Someone -I forgot their name almost as soon as I learned it- had decided that Equestria needed another front. We had been sent out here to set up watch over those who set up derricks and storage facilities. That nasty black crap that leaked out of the ground… the locals would have given it to us… I think. But if you have an army resting on their laurels, and weakened governments to topple, why ask for mineral rights?

Resource extraction. Even as the world darkened, as crops died and fields went fallow for want of planters. That aspect didn’t die with the rest. We didn’t die with the rest. As I, Icepick, Knight Second Class, watched the native Saddle Arabians bring their “resource compensation” to our lorries, I let my thoughts wander. This was the third settlement on this patrol that had been attacked by raiders in the last two months.

A look to the east or west would give the impression that these people were living in a golden sea. However, if you looked to the north, you’d see the Gilache River, nevermind the gunboat I had ridden on. The boat was a poor excuse for a warship, but rockets and mortars would tear their hovels into the same sand they were surrounded by in only minutes. We wouldn’t do that. We only asked for ten percent of their grain, and if the people who harried them showed themselves, we wouldn’t hesitate to meet them in the field. As sure as clockwork, the wind tore across the town. Gritty sand would erode anything in time. I turned my face to look at my fellow Knight who, was barking orders to the villagers.

“Ironsight, did they tell you anything we didn’t already know about the raiders?” My voice got her attention. Nearly two meters of steel turned to face me. Ironsight had barked a final word of Arabic to the village leader. The leader gave a negative reply before hurrying back into his home of dirt. Tonight would be cold, and it’d be windy- I could feel it in my bones.

“He said that they came out of the glare of the sun, and apparently, they were packing some heat along with the normal blades and bows.” She replied slowly. She wasn’t a bad knight, hell, by how she was moving up the chain of command, she might have been better than me, but she didn’t give a rat’s ass about the people we supposedly protected. I still counted her as a friend; another mare about the same age as me, with a hot brother. Maybe I didn’t know what a friend was.

Ehh, It’s whatever. That was my motto.

“Did he give a direction?” The sun was nearly down. Light amplification and that huge reflector people called the moon would be enough if I got the information I needed.

“To the southwest, towards the mesa. The tracks were in the sand. You can’t be thinkin-”

“They’ve been fucking with these people for too long. We can’t just sit on our armoured asses taking things because they can’t stop us.” I cut her off. She could rationalize burning this village down and selling the occupants as chattel, and all it would take was a whisper from a higher-up. I was a lot of things, am a lot of things. “Sandstorm and Darude, they’ll go with me. They were a day behind us right?”

“Fuck, Icepick, get it through your skull. You’re not going to find them. Sand rats know how to hide, especially at night.”

“Was that a yes?” I glared through a bullet-proof visor.

“Ice, I love you like a sister, better than my sister, actually. Just give it up. All the desert holds is plenty of sand to sink into, and it doesn’t help that you're as dense as you are.”

“File the reports. Two knights and an initiate aren’t a huge paper pile, or a huge loss.” I said before turning around. It didn’t matter that my Knight Third Class and my initiate were both as green as the Everfree.

The crunch of sand compacting under me was better than hearing her talk. You could always count on sand to be slippery. I didn’t want the last ember of Equestria to be the same. At the end of that day, I realized that I was protecting those who extracted life from the river bank, and, with any luck, I’d be extracting blood from thieves.

War, war never changes. They say. I say: It’s whatever.

The march back to our headquarters was an actual march.

By the time we made it back to where the gunboat had stopped, the village was in the throes of its evening activity. When the sun went down, they laid on their mattresses. The Sallish people gave us strange looks as we entered; they hadn’t expected us to survive. The three of us, with partially depleted spark reactors and lighter bags walked to their well at the center of the housing. All three of us wanted that water- we had ran dry on our way back. I let them decide who got the first taste.

So, as we entered, the masses of farmers decided we were a spectacle. A mirage made into life, perhaps. The one who had spoken to Ironsight before I left came to me. My mind reeled with the effort of thinking coherently after losing so much water; the tongue through which I would normally speak was thick and uncooperative even as I swished it around my mouth.

I shifted my weight to my right side and pulled the hook and loop on a flap open. With a single, jerky motion I dropped the Raider leader’s head onto the ground. Those who saw it first yelled something excitedly. It wasn’t the reluctant tone that had accompanied the entire exchange with them a week back. No, the tone was pleasant, pleasant surprise. Honestly, the smell of it would have overpowered me if not for the rebreather in the suit. I couldn’t speak their language, but the recognizable skull of a foe is as universal as communication gets.

“Ice, they’re calling you the oathkeeper. And Sandstorm and I: we’re the swords of the oathkeeper,” Darude the Knight said from behind me. I turned to face him. In his hoof was a canteen. The grab was automatic, same as the motion to remove my helmet. Water: best thing in the world for not dying. I could hear Initiate Sandstorm talking with that same leader in words that were incredibly incomprehensible to me.

“Darude, don’t let Sand lie to them. We both know you’re the sheath and he’s the sword. I can kinda hear it some - all - nights.” I relied after swallowing more than the recommended amount of water.

“Knowing you, not knowing you knowing you, you probably rub one out when you hear us.” His voice cracked as he said this. He really wasn’t wrong. If it wasn’t windy in the desert, the sound carried pretty well.

“It’s mostly you making the noise.” Out of the two stallions, he was the bottom and the moaner. It was hot. Not the only reason I chose them to go along and not just because they didn’t mind if I voyeured a little. Darude carried a HUD integrated scoped rifle.

“You wanna keep that title, right? We had an oath.” He said in a high pitched tone for humour's sake. I moved right past him, letting my armoured tail drag along his side as I passed by.

As the night wore on, I found myself asleep on a bed of straw next to an open fire with a smoke hole. They had fed me some black bread and cheese, along with some watered beer. These people had hidden away a lot of their total stored food away when we came. Now, after a single enemy of the people had rolled in the dirt… they were treating us. The three of us were given enough provisions to make it back to the river mouth.

All for a fight that had been won with ease. A few slugs aimed at their band’s leadership was enough to bring them to the brink of surrender. A few more slugs were enough to carry out the field executions. The bit where we sawed the head off of a pony had been done with one of their own utility knives. Obsidian blades could cut deeply and quickly. I had taken it from the leader. A leather sheath strapped to my barrel kept it within reach.

After pulling it out, I just looked at it. The way it became more transparent near the edges caught my eye every time I saw it. Transparency was what it was because of the thickness of the night glass. If I could find a mirror of this stuff… would it reflect?

The blade was rough, the fire next to me was hot, and the feeling of loneliness was palpable. It was a genuine march, a Warrior’s March.

And never let anyone tell you otherwise: we are what we do.

Our trek back to our base took a long enough that we were eating crumbs near the end. Otherwise, there were no issues; just hot days which we slept through, and nights in which the three of us could have been the last people around. I could hear the two of them talking about how they’d explain their choice to go with me, and how they would brag about fighting the sand and those that hid in it. They didn’t mind when I got a half mile ahead of them. In those moments I could believe that I was just a mare walking beside a river, with the only two things in the world being the waters and the moon above.

Only two things worth a damn, anyway.

Every night, the strangest of thoughts would get their time to shine. On the night before we made it back, the strangest of them took hold.

Go back to that village. In the recycled atmosphere of the helmet, the tip of my tongue exited my mouth. The train of thought that had led to the idea had derailed and was lost. The logistics of that plan swarmed my head. All I would have had to do was get rid of my armour, bury my equipment, and avoid my subordinates…

For about two minutes, my mind was in turmoil. It was attractive. I could leave the Rangers behind and live day by day, eating what I made. Bedding a stallion every night. My armour and its servos had stopped their noise as I stood there on the river bank. But for all the beauty of that plan, the holes in it could be driven through with a lorry. Soon enough, the incessant noise of my armor moving itself, with me inside, could be heard once again.

The Elder of the base requested my presence, immediately. Neither of those things surprised me. I had had ample time to think about what I would say. Ramguard, a place that had been both a Zebra and Equestrian naval base, now served gunboats and a handful of merchant craft that had been refitted by the Rangers. It was now a base for the Rangers and was one of the larger cities in southern Sall’han. Elder Churned Waters was a busy stallion. That he was taking the time to talk with me was telling; these words would have weight.

It had been three years since I had been inside the office. At least, this time, I had arrived without a mental health evaluation between arriving at the base and his office door. The flanking guards didn’t seem to notice me. I had arrived there and promptly given my equipment to maintenance. For all intents and purposes, nothing had changed for me, yet.

The whisper of a well-maintained automatic door was all the warning I had before a Paladin walked out with a pensive expression on his face. I walked in and sat in the chair. Elder Waters stared straight at me the entire way. His throat cleared with aplomb.

“And so the intrepid Knight returns.” He said, his voice high and sanctimonious.

“Yeah, it’s almost like the tub wasn’t waiting for me.”

“Icepick, I heard that you took the raider leader’s head to the village. Pray-tell, is that true?” Fatherly; that was the way he had always been described. There was truth in it.

“I did what I had to do to show that my words weren’t empty.” The fact that I couldn’t speak their language is irrelevant. There was defiance in my voice. He looked at me and my defensive posture for a good long moment. It seemed to stretch even as I gazed at his patchy mane, burn marks, and, as a last resort, his eyes.

“You likely know this, but my mother was the General in command here when the bombs erased Equestria. Some say it was hereditary that I became the Elder here. Of those people, some think that my mother and her example led me. Others contend that I got this position only as a matter of my mother’s meddling. Personally, I think the others were willing to put stock in my character because of her. Knight Icepick, do you understand the lesson in that?”

“For argument’s sake, let’s assume that I don’t.” He rolled his eyes at that.

“I give those under my command a great deal of latitude, and I put a great deal of effort into keeping judgements of character purely based on that person’s merit. Not their background. With you Icepick, that’s hard. We, by which I mean people who have a modicum of empathy, have a hard time looking at you in that light. If you had never gone through what you had… if you had gone up the chain like others…”

“Aren’t you supposed to be the one who calls the other on their excuses, Elder? ‘We have to meet our challenges in the present, not dwell on the past!’ That’s what you said to me the last time you spoke with me in this place. At the end of the day, my issue isn’t with you. No, you’re a good stallion. Our issue is with those that are content to sit in a climate-controlled bunker while the people who feed us die from bandits.”

“Icepick, just because you made one expedition into the sands and lived to tell about it doesn’t make it responsible.” He said firmly, patronisingly.

“I was barely prepared for it, and yet I had the head of the bandit stinking up my saddle bags. We have responsibilities. We have a codex. ‘We are the ember of the Equestria that was. What we fought for, we now are.’ Would any royal guard look at an Appaloosan bandit and let them go?”

“Villages, and their villagers, are only out there to avoid us. If they wanted aid, they could live on a sanctioned plot of land, paying their taxes and getting access to all the resources of Ramguard or Hyderbahn. They choose to live on the outskirts of civilisation.”

“Any yet we take our leave of their produce.” He rolled his eyes at me.

“We provide that last bonfire of civilisation. We make it possible for those people living out there to have a market to sell crops at. Without the Rangers, there is nothing.”

“They don’t get a choice in the matter; the least we can do is provide basic security.” At that, he looked down and drummed his hooves on the oaken desk.

“Icepick, because I respect you, and because in spite of it all, I’ve been impressed by the strength of will you’ve shown in the last three years; however, you cannot continue to act so tempestuously. If I had to choose someone in this base to be a chaplain or poet, or anything that involved a dearth of personal ambition, I would choose you in a heartbeat, but we are the last organisation that has both a logistical framework and a code of conduct. Maybe, when you’re my age, and we’re on our thirtieth five year plan, we can secure the entire length of the Senegral. There is no lack of work to be done, Knight.”

I sat there in that deteriorating chair and wondered what exactly I would say if there were no consequences for speaking. There was no way for him to understand. To him, we were the means to an end that anyone would fight for. The restoration of Equestria on foreign soil would require work. Maybe he never realized that what he and his predecessors were building wasn’t Equestria. Maybe he couldn’t. In that case, my words were better left unsaid. With a deep breath, I let the issue lie.

“Alright, what kind of punitive action do you have in mind?” I said with a feeling of defeat. I think my acquiescence made its way into my voice.

“If I’ve changed your mind, if you truly understand the duties of the Rangers and our place in this brave new world, then I can’t think of anything punishment would accomplish. Life is hard for everyone, Icepick. You personally should know that all too well. Now, if that has been settled I have an entire stack of reports detailing the expenses involved with raising that new steel plant.”

“Yes, I’ve heard about that, ‘Ya gotta hav’ steel ta mak’ it!’ Or something like that.” I said as I got up. My voice had a lilt to it. It masked the grinding of my teeth. Being in this room reminded me of that time too much all by itself. His mentioning of it wasn’t an aid.

“No more personal crusades, Icepick… Next time will require punitive action. Don’t make me order that.”

“Right, alright, have a nice afternoon, Waters.” I said to him as the door closed smoothly. Time to go find your CO, Ice. Maybe she’ll be nice.

My armour was going to be in maintenance for a couple days. I was stuck here and not at my actual post. Command saw a Ranger without armour as a liability more than anything else. Honestly, the more time I could put between my apology to Ironsight, the better I felt. Politics were going to make me apologize. I needed to keep the wheels greased, and even though we were technically the same rank… Her mother and brother gave her a certain weight that I wouldn’t of had even if I didn’t ‘misuse the discretion afforded to me’. Oh, fuck, I hated those people that could quote the codex at me for hours without seeing the hypocrisy involved with our organization's application of it.

I had always found a weird sense of contentment when I found a place where I could be alone in a complex of thousands. More often than not, ponies liked to use the bathrooms in or around their personal quarters, so they often left ones next to communal chambers open.

Maybe that was why I had taken a moment to look over the base’s library. I had learned a lot there. Unstructured time in the Rangers is a rarity, especially as a young Initiate. Reading anything and everything that wasn’t a goddess-damned manual was a relief valve. Well, that wasn’t the only way to blow off steam; honestly, the Rangers aren’t that opposed to sex. The codex is pretty liberal in that regard. Same sex, hetero, anything under the sun as long as new Rangers get made. ‘Through the furnace of the loins we are made.’ Those words were said by one of my sex-ed instructors.

All of it came down to the issues of having a small gene pool. The number of Rangers and Equestrians altogether was less than twenty thousand. We’re given a list of others that we can breed with. It was a way to relieve the pressure for ponies that wanted to know their offspring. Even then, the numbers that just took the fertilized zygote and ran with their partner was higher than the former. Really, I, like most Rangers, didn’t know my parents. The cycle perpetuates itself. Is it that hard to give your child to the organisation as long as you went through the same process and came out the way you did? Anonymised, Atomised. Good for the Rangers.

Most of my friends didn’t keep lovers for long. The impulse to breed can be satiated at about any time. Mares have IUDs, and the Rangers keep the population free from STDs with routine screenings and medical care. Equality in bed, and in arms; that was our motto.

It always gave me a weird feeling when I realized that I could already have a number of foals and not know it. I stepped out of the bathroom with that thought in my mind.

And it just so happened that I just happened to run into an old… friend. Paladin Reflex and I might have been called old flames in another time or place.

He had just exited the Knights workshop. He looked agitated. I decided to chance it and caught up to him.

“Hey, Reflex!” I said cheerily to him. His body turned at once towards me. He wasn’t the largest stallion; I had about fifteen centimeters of height on him, and I’m only a little taller than most stallions. Still, he was well built, and had the jaw of a pre-war sports star.

“Is that you, Ice?” He asked, knowing damn well what the answer was. I just ambled forward and gave the now-smiling stallion a hug. Reflex and I, we had history; he had been my bunkmate when we were both in training. He returned it and squeezed me.

“What you been up to, Ice?” He asked me casually after we broke the embrace. He was wearing his carbon-grey undersuit and had a pair of sunglasses on his brow. His short green mane and turquoise coat looked really good under the fluorescents. He had always been a good looking buck. Today was not an exception.

“I’ve been, uh, leading troops into the desert. I have a bag that smells like head and uh…” I shrugged my shoulders. He was looking at me with incredulity. “Do you wanna get dinner tonight, if you’re free?”

“Sure, you wanna slum it tonight?” He asked me quickly, he was never one to miss a beat.

“Okay, I’m happy to be surprised.”

“I gotta get you back for that surprise tackle,” His voice was joking and quite pleasant. He was the closest thing to a... I don’t know. I liked to hear his voice and see his face, it made me smile, made me warm and in more ways than a purely sexual one.

Yeah, we’d have a good night, I needed to fuck someone, it had been a while.

It didn’t matter, I smiled back; my misgivings could wait. We walked together for a little while until we got to his office. In that time, he told me about a greasy spoon he had found on a training patrol in Ramsgard, the city outside the base. Officers could leave, and I was technically on leave, as well, so we made a plan. Spending time in the city was usually pleasant. We entered his office and closed the door. He gave me a quick peck on the cheek and ordered me out, playfully. Just before I got left, he told me to be back here by eight.

That meant I was going to be here at ten after eight.

I had met him next to his office in a suit of utility barding. I had my mane back in a bun, and it was brushed. He had given me a look of consideration before taking my hoof and kissing it. I glared at him, and he led me out and away.

We had spent the walk there complaining about things. I had told him how his sister was doing, and he had told me about the ongoing efforts in the city.

The smell of Ramsguard always took a few days to get used to. Somehow, the combination of salt from the sea, unwashed bodies, and a large market that always seemed open could never leave your mind when you walked in the city. This city, the first city made since the bombs fell, was full of traders and craftsponies and an omnipresent stink of desperation. Having this outside your window can make you feel superior; maybe that’s why they built it. This thought felt out of place in my peaceful walk with Reflex beside me.

For better or worse, the place was growing. Ramsguard had recently had a census. Thirty thousand people in the city, not including the Ranger base. He was talking to me about this.

“This is the first place that’s rebounded. The cities to the south they’re still ruled by warlords and produce nothing. Here, we have wells for water and food shipments from all over the Senegral, and in this city we have people recycling steel and making things. An Arabian here has a life expectancy ten years longer than one further south. Ice, do you see what we’re accomplishing here?” He finished his speech with a flourish and a wink.

“I’m glad that this place is making things, and I’m glad that people here are protected, but can you not see that that the food in part is stolen? Where exactly did you get that statistic from?” He took my words in stride and responded with words that could have comforted Water’s as he went to sleep.

“Don’t you think that when those people living out on the fringe need to find a new hoe or plow they’ll be happily surprised when they can just trade for one?”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right.” I said to him coyly.

His expression changed to one of contentedness, he had won me over, or at least thought that he had. And just seeing that look on his face was nice. It made me feel strangely warm, even as the heat of the day bled away. Being around him in particular brought it on. This silly, silly buck that wanted the best for the Rangers and its people because he believed that the Rangers were the best for the people.

The rest of the walk consisted of small talk and the kind of gossip that permeates any organisation.

Even if I didn’t like the city I was walking through and the looks we received, the night air always felt nice to me. Eventually, we did come to an adobe structure that was bigger than the buildings around it. Reflex grinned at me from the doorway. I rolled my eyes at him and entered.

This place smelled really good. Somehow, the building had kept that hidden. Somehow, Reflex’s smile didn’t tear the muscles in his face. The place was filled with mud-brick benches and a bunch of Arabians just waiting to give us looks of disgust. I trailed him as he found an empty table in a corner of the place. The dining room had two entrances; the one we had came in from, and another just two or three meters from our table. Reflex was a lot of things; none of those things made him complacent in Ramsguard.

We sat down opposite to each other. He held a hoof up in the air. I looked at him curiously. I saw someone from the counter at the front come to us. Reflex let his hoof come down on the table between us. The mare that came over to us had a paper pad in her mouth and a pencil in a strap on her clothing. Her face was long and otherwise not pleased.

“I’ll order for you.” He told me quickly. Before looking at her and speaking in rapid fire arabian. I let my eyes close for a second as I felt inadequate once again. How can I be critical of an organisation's treatment of a people when I can’t even speak their language? On impulse I reached out with a hoof of mine and laid it on his. It felt nice feeling his body under mine, comforting in an alien place, which was funny, considering he was the one who dragged me out here.

After that little bit of speaking, the mare walked off and we were free to talk. It had been a different evening than I had expected, but wasn’t that usually a good thing?

Unleavened bread is good, and the things these people could do with greens made the cafeteria anywhere in Rangerland taste like bunk. I had to admit that Reflex had good taste in food. There had been a lull in our conversation when the food arrived, rightly so.

“So, how exactly did you find this place?” I asked him as he finished cramming the last of the food down his gullet.

“Ice, when we take initiates on patrols we take them through the safest sections of Ramsguard. When one of them asked what Arabians ate and another responded by saying that they ate shit, I set the record straight. I asked an arabian about a place to eat, they told me about this place. I had the pony who responded with the shit comment put on latrine duty for a month, and the one who had asked the question and the others come here with me. Honestly, I didn’t expect it to be good, just that they wouldn’t literally be eating feces but you know what they say about pleasant surprises.”

“They’re rare... And pleasant?” I said to him before letting out a solitary laugh.

“Hah, you still have that same sense of humor. Don’t worry, I won’t let the others know that you’re not a pessimist under that shell.”

I laughed loudly enough to draw the attention of the other patrons.

It was only luck that had me look at the pair of ponies that entered from the entrance we had come from. Both were males, and both were wearing the thicker clothing that most put on when the sun came down. Their walk was stilted, and it put me on edge. Their eyes scanned around before touching our alcove and then suddenly looking away.

“Reflex, those guys are freaking me out. Don’t look at them, just follow my line of sight.” I didn’t see his face. My head was sitting in such a way that I looked nearly asleep while keeping them in my peripheral vision. In that vision I saw them walk over to an alcove adjacent to ours. I thought I caught a bulge on one of their sides. Both of them had hoods laying around their necks.

“Do you think that they’re armed?” Reflex asked me. I yawned and turned to face him.

“One looks like he is, and the other is probably armed as well,” I whispered to him.

He then pushed his lips against mine. I opened my mouth. We pulled our bodies over the table and angled them so that one of our sides couldn’t be seen by the possible attackers. He pulled out a service pistol and laid in on the table obscured by our bodies. I had mine in a thigh holster. He seemed to read my mind. The hoof that had gone for his gun was now pulled up and around my neck. From their point of view, it might have looked like I was about to rub one out in front of them.

No, I pulled my piece from its place. We had a single shot at this, especially considering the way one of them glanced at his side again and again. Both of us simultaneously bent down and grabbed our pistols. Mouth-held or not, we were both good shots. All we were waiting for was a chance to rock and roll.

Author's Notes:

Hey guys, it feels weird posting things on this site again. And well, to any reader who made it this far, thank you for giving this story and by extension me the time of day.