Starry stood beside me nearest to the door while Kijiba sat down by his table, and Chrys stood in the center. Our eyes fell on her.

"Just what the hell are you?" Starry demanded.

"I'm . . ." Chrys chewed on her bottom lip and sighed. "I'm . . . a changeling. I can turn myself into almost any animal."

"Not just animal, but any pony she wants. Her disguise—perfect." Kijiba was quick to add.

Starry's eyes narrowed. "So was there another pony out there who looked like this? What did you do to her?"

"It's not like that! This is me! Just . . . me."

"So you've been tricking us the whole time. That line you fed us about traveling with a trader through this forest? That never happened, did it?"

Chrys looked away.

"And I bet that cute little story about Mum taking you in wasn't true either."

"No! That was true! I never lied to you before!"

"You were always lying to us! You let us believe you were a pony."

"I am a pony!" Chrysanthemum cried.

Kijiba cut Starry off before she could yell at Chrys again. "You wear this mask; you wish you were pony. A lie tells the truth?"

Chrys choked back a sob and wiped her fetlock across her nose. "I've lived almost my whole life like this—like a pony."

"But you're not a pony," Starry countered. "You don't even have a real cutie mark. It's fake, just like everything else about you."

"I wanted a cutie mark as much as any filly or colt does! I tried so many things, hoping desperately that maybe if I was good enough at one thing, I could get a real cutie mark like everypony else. That if I just wanted it hard enough, that it would make me a real pony." She let out a sound that was something caught between a cry and a laugh. "That never happened. But I really do have a talent for matchmaking. Starry, you've seen the ponies at the diner: every couple there was put together by me, and none of them could be happier."

She looked up at Starry. "You remember Scrap Yard and Rubble, right? Remember how sweet her laugh is? Oh, and he had such a great sense of humor! It was like nothing in the wasteland could ever take away his smile." She closed her eyes and let out a wistful sigh. "I set them up together when I was just a filly. When I watched them share their first kiss, I felt something—a chill, a tingle; it was like opening my eyes for the very first time. I almost broke down crying in front of everypony in the diner when I looked back and still didn't see anything on my flank." Chrys sobbed again then took a deep breath and looked up at us. "That's when I accepted that I'd never get the cutie mark I knew I was supposed to have. So I made this one up." She turned to show her flank. "Two roses, entwined together in a heart. Because all I want to do is bring ponies together in love. Is that so wrong?"

The room was quiet except for Chrysanthemum's sniffling. I found myself questioning what it really meant to be a pony. If she lived as one, thought of herself as one, was I in any position to say otherwise? As she was, she was indistinguishable from any other pony. If that didn't make her a pony, then what did?

While Starry seemed, at best, unconvinced, I decided then that if Chrys said she was a pony, I would believe her.

"I don't understand." I turned to Kijiba. "You said there are others like her, and they feed on your tribe?"

He nodded. "I read in my books; masked monsters that feed on love. They feed, and we starve."

"No, that's not what they're doing to you." Chrys wiped the tears away from her eyes. "There's no love in the air here. It tastes foul. Others like—" She grimaced and bit her lip. "Others like . . . me could never survive here."

"But the books—"

"Were printed ages ago. These changelings here have adapted to a world where bitter emotions flourish." Chrys paused, turning her head to look at each of us. She knew the question we all undoubtedly had on our minds, and with a sigh, she answered what went unasked. "I was born during the early days of the war. I don't remember much from back then, just overhearing my parents talk about plans to wait it out. We were just going to go to sleep for a while—a torpor." Tears began welling up in her eyes again. "The last thing I remember is my mother singing to me to sleep. . . . I can't even remember the song. . . . And then I blinked and she was gone. And so was my whole world—everything, all of it, just gone! All in the blink of an eye! And I was still just a little filly."

Chrys closed her eyes tightly and stifled a sob through gritted teeth. "I woke up here, in this forest, looking up into the eyes of a queen with her hive buzzing all around me. I can hear them now—their shrills and chitters are everywhere, all around us. They were watching us when you exposed me, and now they know I'm here!" She collapsed onto the floor and buried her face under her forelegs as she cried. "I'm sorry! I thought I could lead you around them so they wouldn't find us, but it's too late!"

"Chrys." Starry stepped forward, looming over her. "Chrys, look at me. This is very important: what do they want?"

Chrysanthemum lowered her hooves away from her face. Her eyes were bloodshot. "They want me back," she sniffled. "She wants me back—the queen. I ran away when I was still little. The air here—I can't stand it. They keep the villagers on edge and feed off your hate for each other."

Starry pulled out her flask and took a long drink from it. She looked down at Chrys who was still sobbing on the floor. "I assume," she said, pausing to take another drink, "that we won't be able to simply leave now, will we?"

Chrys shook her head.

"Wonderful." Starry gave an exasperated sigh. "You got us into a real mess here. So what are we supposed to do about it?"

"We have to fight them," Kijiba answered. "My people will believe me; now that I have you."

"No!" Chrys sat up. "I never want to change back ever again. Certainly not so you can trot me out on display and turn the whole village against me."

"We don't really have a choice," Starry said. "The four of us are hardly an army."

"And neither is this village," Chrys argued. "You saw them out there, how they live—they're sick and hungry, and I can taste the malice in the air. Can't you? A single changeling can have them all entranced before they even know what's happening—" Her face turned pale. "I hear them getting closer! They'll turn the whole village against us when they get here." She gulped. "The only chance we have is if we go and talk to the queen."

"What? Just walk right up ask them nicely to let us go? That's a terrible plan!" Starry stomped her hoof as her wings flared out. She tipped back her flask and finished off its contents, leaning her head back as she tried to shake out that last drop.

"If I can talk to the queen . . . if I agree to stay with her willingly . . . she might let you and Day go."

"And what of my tribe?" Kijiba asked. "Hunters do not give up prey. I'm left with nothing!"

"I'm sorry! I don't know what else to do! If you hadn't exposed me, maybe we could have gone unnoticed, but you had to go and hit me with that damn powder—"

The same thought struck us all at the same time, and we turned toward Kijiba. "Do you have more of that powder?" Starry asked. "We can use it to incapacitate them so we stand a chance."

"I used what I had," he answered. "More ingredients, I have; but supply is short."

"Then make what you can," said Chrys as she wiped her eyes again. "If we use it on the queen, if we can defeat her, then the hive will be lost without her. All they've ever known is her will. They won't know what to do."

"And how do we know we can trust you?"

Chrys looked as though she were about to start crying again as she faced Starry. "I guess you don't. But it's the only chance we have. And if we don't go out to fight them soon, they'll come for us. They'll take you and they'll put you in trances and make you live out your worst nightmares over and over again until all that's left of you is an empty husk, and then when your soul is empty, they'll feast on your body. It's what happens to everyone who's ever gone missing from this village."

She turned to Kijiba. "I'm so sorry. Please believe me. I was never any part of it. What they do . . . I'd sooner starve than become a monster like them."

The whole time, I sat silently in the corner. I could hardly imagine anything more monstrous than what Chrys described.

As Kijiba set to work making more of the powder he had used on Chrys, Starry continued interrogating her for anything that might be useful in planning our attack, and I sat quietly, trying my best to hold my stomach down. It twisted into knots inside me and filled me with dread as I looked down at the pistol tucked into my front pocket. I was going to have to use it. I'd have to kill, almost for sure. I didn't want to. It was one thing to kill somepony in the heat of the moment, but I was going to be part of a plan to murder someone. Even if she was a monster, I felt sick at the thought. But what choice did I have?

I just had to put on a strong face and be the pony everypony expected me to be.