I had never expected this to happen. Hunkered down with others from the entire empire. Yes, the wind was bitter, but the intermittent sound of artillery chilled us more. When the shells began to explode near us, we knew that it’d be better underground. And so we went under. Under in this case meant a system of tunnels built under our entrenched position. They were a defense that had held. That could be said for the upjumped holes. Waiting in those holes was a normality. In the last week we had been under bombardment roughly forty hours.

The moments of combat were a blessing.

The warming of your blood is a compensation, even if warm blood is soon spilled.

This was the war that had dragged on. It started with the nation to the south and their war; Celestians, sun worshipers with their gold encrusted idols. Our ruler Grimkeep the fifth had decided that the winds were on our side as the Celestians were bleeding in a war with their rebellious colony a continent away. Sall’han, an arid place, which had been their prized rose, became their thorn.

How else could it have gone? It was obvious in hindsight… Celestians are a lot of things. But they have a memory that’s nearly as good as ours. The colony and the homeland settled their differences quickly. The Crystal throne had menaced them in the past.

The Treaty Of Redress, was unexpected.

The combined powers of the Sun had us pushed into our own lands. We could bleed them, but they were not stopping. The radios would speak of our heroic underwater boats tearing into their food supplies and munition factories. And apparently the Freehold of Zebrica had declared for us. All of it seemed for nought from the trenches. From inside someone spoke to me.

“You think they’ll go over the top today Perm?” A buck by the name of Ruby had broken my thoughts. I turned my head, feeling the weight of my helmet in the process, to look into his eyes.

“The bombardment usually precedes an advance. Did you and Gallant repair that machine gun?”

“Shit, I need to check with him. Supply is going to shit. Losing Diamond…”

Clouded Diamond. The only person out here that had any sway with the logistic corp. He had been outside replacing the barrel of one of the company’s water cooled machine guns. The shot had came from the trench a mile away. Maybe if we had seen a glint… No. Its was the price we paid. Anyone here could pay it at any time. We all knew it, but to see it on our doorstep.

“Just be ready, get warm. It’s something those idolaters up there won’t have.”

“Yeah.” He said before walking over to his blankets.

I made it for our radio station. Upon entering, Trace gave me a lukewarm smile. To be fair, it was a better than the expression rest of us had. We ambled up to each other, her steps bouncy even after all of this. What would it require to put a stop to it? My face contorted from the images that train of thought created.

She nuzzled my neck, she always felt warm.

“They’re pushing again aren’t they?” Her voice had a song like quality to it. Her wings and burnt orange coat sealed the deal, everyone who knew her called her Sunny.

For some reason we had gotten along. Her parents had been servants of the state. There aren’t many pegasi in the north. Couriers and weather controllers are well valued even today. It hadn’t many years since the displacement. A century ago the north had been engulfed by the remains of the Crystal Empire. Their great leader had died a long while before that, but the majority of his heirs had little ambition. Grimkeep the first of his name.

In my readings he had always been a great one. Even as his older siblings wasted resources on trivialities, he had quietly plotted. As accidents piled up and various foreign entities killed all of those above him on the line of succession. There were accusations made but nothing was ever proven. After his older sister died from a Stomach illness he took the crystal throne.

That led to a militarisation, a solid decade of it. In the north of Equus a series of brief, nearly bloodless shows of force gave him territory that would have made Sombra salivate. His offer had been simple, honorary Crystal citizenship with all of it’s benefits and duties. He was a fair enough stallion, or so the books said. He took the rest of us and raised us up to civilisation. Brought us steam and learning, the printing press. Things that the Sunny south had had for a century or more. The books told us that as Grimkeep the first passed on, he had told us that the only way forward was to disavow the parlour tricks that had dominated us after the break up of the three tribes.

History had proven him correct. Factories in every city, a furnace in every home and a railway junction everywhere that mattered. Through knowledge we had prospered. Through trade with the south we had found the world was more than happy to trade with us, more than weary to have us as anything more than a scattered series of mineral extraction zones.

Blood is Iron and Iron is our blood.

“I wouldn’t doubt it.” I said to my Bunkmate.

“You’re shivering. Ahh, Perm you’ve got to let me look at that wound.” She wasn’t really bunkmate, we had no bunks down below; however we shared both a pile of blankets and a common cranny. A pressure wave pushed through us then. The shelling wasn’t going to be one of those short feint attacks. They meant to collapse our positions. The not-so-funny joke was on them. We built well.

Well enough.

“Okay, I have a minute.” I said to her in a near monotone. I wanted sleep more than almost anything.

And so as she told me about the things spewing out of the radio, we walked down a recessed room. There in a secluded corner we had ended up.

I had met her back in basic after a conscription tore me out of Maidenpool.

We had found each other because we were both outsiders. The fiftieth infantry regiment had no else from Maidenpool, and no other pegasus. I was happy I had found her. She could be a nuisance, but she knew more about circuitry and electrical arcana then I had ever met. Funny, considering my glyph was an errant spark. I liked talking to her about any number of things. As a soldier on a front, we were both well acquainted with tedium.

So, as we made to lay down she grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me down. She smiled at me. “I wanted to sleep. I don’t want to die tired.”

She dropped herself onto me with aplomb. “You are ridiculous, I hope you know that.”

“Regardless. Now mirror, how does my face look?” I said to the person using me like a bed of straw.

“A mirror without light isn’t very useful?” She bent down and locked lips with me. Her front legs stroked down my coat. I pulled a blanket from the pile with my telekinesis, it was draped on the both of us. My horn continued to glow. The depredations of the tunnel seemed to dim. She was the silver lining for this entire venture.

As she let her weight drop onto me, we both sighed contentedly.

Soon thereafter, with our bodies warmed and dry we passed out.

The trenches were quiet at 0300. The Barrages, for all of their intensity, had stopped the week past. So the Celestians had learned their blooded lesson. Our trenches were assaulted less than our cities. The entire western seaboard had had the guns of Celestian fleet turned on them. Every radio broadcast, they weren’t hesitant to tell us in graphic detail the depredation of the enemy. In Maidenpool, an ammunition manufactory had been hit, a water treatment plant turned into a hole in the ground, and- the broadcaster had teared up when uttering this - a kindergarten.

There were other places that had been struck by seaborne artillery and the bombing raids had been a constant in this conflict. But your home is your home. My parents lived there; they drank from the tap like anyone else. For them, water from a tap was a kind of practical witchcraft. They had killed children, many children. When my thoughts drifted in those lonely nights, my thoughts returned to a single notion.

We were safer here in our holes than they were in their homes.

Safer; more safe.

My rifle was slung over my right shoulder. It shifted laterally as I made my patrol with Drying Wool. We were from entirely different sides of the empire, and yet there was a companionable silence hanging in the air between us. That night, the moon was black.

Hours passed and our bodies tired. After Wool heard something, we stiffened and searched the area. The both us observed a normal section of trench. After conferring with each other, he spoke to me supererogatorily.

“You have my prayers,” he said pensively, without looking at me.

I locked eyes with him, a question on the verge of being said spread my lips.

“We see you sitting with us in the main room, you aren’t there there. Permittivity, I worry about the person who stands beside me. Maidenpool is big, what you’re afraid of…” He stopped. His hooves received a lengthy, piercing glare.

I looked at him, my face stony, for a good number of seconds.

“Thank you,” I said in a dour tone. I didn’t want to hurt him. He was a good buck, and a better soldier than I ever was. But, for me, certain subjects were charged. Some conferred a charge that hurt, and one or two would kill.

I started up again. The trench was life and life didn’t stop when an obstacle appeared; except, of course, in the case of death. Wool followed. Time passed and we came to the edge of our patrol route, and doubled back.

Maybe, if I had been faster, maybe if our ears had been angled the right way, if I hadn’t had my attention fixed on the letters I had sent back home and the subsequent lack of response, maybe. We had made it to a Tee in the trench where the furthermost line connected to a utility trench that led to our regiment’s living quarters. The trenches weren’t built to any specification; the section we were standing in was a meter and a half wide.

I remember, distinctly, the crunch of a booted hoof striking a snow covered plank. It came from the utility trench to our right. Wool turned to face the noise and was stabbed in the throat with a combat knife. He saved my life, even as his life spurted out in time with his dying hearts beats. My rifle and I spun to face it. In the corner of my eyes I saw the iridescent glow of telekinesis coming from the utility trench. The magic user was frantically trying to pull their knife out of Wool’s meaty neck. So, with the mechanical precision born of training, the clasp of my rifle’s sheath was opened. Finally, they freed their knife as I leveled my rifle at them.

The sound of the rifle was deafening, the muzzle flash was blinding, and the scream of pain they made as the rifle round tore through the center of their chest was left unseen and unheard. I had time to cycle the bolt of the rifle before a dark silhouette lunged at me from behind the shot pony.

Their weight caused me to hit the wall of the trench at speed. I tried to break their head with the heavy butt of my rifle, only for them to catch it with a hoof swipe. I had a half second to bring my head down. White hot pain slipped through the chemicals my body was releasing. A line just under my jaw was leaking blood. None of this stopped the large earth pony from slashing at me again with his blade. I attempted to sidestep, only to have him cut into the top of my muzzle.

He placed his rear leg in my way, and the moment of instability when I ran into it was enough for him to lunge once more. The lance of pain this brought was different from the other slashes, I didn’t know then what he had done. My eyes closed.I lit my horn, brightly.

The blue light was a nova in that trench. In that moment, I knew I had to act. In the moment before I seized the blade of the pony I had shot, I observed the length of blade embedded in my side. That could be my death. The thought was passing, like a commentary on the merit of aluminum siding; decidedly trivial, and that too passed. The knife on the ground found itself encased in my magic before being forced into his neck.

Something in me snapped; a wall built in my head broke, the gas contained expanded beyond its containment, my telekinesis shifted. The chilled blade now had electrical potential flowing through it for a fraction of a fraction of second, before the blood and gristle of the body shorted the circuit. My wounded face warped into a blood-soaked sneer. I looked down at the bodies with the aid of a softer horn glow. The shot pony had been a mare, and the one who had stabbed me was male. His heart had stopped after the electricity permeated his flesh. I could see it in the way his body lay.

Cooked flesh is easier to pull blades from, I learned that day. It was a brutal slash to the dying mare’s throat that ended her life. I do not regret it.

I forced myself deeper into the utility trench, my blood leaving a trail any hunter could have followed, any vexed butcher, any spectre of death.

I collapsed a dozen meters from the sight of the fight. As a consequence of the solitary gunshot, a trio of drowsy ponies found my body blood-covered and going into shock. One of them had medical training.

Waking up after a session of violent bloodletting is never pleasant. To be fair, the same is true for all grievous injury. In this case I could feel thin lines of dulled pain on my muscle and on my chin, and a deep fissure in my side. So that’s what it feels to have a cavity packed with gauze. Everything around me was dulled. I could tell that I was drugged.

With an effort I turned my head in a sweeping arc. I was in a wide corridor lying on a thin cot, a thin cot that was seemingly replicated several dozen times in both directions. On those cots ponies were being cared for as best as they could be. Seeing, the sheer number of ponies in discomfort and various degrees of dismemberment would have been sobering, in any other mental state. In a detached way I noted the intravenous fluid mix I was being given. Sometime later I theorized that the tube was the way this feeling of liquid bliss was entering me. And enhancing my existence.

I made eye contact with a nurse pony after an indefinite amount of time. She made her way to me through the crowded medical station before stopping in front of me.

“How are you feeling… Permit…” She asked this with an apologetic tone.

“You can just call me Perm,” I simplified this matter with just a couple words.

She looked at me appraisingly for a moment. I would later learn that my name was written on a sheet of pertinent medical information at the front of my bed.

“Well, how are you feeling Perm?”

“Honestly, I’ve seen better days. Not recently, mind you,” I stated to the nurse. I wasn’t lying to the mare. The recovery from the knife wounds was a good deal better than receiving the wounds.

“Alright, that is good to hear. The next meal is another two hours. And let me answer your next question for you: you have been unconscious for just about two days.”

She ended her statement with a false cheeriness that I could sense even in my novel mental state. She had obviously had a hard day, the wear was evident in her eyes and her face. If she had been better rested she would have been quite pretty. As it stood I had one slightly odd request.

“Miss, are there any periodicals that I could read?” I asked of the mare. A mare that could have used some of the substance flowing through my veins.

“Tomorrow I believe I could find a newspaper for you, most of the morning issues we received have already been employed. However, could a penny dreadful sate your hunger?” She said to me before glancing down at the list of pertinent information and curiously, my face.

“You previously stated that a meal would be served two hours hence; why would I eat a book?” I said confused tone.

The mare uttered a slight chuckle, her bunned hair reminded me of Trace- nothing else did the two mares share. Tracy was a lightly coated and dark maned pegasus, with a rambunctious demeanor. This mare was a dutiful earth mare whose colour scheme reminded me of the ashy skies in The Imperial City.

“No, in all seriousness, I would quite enjoy perusing such a book. On another note, how ravaged is my face? I’ve seen you glance at it as often as I have watched you look at the other patients’ missing limbs.”

“Perm, it is worse now than it will be. That said, the scars on the bridge of your muzzle and under your jaw will stay with you. As of this moment I am watching your wounds, like a hawk, for any sign of infection.”

“I expected as much. Well, in any case, thank you for telling me the truth.”

An hour later, an hour before my next meal. I might add, superfluously, the nurse had brought me that book. I gave her a quizzical look. Apparently, her definition of a penny dreadful was different than mine. This book was old. There was no crude cover art on the front, only a hardcover and a title written in flowing script.

“Thank you, miss?”

“Sallow Smile. Now have a good read, but let your body rest. You need it more than you think, you soldiers always do.” The mare left in much the same way as she did before. Some part of me hoped that assisting me would leaven her spirits. There would be no confirmation, one way or the other.

The book, I opened with a tendril of blue magic. It was not a surprise to me that the text in the book was tiny, and the words themselves arcane. But, those were the easier things to infer from the title. The foreword was by a professor of cultural studies. It was a compilation and translation of folk tales and questionable historical documents.

As a book it wasn’t that old, no, it seemed to be an old text book for this mare’s class.

“The spear in the stone?” I said to myself. Neither of the wounded earth ponies beside me noticed my words.

All told, I spent a fortnight in that hospital. Sallow Smile and I had a couple good laughs and a similar number of serious conversations. Many of those conversations were somber. She came from the other side of the empire, just as Drying Wool had. The stallion laying on the cot to the immediate right of me I also got to know. He had taken a touch of shrapnel to his barrel and neck. Head Wind was his name, a large stallion with the kind of musculature sculpturists would die to get their hooves on. Not to say that he was a pretty stallion, quite the opposite, in fact. His demeanor was coarse and he wasn’t on the friendliest terms with Smile. But he was a veteran and he was a person who was in a convenient location. The large earth pony and I got on as well as could be hoped.

In a turn of events that I had not predicted, he was interested in the book as well. If only for the entertainment value, it had illustrations. The nurses saw no problem in both of us sitting together after meals, reading the book. To be more truthful, I read it out loud for us both. I wasn’t sure if he was literate, and I wasn’t going to ask. No, it was pleasant just having someone being next to you. It helped keep me distracted from all of my lingering doubts. One of the first things I had done upon waking had been taking some stationary and writing a letter to Trace, and one to my parents. Throughout my stay, I’d received nothing. Well, nothing except the roundabout attention of someone who socially wouldn’t be caught dead reading about the fairies and forest gods of yore.

So, on a colder night than usual, the two of us were sitting on my cot. The light wasn’t the best, and I knew for a fact that he hadn’t bathed in the time that I had known him. We were enjoying what was the third tale enclosed in the book.

“So that buck’s cock just up and disappeared? I mean I heard about it falling off after gettin’ smelly like and green, but…” He leaned over to me, practically speaking into my ear, before chuckling loudly. It was an odd sensation, his breath was blazing against my ear. That same ear twitched before I made it lie down.

“I would assume that it fell off and he just didn’t notice. Also, that is the most horrid thing that I have ever heard. Though, I think the magical disappearing cock is the worst that I have ever read.” I said, bumping shoulders with what had become my institutional best friend. ‘

“The best thing I ever read was a sign that said: ‘Hawt Mare n’ mores’.” His serious expression in the incandescent lighting gave way under my sly one.

“I assume, because it is you that I’m talking about, that you went inside such an establishment. Pray tell, what was the ‘ n’ mores’?”

He stared at me for a right second before speaking.

“That was a griffon, she had the biggest damn shanks on her. And the noises she made were gooder than a turkey dinner.” Something about that boast seemed off, but honestly the confirmation that he could read was sufficiently novel. At that moment I read nothing into it.

“Well, my carnal conquerer of a comrade, do you wish to start the next story?” I asked him, both to change the subject, and well, to obtain the information. It was getting to be around midnight, and sleeping does spur healing. And healing was slowly creating and removing the itch on the inside of my chest cavity and on the bridge of my muzzle. The blade, for all the pain it caused, had avoided my lungs.

“I’m just gonna assume that first part was a nice thing. And yeah, starting something doesn’t mean it gon’ get done in that sitting. As much as I enjoy your company sitting like this, it’s doing a number on my ass.” He said to me quickly before continuing. “Actually,” he said before laying on his back with his rear legs laying off the end of my cot. “This works, just uh, sit back too.” So I did as requested. It was comfortable, physically, but the both of us had our heads and barrels pointed up and down at the book being held between our bodies. That space, being very small, led to the book being balanced on the ends of both of our ribcages.

“It just told us the ending, right in the title! And don’t even get me started if it’s one of those stories where a big buck with lots of meat on im’ hacks a monster to death. But, doesn’t go on to rut the shit out of the mare locked in with monster!”

“Only a single story was similar to what you described. In any case, virtue isn’t something to sneer at. Chivalrous, you are not.”

“Yeah, yeah, the last mare I fucked said the same thing. But her voice was a tad bit shriller than yours.” I just looked at him, disparagingly. I turned the page to an see an illustration of this story's’ protagonist. She was an average sized cerulean blue mare with a mane and horn the colour of ivory. A set of iron reinforced leather armour adorned her body.

“I take it back, I can take another speech about virtues if I getta see more of that flank!” He said to me in a hurried tone. He had this odd propensity to suddenly gain energy, though it was usually precipitated by sexual stimuli. I merely chuckled and moved the book up for a moment. A lightning-like dart of my eyes, and I had my answer.

“Good, good, I was wondering,” I said under my breath. The book slid back into place between us. So, in that next second, he lightly tapped my back leg with his.

“I ain’t a whore, iffin you wanna see the goods, pay me or dine me.” He said to me in a harsh manner; However, there was a softness in it, a playful softness.

“Whore or not, I needed to check your blood flow, you did enjoy the image of the mare. Unless, you would rather have Smiles check that to see if it still works. You wouldn’t want it to fall off…” He kicked me again. And this time he had the contrary expression.

“It works, trust me. If you have to check, I guess you could. I can’t fault a horny buck like yourself.”

I felt a flush as he said this. I was more than a little glad that the most powerful light source in the hall at night was my horn. It was that touch of huskiness in his voice that caused my blood flow to shift. Some part of my mind insisted this had been some completely normal teasing between bucks, but it wasn’t quite up to snuff. I killed my horn light and turned to him.

“Oh, no it just disappeared. My horn. Now you're the horniest buck in this bed!” I said with vehemence that was only half falsity.

He slunk out of bed, his weight lifting on the bed made the entire cot recoil. He outweighed me, that was for sure, and his sheath was objectively handsome. I had a number of strange thoughts that night. My normal trains of thought being redirected to foreign rails; exotic rails and somewhat frightening ones as well. He began to snore in his own cot almost immediately. That certainly didn’t help allay any of those thoughts.

We did not speak of that interaction, but we did resume what had been our routine. Consuming food, reading the story with the attractive mare protagonist, and speaking in amicable terms. Though there were others around us, we mostly stayed together. Sallow called us each others’ shadows. It was a strange fortnight. I think that the novelty of a situation is an indicator for how long it feels. In that hospital, reading that long yet enthralling series of tales, it was as if time itself had stopped. It behaved in that manner for at least the first week and a half.

Three things tore me from this warped sense of time. The first was something I had dreaded even before arriving in this place. This was an answer to the question that, likely, led to me spending time in this place. I had spent every moment of Mail Call in the throes of hope and dread, this event reminded me of that quantum mechanics thought experiment. Graphene’s Goose. It involved a box with a goose inside. If an electron spin detector registered a positive spin, it would release a deadly gas into the chamber. If it was a negative spin, then it would be left unreleased. The confounding thing is that from the outside there would be no way to know either way. Graphene had invented it as a way to show how absurd the predictions of quantum mechanics were when applied to a real world scenario. Everytime mail call was announced, I felt like an experimenter staring at the sealed box.

When the mail pony came by and hoofed me a letter, I could feel my diaphragm contract, I looked at the letter for a moment. It was enough time for my mind to become a dusted chalkboard, rapidly being filled with possibilities, all of them being more horrific than the last.

I felt a wave of surprise when a hoof softly impacted my shoulder. Head Wind had placed it there, which was the first time he had displayed our rapport like that. The mail pony had as many letters to deliver as I had worries plaguing my mind. I was sitting on the end of my cot and Wind had come up behind me, leaving a foreleg on my bed to support himself. His breathing was audible from behind me, the wet rasp present in his baritone was nearly as comforting as his hoof on my fur.

“Come on mate, if ya don’t start breathin’ again, I’m gonna pull that paper out and read it myself, mostly on account of me bein’ curious and you not being awake.” He said this in his conversational tone. If I wasn’t familiar with this stallion, I would have taken offense.

“That implies that you can read multiple sentences without having a stroke,” I said this before turning my body to face Head Wind. I unconsciously laid my other hoof on his. It was shaking, even as my voice stayed as placid as a frozen lake.

“We both know that I can read just fine when I’m stroking. Now open the letter, Perm,” he spoke the last line with a dour, tender tone. He was guilt tripping me into facing the truth.

I pulled the letter onto my lap with a single flash of telekinetic force. I opened the letter with the bread knife I kept close to my bed.

It was a letter from the city of Maidenpool. It said, in effect, that my parents had died in their apartment. It had been struck by naval artillery. There were condolences and there was an attached apology for not getting this information to me sooner. Apparently, the indiscriminate shelling had built up quite a backlog of unidentified bodies.

At the very least, the Celestians had the decency to leave their teeth in identifiable shape. The shaking had become my very own earth quake, as if the earth itself was swallowing me up, as it had my parents. In that moment I could have killed a city of Celestians. In that moment, I wanted to storm the enemy positions with a knife in my teeth and a feeling of invincibility granted by faith in a just creator.

I had made several surveys of this hospital. It had nearly three thousand patients, and was covered in a light dusting of snow, and I knew that I could leave if I desired it. A one-man crusade was the only right course of action to my mind.

I moved to get up. I felt the pressure on my shoulder increase. Wind was keeping me down. And on some level, that was enough to keep me sedate. If I wanted to leave, I needed to do it without causing a scene.

“Mate, you always talk about thinking. It’s your thing, you scrawny son of a camel. Don’t stop doing it!”

His voice had a cold intensity to it. He had put my problems onto himself. He was expending effort on my bettering my existence, or at the very least, preventing me from worsening it. I had only known him for less than a fortnight; this was absurd, every part of it. I wanted to go out and die, to find something to die for, because as I stared into the abyss of my future life, I could see nothing worth living for.

My lungs released the air that had been trapped in their lower sections for a painful epoch. As I did this, the pressure on my shoulder diminished.

My jaw was clenched, the muscles in my body were flush with blood and ready to move. Every part of me was waiting to avenge. Every part of me was equally impotent. Every part was equally unable to change what had happened.

My healing wounds felt warm, comforted by the adrenaline and the endorphins released by my brain.

“I hear ya, if ya wanna go outside, with me, I’m ready,” He said with rapidity. If I was going to make a break for it, he was going to be the one that stopped me. Ergo, he wanted to stop me doing something that I would regret. At some future point.

With limbs that felt like live wires, I moved off of the bed in a controlled, borderline graceful motion. A single continuous telekinetic tendril positioned my coat over my body. It was thick and it stank. It would work. He followed in my wake, and, at this point, we were cleared to leave the place for walks, short ones, at least. In the span of time it took me to walk to the nearest exit with my Earth Pony guardian, the odor of decay struck me as I trotted past the F-Wing of this field hospital. This place was a place of decay. The exit called to me. Outside the air was chilled, but at the very least, it was lively.

Perhaps a kilometer from the hospital, a hill was visible. Normally, it was the kind of hill that was made to be crested, just large enough to be impressive from the bottom and with a steepness that emboldened you rather than intimidated. I had made my way up to the top of it on two occasions, Head Wind accompanying me on both.

Some might find it odd for patients to do this kind of strenuous activity. All I can say is this; the first time we had hated it, and only finished because of the kind of free floating competition two companions have between them. The second time was considerably easier. Letting two wounded soldiers take charge of what would be called physical therapy actually worked, in this instance. Just because something is within your operational purview does not mean that you will truly treat it as such. No, the staff had greater issues on their minds.

The two of us had maintained a sheet of silence between the two of us as we made our way there. An unspoken agreement was made as we walked south, towards the hill, and to the front, where we had both bled. With legs that were impelled by raw emotion, I had taken the lead. Even then, I spared a glance behind me every so often. His pace was mechanical and calculated, in comparison. Every time I let my eyes fall on him, his met them. From the slight distortion in the shape of his left cheek I could tell that he had the inner flesh of it between his molars.

As we came to the foot of the hill path, I stopped and turned towards him.

“What would you have me do, oh great determiner of others’ lives?” I barked at him, my voice cracking with desperate intensity.

“Just climb the damn hill. Then we’ll have a little chat. Just the two of us,” He said simply, with a less affected accent than usual. The idea that I had cracked this boisterous stallion’s veneer stung me.

The trip to the top seemed to be of minute duration, and accomplished with greater ease than any before. My skin, under a layer of sweaty insulation, was achieving a new equilibrium with the outside air. The odd gust of wind bit into my face. But, even as these sensations registered, my mind only gave them the smallest of attentions. A mental image of my mother sitting peaceably with father in the room as the sirens went off couldn’t leave my mind’s eye. My parents were similar in that they paid little mind to something that seemed improbable. It would have been quick, I desperately hoped. Concussion waves acted in that manner. They were affable, a fine way to die, even if they had a habit of nudging your funeral in the closed casket direction. The notion that their building had collapsed and left them buried alive, or anything analogous, it was sealed from my conscious mind like a battleship taking on water; the flooding sections were separated by bulkheads. What was drowning inside said sections, I couldn’t know. The reasons manifold, as always.

For reasons I could only guess at, he had fallen significantly behind. In hindsight, I believe he was thinking about his words before he said them.

So, there was a moment where I was alone, king of the hill, the coniferous trees dusted with so much snow, my oh-so-static subjects. Like the rear segment of a compass needle, my eyes were drawn to the south. Somewhere out there, hordes of Celestians sharpened their blades.

Even if I had lost something, there was still country and in country, there was hope. War was hell, but only the most naive among us thought it was going to be like the stories in that book. No, in war, the innocents always suffer the most, and fighters leave what they once were as a matter of course, of necessity.

My internal monologue ended as I heard the crunch of snow from behind me.

“Perm, I’ve seen ponies act like this before. It don’t end well. I feel like camel shit, making you open that letter. Can ya tell me what was in it?”

“My parents were killed in an artillery bombardment,” I said without looking at him. Somehow, that rage had cooled. I knew now that I could wait until the hospital truly cleared me. My voice was monotone, softened yet containing a core of steel.

“Fuck. Permittivity, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. Shit, I knew that it wasn’t something like your cat dying or some shit, but fuck.”

“You were right, even if you didn’t know what precipitated… this,” as I finished the statement my eyes drifted down my chest all the way to the hooves sunk into the snow. I didn’t expect what happened in the next moment. The sound of him approaching wasn’t surprising, in and of itself it was like the sun being slowly occluded by the earth to my left. Anger and fatalism was cast aside by the feeling of Head Wind’s muzzle pressing against my neck. The gesture cleared my head of definite dark thoughts and replaced them with many muddled ones. These weren’t cast of black ice, these thoughts had a tinge of connection.

“Hey, I gotta have a certain somepony finish that story, ya know, the one with the real-ly ruttable ass…” His voice was husky, yet reaching. This stallion had become my friend, my fellow knight of the cafeteria table. Without truly thinking, I pushed my neck against him before tapping my flank against his.

“Wind, thank you for keeping an eye on me, well, keeping an eye on everything but my rump,” I stopped my speech as I tried to form the right sentence.

“Awe, but that’s your best feature,” he said lightly. He had pressed his side and shoulder against me. So, we had come to another unspoken agreement. We would speak of this taboo attraction in jesting euphemisms, for the most part. It was better for us this way. We were both deeply comfortable with each other and very unsettled by the way ponies would see us, how our internalized moral senses were pushing against the very idea. In my case, I was grasping for anything that could distract me from my second newest revelation. The poison.

“No, don’t lie, what drew you in was my comely visage.” My head turned as I said this. He was taller than me by a slight margin, but his head was lowered.

“Can I say anything that’d help?” This entire situation felt off, he had followed me as I bled off enough emotion to transmogrify an inconsolable rage into a brittle numbness.

“Neither of us wronged the other… T-thank you,” I said with a stutter. In the back of my eyes I could feel muscles tensing; I knew the crucial damn was at risk. There was a silent period, of some duration. That magnetic attraction eventually pulled vision to the south. I remembered the night that had sent me here. The sight of Wool being wounded mortally flashed before me, and the vision of arcing energy seemed to burn itself onto my retinas once again. If I died now, or soon, I would fail to discover what that flash of power was, what killing someone who only had the same nationality of my parents would feel like, or, strangest of all… what this male beside me had between us.

If either of us had looked up at the right moment, we would have seen a glint. A poor mare’s comet, a harbinger, Number three.

“Permittivity, I give a shit about you,” He said tenderly. At that, I turned to face him. There was no time like the present.

“That heartens me, and scares me, yet-” I threw a fore leg around his neck. Really, there shouldn’t be a difference- I impelled my head forward-there was. His lips felt chapped, but taut. His form stiffened. But, after a second or two, it slackened, just before he drew up one of his legs and wrapped it around my neck. My tongue, randily pressed against his closed mouth, as if his lips were a guarded castle and my tongue was an invaders’ ram. He relented as I let out a noise of gratification. As my wet appendage entered his maw, he returned my noise with a lusty moan.

It was different, that couldn’t be denied; it was also equally erotic.

After a right minute of kisses and brusque caresses, we broke away. The need for oxygen isn’t a social more; able to be subverted, but required to live. For reasons unknown, the visibility of our mixing exhales was arousing.

“N’ mores?” I said in the manner of a question. It wasn’t. The large stallion tittered as he shifted his weight between his thick legs.

My impulsivity was something I tended to suppress, and so there was a moment where my blue tinted orbs drifted away from my-companion-to the south that called. I let a deep breath out of my chest as I felt him place his head against my cheek. I knew in that moment that he would find out first hoof how sensitive my ears were; they could be used as a barbaric lever to manipulate me, Trace had used them that way.

I thought without realizing the gravity of said thought. The noise of Wind pulling in air told me he was on the precipice of speech. But out in the farthest background a blinding light made itself known. In my memory, I remember that the wind was blowing south, later I would learn exactly how important that was.

Head Wind spotted this aberration as quickly as I did. My jaw was making its way towards my hooves at a laudable pace, whereas Wind continued that intake of breath.

It wasn’t brighter than a thousand suns at this distance, but it was a fierce competitor with the setting sun to our left. It was like a boisterous cousin of our home star decided decided it would be our guest. The noise was indescribable, like the earth was itself being played by the instruments of ponykind.

“If that was ours, there will be peace in our time, if it was theirs…” There was nothing else to say as we watched the beginning of a new age. Our personal heat was forgotten for a time. In the dying light of both stars, we lost ourselves. As we meandered our way back into the oppressive dark, I could feel something change inside.

The what of it was as obscured as that mad torch’s mechanics.

But, oddly, the why was all too evident.