For the second time in as many days, I woke up someplace unfamiliar, with no recollection how I got there. In contrast to Barley’s barn, however, this place was harsh and cold. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all made out of steel, reinforced with heavy steel bulwarks and painted white; I had a feeling the paint was only to keep the metal from rusting instead of actually trying to make the place look appealing. Harsh fluorescent lights illuminated the little room I was in, which felt more like a cell than a room.

Groaning, I sat up in the bed and rubbed my neck. My body was sore all over from horn to hoof. I knew I’d be feeling those bruises I’d gotten fighting the Crimson last night for some time to come. All things considered, I was just happy to be in one piece. My nose didn’t feel broken, at least; that was a miracle after that earth pony used it to play drums with the doors of the dresser.

“Ember!” It was Chaff’s voice, and I jumped at my name. The colt came scurrying over from the other side of the room where I saw a military bunk similar to the one I’d been sleeping on; I guess he’d been waiting for me to wake up, just like the day before. His hooves clopped against the steel grating that made up the floor before he threw himself against my side and nuzzled me. “You’re up!”

“Yeah, I’m up,” I said, rubbing the colt on the head. “One of these days I’ll stop falling on my face and passing out.” I looked around the room, but didn’t see anypony else. “Where are we?”

“I dunno,” Chaff said, also looking around himself like this was the first time he’d actually stopped to think about it. “After that awesome pony and that bird-cat-guy killed those two Crimson they searched the house and found me. They said they’re Sentinels!” he squeaked, his excitement making it hard for him to keep still. “They said they were gonna take us someplace safe, and they picked up your things and carried you down the road. Then we met up with more Sentinels and these unicorns appeared out of nowhere and cast some cool magic and then we were here! Well, not here here, because we appeared somewhere else, but they took us here to rest until you were better.” Gasping, he pressed his hooves against his cheeks and flung himself back on my bed. “We’re at the Sentinels’ base! Isn’t that awesome?!”

That would be pretty damn awesome—if it happened to be true. Thankfully, right as Chaff finished saying that, the door to our little cell opened and in stepped two familiar figures to testify to his story. The orange mare and cat-bird-thing both stepped into the room, except this time without armor. They were both smiling, or at least, I knew the mare was; I wasn’t sure if that was a smile on the other Sentinel’s beak or what. The latter closed the door behind them, and the mare calmly walked up to the two of us. “So you’re up? Good to see. I was a little worried about you when you passed out last night. Sig might be a fast griffon, but even he can drop the ball sometimes.”

The… griffon? The other sentinel crossed his arms and leaned back against the door jamb. “I wasn’t expecting her to pass out like that,” he said, smirking at me. He rubbed back some of the feathers around his eyes, which I noticed were dyed blue, and shrugged. “I’d like to think she was just stunned by my dashing looks. It’s not everyday you’re rescued by a knight in shining armor.”

The mare shook her head and rubbed her brow with her feathers. “Yeah, I bet that’s it,” she said, smirking at me. I shuddered and shifted in place. The Sentinels should probably think about turning down the heat. “Anyways, glad to see that you’re up,” she said, sticking her hoof out towards me. “Name’s Zip. The big guy over there is Sigur, but we just call him Sig. We’ve been making it our duty to help runaways like you two for the better part of five years now.”

I timidly shook her hoof, still feeling uncomfortable under my cheeks and in… other places. Trust me, if you could see this mare, you’d understand. “E-Ember,” I stuttered, trying to smile back. “I… I-I can’t thank you enough for what you did back there. If you hadn’t shown up…”

“Pshaw,” Zip said, dismissively waving her wing. “It’s what we’re here for. Isn’t that right, Sig?”

“It’s why I left the quarry,” the griffon said, examining his talons. “Figured I’d do better fighting bandits than beating my rivals over rocks and mates back home.” He blinked, then raised an eyebrow at me. “What, you’ve never seen a griffon before?”

So I might have been staring a little now that I had a chance to get a good look at him. And by a little, I mean a lot. I’d never heard of a griffon before back in Blackwash, and as I’d later find out, they aren’t exactly common to the planet to begin with, either. So I was understandably fascinated and a little bit scared of him, because I’d never seen anything like him before. Well, I had seen a few things resembling him that’d I’d gotten intimately familiar with in recent memory. “You’re… like a small shrike.”

Zip began to giggle. “A little shrike? Please. This catbird could give the shrikes a run for their money in the fighting department.”

“I don’t know whether I should be offended or honored,” Sigur said. “My flock father always said I had some of the hunters’ ferocity in me. Of course, my siblings said I had their brains as well, but I was the only one smart enough to realize there was more to the world than the quarry.”

“You’re cool!” Chaff suddenly exclaimed, hopping off of the bed and bounding over to the Sentinel. “I can’t wait to tell Mama and Pop-Pop that I met a real life griffon! Oh! Oh! Is it true that you guys eat pony meat? Or that you hatched from eggs? Or—?”

Sigur chuckled and patted Chaff on the head. “Slow down on the questions there, kiddo. There will be plenty of time to talk about that later. How about we get some breakfast first, hmm? I bet you’re starving.”

The mere mention of food had Chaff bobbing his head in agreement, and opening the door, Sigur led the colt away. As the griffon’s tail was disappearing from sight, Zip looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Sig’s got a good point. Let’s get some food in us, and then we can talk some more.” Her energetic wings blurred at her sides, taking her to the door in the blink of an eye, and she looked back at me. “Well? You coming?”

I opened my mouth to respond, but it felt like my tongue was made of cotton. Instead, I hastily nodded and scrambled off the bed after her, silently cursing myself as she glided ahead. Some first impression I was making with the Sentinels; here I was, literally chasing tail around their base.

Speaking of their base, it was massive. We left the cell behind, which judging by the surroundings was actually a holding cell in the brig of the base, and began to trot down long halls of concrete and steel. Enormous blast doors cordoned off sections of the base, but most were kept open. Only once did we have to stop and wait for a pony in a gray uniform to open one of the doors, and that took a solid minute before we could proceed. The blast doors were twenty inches of solid steel and titanium, and probably weighed a hundred tons. If those things were locked, nopony was going to get through them.

Chaff and Sigur chatted ahead of us, leaving Zip and I to walk side by side in their wake. I could feel myself sweating under my coat, and I hastily cleared my throat to try to alleviate some of the awkward tension that I could feel building around us. “So, uh… this is some base you guys have.”

Zip nodded. “Old military. This was one of Equestria’s weapons depots on Auris. It was also its base of operations in the north, in case the planet was ever invaded. The Sentinels have been using what’s down here for the past two hundred winters to bring peace to the valley. Trust me,” she said, winking, “you can’t even imagine just how many bullets we’ve got down there. Lots of pre-Silence tech and machinery, too, but there isn’t enough power to open the doors to see what we’ve got, and the past forty years of digging and cutting haven’t managed to crack open the storage bays. Even still, we’ve got a tank that was taken out of storage for maintenance when the Silence hit. Thing’s definitely seen better days, but we’re trying to fix it. Finding parts for that monster has been a challenge in itself when most of the parts are in the storage bay as well.”

“A… tank?” I said, trying to imagine just what an Equestrian tank would look like. If their ringbirds were anything to go by, it probably carried enough firepower to level a mountain. Equestria was sure fond of overkill. “Why would Equestria need a tank here? Who would invade Auris?”

“Turns out, a lot of people would,” Zip said. The four of us rounded a corner, and Sig held open the door to a large mess hall. We trotted inside and began to move towards one of the many, many empty tables in the hall as Zip continued. “We’ve been able to decode a few of the messages the base received right before the Silence. Apparently there was a huge war on Equus before all communications went down, and Equestria didn’t have many friends. Griffons, dragons, zebra, even caribou, they all wanted us dead. And the feeling was apparently mutual.”

That would certainly explain a lot, but even that only raised more questions. “But if we lost, then how come all those people that wanted to kill Equestria never came here? How come we weren’t wiped out?”

Zip only shrugged and flagged down a colt hardly much older than Chaff who was carrying some food on his back. “We don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure. Something happened, and we were left alive. Forgotten, ignored, or just damn lucky, we’re still here, and that’s all that matters.” The colt finally made his way to our table and dropped a platter of what looked like pasty brown soup in front of us before bowing and backing away. Believe me, it tasted as bad as it looked. I thought poor Chaff was gonna start puking, to say nothing about how my own stomach felt.

Zip and Sig weren’t bothered by it at all, judging by how quickly they began to devour their meal. I guess the taste grows on you or something; I was just trying to not be sick. Or distracted by Zip licking her orange muzzle after she set her bowl down from just jamming her face into the goop. Sighing, the mare belched and leaned back in her seat. “It’s not like we can ask Equus what happened, anyway,” she said, finally finishing her thoughts she’d started a minute ago.

I tried to force down another gulp of the sticky mush that apparently passed for food around here. The Sentinels might have had a lot of fancy toys, but they really needed a good cook. That was when I thought back to just a few days ago. “Well… that might not be true.”

Both Chaff and Sigur stopped their chitchat to look at me, and even Zip raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

I hesitantly nodded. “Yeah. I used to live in an old Equestrian listening outpost on top of the mountains,” I said, earning surprised looks from the two Sentinels sitting with me. They suddenly seemed much more interested in what I had to say, even more than when I’d just claimed that communications with Equestria might not be as hopeless as they seemed a second ago. “About… stars, it was just five days ago, we received a signal from an Equestrian probe. It sent something in code… we couldn’t make sense of it.” I shrugged, looked at my ‘soup’, and pushed it away in disgust. “Next thing we knew, the Crimson came knocking. They burned everything down and stole all the computers at the outpost. Whatever it did, they noticed, and it got a lot of ponies I knew killed. Or worse.”

Zip bit her lip, and Sigur uncomfortably ran a talon through his crest feathers. Even the usually energetic Chaff was silent. Before I knew it, however, I felt Zip rest a feathery wing across my back. “I’m sorry,” she said, patting me on the shoulder. “I didn’t know… I thought you’d been a captive of the Crimson for a while when I saw your brand. I didn’t know that you’d lost so much so recently.”

“Yeah…” I let the word trail out into silence. Shrugging, I set my hooves down on the table and pushed my chair back. “My friends are still alive, though. The Crimson took them when they left the mountain. But I’m going to get them back.” Standing up, I looked down at the two sitting Sentinels. “Will you guys help me?”

I’ll admit, I was expecting the two of them to be a little more gung-ho about striking back at the Crimson after the show they made last night. Instead, they shared concerned glances with each other. “Ember,” Sig said, resting his forearms on the table, “you’re asking us to take down the Crimson stronghold in the hope that your friends might still be there.”

“Yeah, and?” I said, looking between the two of them, incredulous. “You guys have the best armor I’ve ever seen. You’re pretty much invincible! That and you’ve got a f—freaking tank!” I exclaimed, only catching myself on the last word when I remembered Chaff was still at the table with us. “If you just organized all your forces and struck at them, I’m sure—”

“Ember, look around us,” Zip suddenly cut in, with a scathing voice that stopped me in my tracks. “How many other Sentinels do you see? And I’m not talking about the ponies in the gray suits. How many other ponies in armor are there?”

I looked around the mess, reminded again just how empty it felt. Most of the ponies here were wearing those gray uniforms, and they definitely didn’t look like the fighting type. In the far corner of the mess I spotted three ponies sitting at a table, fully dressed in the silver armor of the Sentinels. “Where is everypony?”

“Elsewhere in the base or on patrol,” Sigur said, pushing his empty bowl to the edge of the table. “There are only fifty of us left, plus three times as many in support staff. There used to be a lot more, but…”

“The Crimson,” Zip finished for him. She raised a shaky hoof as if she was pouring one out for her comrades, and Sigur did the same, even if they didn’t have anything to drink in front of them. “When I joined five years ago, there were a hundred of us. Five years before that, there were two hundred. We might have the tech, but we don’t have the people.” Sighing, she likewise tossed her empty bowl into Sig’s and frowned at it. “The painted fuckers have hundreds, if not a thousand or more. Plus, they can always conscript more slaves from the towns in the valley when they’re running low on numbers. We used to recruit our soldiers from those towns, but they drove us out of the valley. We would have lost so many more if we didn’t retreat to the Bastion.”

Sigur leaned across the table and grabbed Zip’s hoof, steadying its trembles. “We will survive. We will fight. And one day, we will win. But we can’t be idiots,” he said, looking to me and shaking his head. “It’s better to hold here and keep harassing their patrols than to try to strike at them directly. We may have a tech advantage, but we’re not invincible. Especially when they bring their damn ringbirds into the fight. No amount of shields can stop cannon rounds, especially high explosive ones.”

I looked between the two of them, stunned, and feeling all of my hopes and plans suddenly slipping through my hooves like water. What the fuck was I going to do if the Sentinels wouldn’t help me? I slammed my hooves on the table, feeling tears of desperation beginning to well up as my options began slipping away. “Is that it, then?!” I cried, wildly whipping my head between the two of them as my frustration boiled over. “I came all this way and for what?! I thought you could help me, that’s why I was marching deeper into Crimson territory instead of away from it! I thought you could help me save my friends!”

I realized I was screaming when I noticed how frightened Chaff looked, and I immediately recoiled. My fury swiftly gave way to exhaustion and sorrow, and I collapsed back into my seat. Trembling, I did my best to blink my tears away. The last thing I needed was to start bawling now.

Then orange limbs wrapped around my barrel and drew me in close. “Shhh…” Zip comforted, holding my head against her neck and stroking my mane. My entire body was encased in a caring cocoon of orange, and I found myself leaning on the smaller mare for support. “It’s okay, Ember. Let it out. Just let it out.”

I wanted to scream at her. I wanted to fight back. How could she even pretend to care after all but saying to my face that she couldn’t help, wouldn’t help me save Nova and Gauge and everypony else I cared about?! Fuck the Sentinels! Fuck her! I’d be better off just leaving now and never looking back!

But I didn’t. I couldn’t. As Zip hummed and cradled my head, stroking my mane and patting my back, I began to hiccup into her shoulder. Those hiccups freed the tears hanging beneath my eyes, and from there, I couldn’t stop myself. I wailed like a little filly in the middle of the mess hall as days of stress and failure finally caught up with me.

'The Bastion,’ as the Sentinels called it, was nestled at the end of a rugged box canyon, literally carved into the stone around it. A hundred and fifty feet of exposed steel betrayed its presence in the canyon wall, but the base extended considerably deeper into the earth around it. It was designed to resist orbital bombardment, and the sheer number of hardened bunkers facing out towards the rest of the canyon meant that the full mile of exposed ground in front of it could be covered with devastating fire. Any assault on the Bastion would cost thousands and thousands of lives, even if the assaulting army was equipped with state of the art tech. The Crimson weren’t, and even their gunships would be immediately swatted out of the sky by the antiaircraft artillery the Bastion housed in its upper bunkers. No wonder the Sentinels had retreated here when they lost the valley, and no wonder the Crimson hadn’t been able to stomp them out once and for all. The fortress was simply impenetrable.

For now, though, the canyon was quiet. Peaceful. I sat in front of a window on one of the upper bunkers, staring out over the rough terrain, imagining an army trying to take this place. Faceless soldiers tried to dart between trees and gullies in the face of a brutal onslaught of machine gun fire and mortar strikes from the upper levels of the Bastion. Over there, a monstrosity of an armored tank lay overturned and broken on some rocks, its hull scorched out from an antitank round that punched clean through its upper glacis. Above me, I could see a ghostly wing of ringbirds descending on the fortress, guns blazing as they tried to suppress the defenders in the bunkers, only for the triple-A to shred them to pieces before they could get close. Not even the artillery raking the sides of the Bastion could lessen the sheer amount of death it put out towards those trying to take it.

But there was no battle, not today. The Bastion never saw the kind of orbital invasion it was designed to withstand. I was certain the Sentinels had to defend the thing in the past, or maybe even ponies who came before them, but for now, the canyon was quiet. And for as crazy as Carrion seemed, from what little I saw of him, he didn’t seem like the kind of pony to pointlessly send thousands of soldiers to their deaths trying to crush the Sentinels. As far as he was concerned, he’d already won. The valley was his, and the Sentinels were just a nuisance, one he was slowly but surely whittling down, while he only grew stronger.

My ears briefly turned behind me when I heard the heavy metal door to the bunker creak open, but the rest of me didn’t move. I only continued to stare out over the canyon as I heard claws scrape across the concrete floor. Sure enough, I caught Sig in my peripheral vision, standing just off to my left. “How are you feeling?” he asked in a quiet, sensitive tone. “You alright?”

The truth was, I still felt awful. No amount of kind words could change that. But, admittedly, I was feeling much better after Zip let me cry on her shoulder until I had no tears left to shed. She’d taken me here afterwards to give me some place to sit and be alone with my thoughts, giving me the space I needed, where other Sentinels wouldn’t bother me. I was grateful to her for that—for all of it, really. After the worst days of my life, it was good to know that there was somepony who cared.

Of course, I didn’t tell Sig any of that. Call it petty anger or whatever you will, I dredged up some more disappointment and melancholy to show him as I shrugged and rested my chin on the window in the bunker. “Fine.”

The griffon hesitated before he decided to sit a respectful distance away from me. “Zip went to talk to our captain, and I gave Chaff to some of the mechanics to keep an eye on him,” he said, watching me with careful hawk eyes. “Figured they could keep the colt busy while we figure out when we can spare a patrol to get him back to his family. Plus, he seemed excited to get to sit in a tank, and the mechanics were happy to have him.”

Silence filled the air between us while he waited for me to make some remark, but I simply didn’t have anything to say. It was good that Chaff was at least enjoying his time here. If only I could say the same for myself. As much as I tried to avoid the thoughts, my mind was only occupied with the fact that I’d nearly gotten myself and a colt captured by the Crimson by chasing a dead end. And even though I’d killed two of them in Blackwash, last night was a stark reminder of how hopelessly outmatched I was by even their average soldier. Really, what hope did I even have of freeing Nova and Gauge if I couldn’t even kill a fucking bandit with the element of surprise?

Sigur must have seen the look on my face, or maybe griffons can read minds or something, because he scooted a little closer to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “What was your home like?” he asked, catching me off guard. When I looked at him, confused, he offered me a kind smile. “I know it hurts to think about, to remind ourselves of everything we’ve lost, but if we can't remember where we came from, then we won’t have the strength to keep on keeping on. It’s important to remember that—now more than ever.”

I began silently fuming. What right did he have to ask about Blackwash? It’s not like it mattered anymore. There wasn’t a Blackwash left to remember. It’d all been burnt to the ground days ago, its population killed off or enslaved. Everything I loved, even everything I hated, was simply gone.

But Sigur surprised me again by speaking first. “I grew up in a quarry,” he said, staring out over the canyon with me, although I felt his eyes were elsewhere, seeing something far away that I couldn’t see. “We didn’t have any fancy name for it, because we weren’t all that creative. We just called it ‘the quarry’. And even though it was hard, it was still home.” He cocked his head towards me, a gesture I learned was the griffon equivalent of raising an eyebrow, as they didn’t have any. “I imagine you can relate.”

It took me a moment, but I hesitantly nodded. Grunting, the griffon leaned forward and tapped his talons on the concrete bulwark of the bunker. “The quarry used to be where the settlements in the area got their stone. Granite, mostly. Equestria dug deep in the seventeen winters that they maintained the colony until the Silence began. It’d take you a full ten seconds to hit the bottom of the quarry if you jumped from the highest ridge. Take it from somebody who has wings, that’s a long fall. The sun hardly hits the bottom of the quarry, so we live on the higher levels.

“We have a nice community there,” Sigur continued, staring out to the horizon in what I assumed was likely the direction the quarry was. “A nice flock. Everygriffon plays their part. The adults hunt for food and guard the quarry. The elders lead the flock, prepare the food, and watch the fledglings, who do everything else as they can.” He quietly chuckled and cast me a sidelong glance. “I’ll admit, when I first met a pony, I thought your family structures were weird. Everypony has their own set of parents, grandparents, and so on. I doubt you’re any different.” I nodded, and he continued. “In the quarry, we don’t have any of that. We’re a flock. Everygriffon born in one year is given to a flock father to raise. They’re the elders of the flock that are too weak to fight or leave the safety of the quarry. And in place of our mothers, we have the nest makers. Those are the old hens, and they’re sort of like mothers to everygriffon in the quarry. I always thought it was nice because it made sense, you know? It let the adults take care of the flock without having to also raise their children.”

Despite my efforts to stick to my melancholy mood, I couldn’t help but feel a little interested in learning about Sig’s way of life. It reminded me just how big Auris was to have societies that could be so different from each other despite coming from the same beginnings. “But that seems kind of… I don’t know, impersonal,” I said, furrowing my brow at him. “Didn’t you know who your real parents were?”

Sigur shrugged. “I know who my birth mother is. It’s a little harder when it comes to my father, because mating season is… well, it’s something to be seen to be believed, and even then, I’m not sure a pony like you would want to.” Oh stars, I could already see the horrifying pictures of griffon orgies filling my mind. I began to grimace, and Sig laughed. “Another reason why a pony family ideal would be hard for us to use. But it doesn’t matter to us. My flock father raised me and fourteen other griffons from the day we were born until the day we became tercels and hens—stallions and mares, if we were ponies. They may not have been my blood, but they’re a truer family than my own blood, as far as I care to follow it back—which isn’t very far at all, mind you.”

It also went without saying that it would’ve been impossible for Sigur to go back more than a generation or two with just how little emphasis the griffons placed on their lineage. If the flock practiced communal child rearing, then they wouldn’t have any reason to keep written record of who was whose foal (or fledgling, as the case would be). But there were a few things I still wanted to know. “Why did you join the Sentinels?” I asked, possibly catching him off guard with the sudden shift in topic. “Did something happen to the quarry?”

Sigur held out a talon and shook his head. “Thankfully no, by the spirits’ blessings. The quarry is fine, as are my siblings. I was motivated by… let’s call it a sense of higher calling.”

“Meaning…?”

“Twelve years ago, me and my brother—one of them, anyway—we were on sentry duty along the south cliff,” Sig said, shifting his limbs and making himself comfortable. “We had only recently become tercels. Not even a year or two prior. That meant we had all the shitty jobs, like going on watch, collecting lumber and flax for building materials and hauling it back to the quarry, that sort of thing. We’re the strongest, if not the sharpest, so the flock uses our simple strengths while we learn to become true adults. And sure we’d complain, but not too loudly. It’s something that everygriffon did when they were growing up, and soon we’d be making the fledglings under us do it too.

“But anyways,” Sigur said with a dismissive wave of his hand, as if it helped him disperse the tangent he’d started down, “Jahlen and I were on watch on the south cliff, just the two of us. The rest of my brothers and sisters were on watches elsewhere around the quarry, because when one of us got watch, we all got watch. We passed our time with idle conversation as the moons rose and kept the rocky landscape around us well lit. Talk of our rivals, if we were planning on getting involved in the mating season brawls, for lack of a better word, and who we had our eyes on if we were—that sort of thing. Watch was boring, and nothing ever happened. But of course, that night was different.

“We heard a scream,” he continued, slowly rotating his hand about the wrist as he dredged the memories from the back of his skull. “Definitely wasn’t a griffon, because it didn’t have a shrill raptor screech to it. It took us a moment to realize that it was a pony, a mare, and she stumbled out of the brush below us not long after.”

He paused as if he was carefully considering what he was about to say next. “I’d seen ponies before. The caravans stopped by the quarry occasionally for our stone, and in exchange they gave us bullets and other goods we couldn’t make ourselves. But I wasn’t a flock father, so I never interacted with them. But this mare, I could tell something was wrong, even more than a scream in the night would tell you.

“When she dashed into the clearing beneath the cliff only to find herself in a dead end, she stood still long enough for me to get a good look at her.” The Sentinel’s voice dropped to a dark tone that made the hair on the back of my mane crawl. “She was beaten, bruised, bloodied. It looked like she’d been in a fight she’d only barely slipped away from, and something told me she wasn’t going to stand a chance if whatever her opponent was came back for round two. And then she turned around and we saw her tail.” Sigur grimaced, clenching and relaxing his fist. “It was messy. We knew immediately that she’d been raped, and by the looks of things, by more than one bastard. She also had a brand burned into her left cutie mark. A heart.” He nodded to me. “Just like yours.”

I scowled and felt anger begin to churn my stomach. “The Crimson.”

Sigur stretched his wings and leaned back. “This was before they’d driven the Sentinels out of the valley. They were loosely organized then, and reckless. But Carrion was consolidating his hold on the bandits, and soon they were pushing deeper into the valley, raping and slaving as they went. That one of their slaves was at the outskirts of the quarry meant that there would be bandits not far behind her, so we had to act fast.

“Of course, as good brothers tend to do, we had different ideas on what we needed to do.” Chuckling, Sig shook his head. “He wanted to fly back to the quarry and raise the alarm. I wanted to go save the poor mare before the Crimson found her again. It didn’t really help much when the Crimson showed up before we could even leave, anyway. Poor mare didn’t stand a chance against the five of them. They had her back on the ground in a second.”

I hated that I could sympathize with this nameless mare. I’d been there, and although I was lucky enough to escape before I could be raped, that didn’t mean I didn’t know the terror of the mere prospect of it. Maybe a little bit of that terror crept into my voice, because I swallowed hard and spoke in a wavering tone. “What did you do?”

Silence stretched between us for a surprising amount of time before Sigur swallowed and bowed his head. “Nothing,” he said, staring down at his talons. “It would’ve been the two of us against the five of them. And they had better weapons than we did; most of our firearms were homemade, and the pipe rifle I had didn’t have anywhere near the firepower as the dual automatics that the Crimson carry. We couldn’t have done anything. So I sat there and watched while all five of them had their turns raping her before they dragged her exhausted body back through the woods to whatever camp they had made.”

His talons clenched and shook with fury he’d repressed until now. “Jahlen was just happy that we didn’t get caught. ‘Better her than us,’ he said. But I couldn’t stand it. The next day, I gathered what meagre belongings I had and left to try to find her. My wingmates called me an idiot, but I was the only one who cared enough to try to do something.” Shrugging, he merely sighed and gestured around us. “Never found the Crimson or their camp, but I ran into a Sentinel patrol. They asked me what I was doing, I told them, and they picked me up. Been here ever since, for better or for worse.” He hesitated, then added with a defeated sigh, “Never did find the mare, though. It wasn’t like there was much of a chance to begin with, but it still hurt, all the same.”

And here I was hoping for a happy ending. Sadly, stories like Sigur’s seemed to be the trend down on the surface. How many other nameless mares suffered similar fates over the years? How many more would see the same? Until the Crimson was stopped, until somehow Auris managed to drag itself out of the pit of savagery and lawlessness that we all lived in now, these things were just going to keep happening, and there was little anypony could do except try to slow it down.

“What about your siblings?” I asked. “They couldn’t have been happy with you just leaving them like that.”

Sigur fidgeted and fussed with the feathery crest on his head. It was pretty clear that I struck a sensitive topic. “I… they…”

He never got the chance to finish, for we both heard the airy swoosh of feathers followed by the dropping of hooves to the ground. We turned to find Zip standing in the doorway, panting lightly, and with her armor strapped to her body. She rested a foreleg against the massive steel door and nodded to the two of us. “Sig, Platinum Rampart wants to see us. He’s planning a strike.”

Sigur was already scrambling to his paws and talons. “A strike? I thought we were putting all offensives on hold indefinitely.”

Zip gave him a level nod, but I could see the excitement in how her shoulders trembled and how she rocked her weight back and forth across the tips of her hooves. “Times change. Looks like we’re going to be let out of the cage for more than routine patrol.” Then she turned to me and gave me a huge grin, like I was the one responsible for liberating her from the boredom of the Bastion. “Something about the Crimson stealing a piece of a message from Equestria got him to finally get us moving.”

I blinked stupidly at her. Was I really hearing this right? Or was this just some kind of cruel joke? I hardly dared to breathe in case it was the latter. “Wait… you mean…” Maybe, just maybe, this slog wasn’t such a dead end after all.

My heart soared when Zip excitedly nodded. “Rampart wants to see you, too. Anything you can tell him about the signal, have it ready for him. He’ll want to hear it.” Spreading her wings, the mare began to hover and back out of the bunker. “Looks like you’re going to get that help you wanted after all.”