"Tell me a story, tell me a story!"

The foal bounced across the room, school book forgotten at the doorstep, the weariness of an afternoon of factory work almost visibly falling away. The other pony in the room, a stallion wrapped up in in blanket, laughed softly and swept the blanket aside to let the foal in.

She stopped. "Ma says I can't go too near you, Cress," she pouted. "You're sick!"

"Aye, but that won't stop me from putting on a helmet and marching around in an hour. The Militia doesn't allow sick days. You always wanted to be in the Militia, right, Rose?"

Rose bobbed her head vigorously. "Still do! But before you go, brother..."

"Of course," Cress said, pointing another blanket draped over the only table in their shared bedroom, cramped and rusted as it was. The metal siding starting to peel away, he'd have to speak to the dorm head about that. They had a window though, and that was the most important thing. He doubted Rose would give it up for the cleanest bedroom in Equestria's history. And that was saying an awful lot.

Rose sidled up next to him, swathed in her blanket, apparently forgetting his sickness to get a clear view outside. As always, her gaze was transfixed by the sight of the Fourteenth Avenue of Heroes, beginning a few hundred feet from their factory and going out to the harbor. Going into the harbor, actually, in the case of the oldest bits. Bad foundation, he'd been told, and the construction techniques that had allowed the entire precinct his factory was built on to be as sturdy as real ground had been lost centuries ago. That's when they started the Fifteenth Avenue, fifty years ago. He hadn't yet been really able to get across to Rose that the enormous statues she was staring at were recent memory, five hundred years at the oldest. It'd be quite the day when she finally realized how long ponies had been around.

And how far they'd fallen.

"That one!" Rose said, breaking Cress out of his thought, pointing at one of two parallel rows of statues.

"The one with the big rusted cross on her saddlebag?"

"Yeah!" his sister nodded.

"Well, I'm pretty sure that's the Angel of the Docks. Back when the precinct all the way over there" he took her head in his hooves and directed her gaze over to the far end of the breakwater of Baltimare Harbor, mostly covered in smog and soot, "yes, that one, when ponies still lived there."

"She was a Pegasus?" Rose asked, eyes wide.

Cress laughed gently. "No, she was as much of a common pony as you or me. She was an angel because of what she did, not because she had wings. She had a fair golden mane, and grew up in factory a lot like the this one...

Since her youngest days, the Angel of the Docks was a kind-hearted and earnest pony. She worked in an weapons factory during the Twenty Year's War between the Southern Commoners' Republic and the current government of the Free Colonies across the Eastern Sea. Her mother died early in her life in foalbirth of a sibling but the Angel was cheerful and hard working by every account.

When the quotas were doubled, she kept her comrade's spirits up with songs and tales of ponies and places forgotten in our days. When half of the factory's crew was conscripted and sent across the horizon to fight, she helped teach the foals to work the machinery and found the safest jobs for them that were still productive. When they halved the rations, she grew what she could on the roof - in those days, it was very common to look up and be able to see the sun. When the Wasting sickness hit Baltimare, she turned the factory into a hospital and cared for so many ponies with the same zest she had showed in the everything else in her life.

A hundred factory crews still have their own stories of her kindness and infinite tenderness. With barely a remembered conversation or even a description beyond her golden mane, the Angel inspired, and made life for the ponies of her time a great deal more bearable. Things were worse then than they are now; yet the Angel of the Docks was enshrined in stone a half a century after her death at an old age, as pure and worthy a pony as Baltimare has ever sired.

"Wait, that's it? Did she ever get married? Why is the place she lived in abandoned now? Did she have a temper? Why is she called an Angel if she isn't a Pegasus? Why-"

Cress smiled at Rose's inevitable rush of questions, and held up a hoof, waiting for her to quiet down. "I'm sorry, Rose, but I need to get ready for my Militia patrol. You can hear another story when I get home, if you're awake."

Rose nodded and looked down. "I'm sorry, brother. It was a very nice story. Thank you."

She was so bashful sometimes. "It's fine. Stay safe, sister," Cress said, getting up and starting for the door. "I love you."

"Love you too."

He paused at the door. "You'll stay in my memories, Rose." he said, knowing she wouldn't comprehend the significance of the phrase very well at her age, like always. He was a young stallion, and still hardly did.

"Yeah, same."

Baltimare was an historical city. The winding alleys and heights were heady echoes of the past, half remembered stories about the more impressive piles of ruins or the tales of how the rusted skeleton of a gigantic warship was stretched over the Castle Hill. Empty factories and statues whose features and memory had been worn off decades ago. Miles of urban coastline, a forest of smoke stacks and twisted metal. If you got really close, you could start to see the ponies that lived there, blots in the shadow of greater things.

Cress had grown up here, and the taller he got the more he was aware of how small he was. The living stayed near the shore, usually, in rusting shanties clinging to the sides of the factories that still functioned. That was not to say Baltimare was dead, and that there was no organization or government; in some sections the statues were polished sharp and ponies still thronged the streets in great bustle. Many ships still came and went from Baltimare's natural harbor, and trains clattered on the old trestles to the outside world. There were ponies with uniforms, unicorns sometimes even travelled through, representatives of Canterlot in finery and oozing authority. Cress had never faced starvation in his twenty-three years. Slop, soup, stringy vegetables, and sometimes bread.

Yet everything was in the shadow of the Old City. Ponies got lost in there, utterly desolate streets and broken technologies nopony understood or cared for. Cress had never shaken the feeling that everything and everypony around him were less, a crust on the thousand-year old city, remnants of something much greater.

Cress. There wasn't much he said about himself, and nobody needed to ask. Another worker shifting slag in a heavy coat, a common pony with a coat and mane of dulled green and brown, different in color but much the same from his fellow workers. Common ponies. He'd heard stories, about Earth Ponies, creatures that looked exactly like him but brighter and higher, creatures with a special connection to a living earth. He tried to imagine a connection with the dirt that occasionally poked up through cracks in the pavement on the outskirts of the factory, and was never satisfied. Earth ponies were a favorite story of common ponies. They relished the stories, lived in them and tried to envision what the elders told them.

Some stories were more real than the towering, crumbling edifices that blocked any sight inland, however. They were the reason Cress was trotting along the outskirts of inhabited Baltimare, wrapped up in a grey overcoat with a firearm and a blade slung over his back, staring at the windows above and gutters below. The Cults were very real. Equestrian history, if anything, was a story of loss, Cress had decided. Cults were disgusting abominations, mockeries of organization to a foul goal against all that was good and holy. Besides what his milita officers snarled, Cress had a more simple view. The Cults wanted things back. The Moon Cult, worshipping the Nightmare Triumphant, with a very different history of 1,200 years ago. The Sun Cult, less reviled but officially not tolerated, praising the Living Sun that once tread upon the earth, easy to spot out whenever the clouds and soot occasionally rolled back to display the open sky and the sun. Petty technology cults, collectors. Cress was young and reasonably healthy, so militia service was mandatory for him. A stressful two days out of the week patrolling or sitting around checkpoints, grumbling and staving off recruiting for the Central Guard. Cress had relatives in the service, and had no desire to leave his home and waste away somewhere distant and evil.

A glint of light and flurry of movement in a gaping hole in a wall maybe thirty stories above him snapped out of his thoughts instantly, and Cress unslung his firearm, staring upwards. A current of fear ran through him. Militia often brushed against the Magic Cult in Baltimare, bastards who abused the power of the Heavens that the unicorns of the government used reverently. Magic running through their bodies, capable of insane deeds, Cress had heard stories of rogue unicorns who could blow down an entire patrol or immobilize one of the Militia's rusty old war-machines with an evil burst of power. Common ponies would sometimes disappear from their dorms and be recognized months later, fired with unholy powers. Cress had seen one. His factory mates had eagerly listened to his story of the captured cultist, a defiant stallion with an impossibly bright red mane. A foul sight.

A minute passed, and another. Nothing else stirred, and Cress sighed and turned back to his patrol route.

The sun was almost under the horizon when he arrived at the Southern Perimeter Barracks, exhausted with the prospect of grabbing a lantern and heading back to his factory to complete his shift. The Barracks was practically a small fortress, a grated metal wall surrounding some weapon towers and grey buildings, banners of the Central Government hanging from them, muted in the twilight. It was surrounded by rubble, old perimeter housing torn down to provide clear lanes of fire. He passed through the checkpoints, uncomfortable under the watch of automatic weapon emplacements, but even more uncomfortable with what he saw as he walked into the courtyard.

An airship, and honest to the Heavens airship was fueling in a recess in the courtyard, hidden from outside view. Dozens of ponies in the black helmets of the Central Guard stood around it, but as he neared, Cress recognized some of them to be fellow members of the Militia, one of them even a mate at his factory who had set out on patrol an hour before Cress.

An officer in gold braid had gone unnoticed on the edge of the fueling pit, focused as Cress was on the airship, but as Cress drew up to the pit the officer barked for his attention.

Cress clicked his hooves and straightened up. "What is it, sir?"

The officer was definitely a real member of the Central Guard, calm and at the same time staring down Cress with an intensity he could see. "You are a member of the Militia of Baltimare?" the officer asked without preamble.

"Aye, sir," Cress replied, "of Factory Three, Precinct Seventeen."

The officer nodded. "Are you married?"

"No."

"Then there is no question. You are hereby conscripted into the Central Guard to fulfill your duty as a citizen of Equestria to defend its ponies and its order. You will receive a new helmet and ship out by airship to a troop ship in the harbor as soon as possible. Please see the pony at the boarding ramp of the airship below." The officer took a folder out from under his uniform, pulled out a paper with a generic message and conscripted stamped onto it, and handed it to Cress.

Cress blinked, an involuntary shudder running down spine, processing the information bluntly. "Yes, sir," was all he could say, and turned away, swallowing hard, shoving the paper into a coat pocket.

"I am Colonel Arbor, commander of the 485th Conscript Battalion, and your commanding officer." the officer called after him, and Cress was down the stairway, trotting through the press of his fellow soldiers to the ramp. In a haze, he traded his dented helmet for a black Central Guard one, and was given a saddlebag with a very small amount of extra ammunition in it. The pony behind the small desk had him sign his conscription papers, and he was done, and sent away. He stood with his fellows, looking up at the darkened sky; the floodlights of the Barracks were turned on as he stared, and he looked down to avoid the glare. He was shivering under his heavy coat.

Eventually, he was vaguely aware of a voice raising above the tumult of the conscripts' harried and fearful conversations. It was the Colonel.

"We are about to leave!" he yelled. "First, however, I will be selecting some of you married fellows to return to your factories, as per the guidelines of the emergency orders from the Central Government that have landed you here today. Please come up the stairway in an orderly fashion."

The conscripts did anything but. All the married ones were pushing and fighting their way up the stairs, and Cress was certain a few of the ponies he knew in the crush were certainly not married but still trying to reach the Colonel. Perhaps they figured the Colonel would not check the difference between a marefriend and a wife, with how desperate things must be to snap up militiaponies at night with an airship.

For his part, Cress stayed in the pit, taking in the glare of the floodlights, the roar of the airship engines spinning up, the voices of conscripts and airship crew alike, feeling the wind as the propellers began to turn. He was a turmoil of emotions, fear and a damned sense of living in this moment, like it was special and memorable. He was making a story. Those thoughts ended when he thought briefly of Rose and his family.

"Paper," he muttered to himself, "I need paper, I need to write."

The Colonel was sorting through the married ponies quickly, ignoring the pleading of the ones he passed over until they went back down the stairway.

"I need paper! A quill! Anyone, does anyone have it?" he cried, increasingly impatient.

He had a flash of inspiration, and bounded over to the loading ramp of the airship, where the pony who had given him his equipment was packing up. "Sir, sir, please-" he sputtered, breathless.

"I'm just a Guard," the pony said.

"Please, do you have a quill? You were signing off on our papers, yes?"

"Um, yes. Why do you-"

"Can I have it?"

The pony didn't answer, looking very confused, but Cress spotted a quill still on the little table that he'd gotten his black helmet at. He snatched it up, took his conscription paper out of his pocket, turned it over, and began scribbling frantically.

Dear Rose. I have been conscripted into the Central Guard. I don't know when I'll be back. Study hard and work well. Old Barley tells good stories. I am making my own right now. You're doing that too, even if you don't know it. I love you. Be well. Please let me stay in your memories, Rose. You will stay in mine. - Cress.

He glanced up, and saw the Colonel was finished, a small number of married ponies standing near the edge, their black helmets gone, most looking very relieved. Cress ran up to the edge, saw a pony he knew from the factory.

"Hey, hey!" he called. The pony looked down.

"Cress?"

"Get this to a foal named Rose, she lives in the harbor corner of Floor 16. Please!" he said, crumpling up the paper and throwing it to the pony.

"What is this-"

"Rose! Floor 16!" Cress yelled desperately.

"Rose, Floor 16." the pony repeated, looking over the paper. He opened his mouth to say more, but Cress was gone, running for the ramp into the airship with the rest of the conscripts.

Cress felt like a pegasus skipping over clouds. He bounded up the ramp with a light heart, given the circumstances, reveling in the groan of the airship and roar of the engines, straining under his weapon and saddlebag, every nerve tingling from the moment.