I don’t remember how long I laid across Mom’s body, sobbing and heaving as the heat slowly left her bloodied, blue coat. It’s hard to keep track of time when you’re dealing with more suffering and anguish than you’ve ever felt in your life. It could’ve been five minutes, or it could’ve been five hours, but I would’ve just laid there next to her for the rest of time if somepony didn’t grab my mane in their teeth and literally pry me off of Mom.

“No!” I screamed, tears blurring my vision as I thrashed and struggled and flailed against the pony dragging me away. “No! Let go of me! Let go of me!” I swung my hoof over my shoulder and hit something soft, likely a nose. There was a cry of pain, and the pony pulling me away let go, allowing me to scramble back to Mom’s body. But before I could get there, another pony hopped over her and swung a rifle like a club, hitting me clean in the face. I cried out in agony and fell over, a few inches away from Mom, with the world spinning around me and feeling like I needed to puke.

Shaggy forelimbs filled my vision as the pony who clubbed me stood over me. In the orange glow of the fires raging around us, his yellow legs seemed to glow gold, even if his fetlocks were long and unshorn, and the hair of his coat was matted and grimy. He wore what looked like Equestrian combat barding fortified with the hide of some creature across his chest, which accommodated the two automatic rifles jutting out over his shoulders and above his wings. His face looked like something out of a nightmare, scarred and torn up, and completely missing any hair whatsoever on the right side. Two eyes bored down at me atop a crooked smile, but only one had an iris and a pupil. He knelt over me, and I caught the smell of something rancid on his breath as he grinned. “Well, you’re a pretty one, aren’t you?”

I screamed. I screamed loud.

Hooves were on me before I could even move, and I suddenly found myself staring down rifled steel stained with black powder. “You’re coming with us,” the half-faced pegasus said, smirking. Or maybe he was trying to smile, but the scarred part of his face didn’t move. “You try to use magic, I break your horn clean off. You try to run, I shoot you. But not in the head, no. In the leg. And then we drag you back and keep going until you learn your lesson, or you’re out of working legs. Understand?” My petrified expression must’ve been enough of an answer for him, because he took the gun barrel away from my face and backed up a few feet. Then he gestured to my hooves with the gun. “Up.”

Trembling, I forced myself to stand, even though the vertigo caused me to stumble and nearly black out. I was pretty sure another hit to my head was just going to knock me out cold at this point, a fancy I briefly entertained if it meant escape from this Tartarus. Then a swift kick to my flank sent me trotting with a yelp, and I couldn’t do anything more than go where the yellow pegasus led me. Behind me, I saw another pegasus, presumably the one who dragged me away from Mom in the first place, pick Fortitude off of the ground and sling it in a holster across his back with a hum of approval. It made me sick to see one of these monsters take the family rifle after having slaughtered Mom.

If I ever got out of here, I was going to kill every last one of them.

But that was a big ‘if’, and as I was forced along the burning streets of Blackwash, forced to inhale the stench of smoke and feel the scalding waves of heat against my sides, it seemed less and less likely. I swiveled my ears in search of gunfire, but heard nothing save the crackling of fires, and the occasional terrified scream from somewhere in the night. Whatever fight Blackwash had, it’d been crushed out of us. These… bandits had won. It wasn’t even close.

The closer to the center of town I got, the more bodies I saw. Ponies I knew laid in bloody heaps, some with clean gunshots through their ribs or necks, others missing entire portions of their skulls. Everywhere we went, it was more of the same. More bodies, more blood, more violence, more death. Some part of my mind figured out they were taking me to the opposite end of town, where the dishes were. But I was too tired and too broken to care. The only thing that kept me moving was some fear of death, some self-preservation instinct. The body wanted to live. It’s probably why I didn’t die that night.

As I saw more bodies, I also saw more bandits, especially as we got closer to the dishes. They were all pegasi, and while they weren’t mangy or dirty, they certainly looked messy, like it’d been a few weeks at least since they’d had a good shower. They all wore stained, patchwork combat barding painted a bright red and supplemented with hide armor from different beasts to protect them from injury (though apparently not from .308 rounds). Their faces were hidden behind some kind of decorative red war paint, ranging from the uncreative blacking under the eyes to one particular pegasus that must’ve spent an hour working on the intricate designs covering his face. With the fighting in Blackwash over, they milled in groups, chatting to each other and stuffing whatever they picked clean from my fallen friends and townsfolk in their numerous pockets. They reminded me of flesh-strippers, strange avian scavengers that could peel the flesh from a corpse in under an hour with their serrated claws and teeth.

Then I saw ponies that I knew who weren’t dead. Many ponies, mostly mares and fillies, had been massed in the wide clearing in front of the listening outpost. Standing around them and hovering overhead were more of the bandits, who kept their rifles trained on the prisoners kneeling before them. With a rough shove, my new best friend pushed me into a crowd of young mares, then nearly broke my back with a savage blow that forced me onto my knees. I collapsed amongst the frightened, whimpering, and sniffling, and when nopony helped me up, I grunted and struggled to upright myself. Shivering, more from my fear than the temperature, I huddled my limbs together and looked around me.

We’d all been segregated by sex and age, with the elderly in one section, stallions and older mares in another, children in a third, and then mares my age where I was. It wasn’t too hard to figure out what the divisions were for. I curled my tail around my waist and hugged it between my forelimbs. If I wasn’t so afraid of death, I would’ve tried to provoke one of the bandits to kill me. Anything would’ve been better than the fate that I knew awaited me.

There was a commotion behind us, and I risked a glance over my shoulder to see a group of bandits leading several techies away from the listening outpost and to our group. Among their number, I saw Nova and Gauge walking side by side, blood staining the snow white coat of the former, and the latter with an ear torn off, which dribbled blood down the side of his skull. Behind them, a pair of bandits kicked the deactivated SCaR around like a hoofball, laughing as they put dents in its casing. The bandits made a fifth group out of them, kneeling them down a few dozen feet to my left. I stared at them with wide, fearful eyes, and managed to catch Nova’s attention. She lightly nudged Gauge and pointed to me, and the three of us tried our hardest to comfort one another from a distance. Just seeing that none of us had died was an immense relief, even if it didn’t provide any solutions to the awful situation we found ourselves in. At the least, it meant we could all share the suffering together.

The bandits began shouting to each other, and my ears twitched at the noise I’d first heard what felt like a lifetime ago, only this time much louder. A distinct whirring noise droned through the night, growing louder by the second, until suddenly in a gust of wind and bright lights, a silver machine rose above the cliff side. The bulk of the machine was a ring about sixty feet in diameter, within which a triangular cabin was suspended by struts connecting the sides to the ring. Something blurred within the superstructure of the ring; it had to be a rotor system of some sort, because I didn’t see how the thing was staying aloft otherwise. The barrels of some really big caliber guns protruded near the forward point of the triangle, beneath a wedge of windows set within its reclining surface, and as I watched, three skids deployed from the undercarriage of the thing, allowing it to settle down on the ashy ground of our ruined town.

I didn’t know at the time I was looking at an Equestrian Ringbird, a pre-Silence gunship and troop transport famed for its reliability and survivability. It would explain how one was still functioning perfectly two hundred winters after it was last used. But at the time, it looked like it might as well have been some sort of alien machine, summoned by the strange signal to bring death and ruin to the planet.

A large cargo door opened on the back of the ring-like machine, and out marched a tall and muscular earth pony, accompanied by a platoon of soldiers of different races. The earth pony had a red coat and wore some kind of hi-tech metal armor, where all the edges had been filed and sharpened into deadly points and blades, and glowing lights flickered in stylistic designs across its scorched surface. Several white marks covered his face, neck, legs, pretty much every bit of his body that was exposed to the air, ugly scars from fights long passed. Black warpaint covered his eyes, cheeks, and muzzle; I guess red really wouldn’t have stood out against his red coat. Hanging from hooks on either side of his armor, two long-barreled hunting shotguns rested, with the grips extending just beyond his shoulders and turned upwards for easy access. I could tell by the way the bandits all gave him space and saluted that he was their leader. He cantered forward at a leisurely pace until he stood in the middle of the five groups of prisoners, then looked us over like he was appraising goods.

“You’re probably wondering what cruel twist of fate brought us to your doorstep,” the earth pony said, in a loud voice with a surprisingly lilting accent that seemed completely out of place with the bandits surrounding us. “That answer is pretty simple, really. Your little toys heard something that was of particular interest to somepony with a lot of bullets.” He gestured to the dishes, then laughed and shook his head. “And so here we are. Please, don’t take it personally. It’s only business, after all.”

He frowned, then paced in front of us. “This is a really nice place you have up here. I’m sorry that my soldiers burnt it to the ground, but that’s the price of business.” He suddenly stopped, and slowly, the most frightening smirk crawled onto his muzzle. “Now, did you know that my employer wanted me to leave no survivors?” he asked. The ponies around me recoiled slightly, and murmured to each other. A mare a few individuals away began sobbing and buried her face in her hooves. This… monster seemed to relish the anguish and dismay, and he began to pace again, grinning. “Now, I’m not cruel. I’m not dishonorable. I think we can come to a proper agreement here.” He’d made his way back to his original starting point, and with a quick pivot about his hooves, turned to face us all. “Tell me what the code says, and I’ll let you live. How does that sound?”

I felt my stomach sink like a rock, and ponies all around me began to frantically whisper to each other. This was all over the code? Stardust’s unvoiced fears had come true. I knew exactly what the code had said: FAFA, E, 36-J. But I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t want to say anything. I didn’t want this sick monster looking at me, so I kept my head down and hoped somepony else would give in.

Apparently, the techies and greasers all had the same idea. When nopony answered him after a few seconds, the earth pony rolled his eyes and bit down on the grip of one of his shotguns. Drawing the weapon, he broke it over his foreleg and made a show of the cartridges nestled in the twin barrels. “Come on, is this really so hard?” he asked, like a parent who’d grown frustrated with their foal. Sighing, he gestured with a hoof, and two pegasi swooped down into the crowd of techies and dragged one out, kicking and screaming. I watched with wide eyes as they threw him down on the ground in front of the red pony, and before the poor stallion could so much as sit up, the earth pony pressed the shotgun against his cheek and fired. Red gore sprayed the ponies closest to him, causing screams and sobs to ring out from us prisoners, and the now headless body fell to the ground by the earth pony’s hooves.

“Maybe we got off on the wrong hoof,” the stallion said, spitting the weapon out and resting it on his foreleg again. “I’m Carrion, enforcer extraordinaire, and leader of the Crimson. And I don’t take kindly to ponies wasting my time. I’ve got a few hundred more shells on my bird, and I can do this all night. So, what’s it going to be?”

I glanced over at Nova and Gauge. The white mare was clinging to Gauge’s foreleg, wings extended in alarm, and shaking uncontrollably. Gauge had sweat beading on his forehead, and he nervously looked from side to side at the ponies standing around him. His throat bobbed, and just before he opened his mouth, another voice rang out from behind him. “The code is encrypted. We weren’t able to access it.”

Carrion raised an eyebrow and turned to the rest of us, holding his forelegs out as if he was asking ‘was that so hard?’ He turned to the group of techies and gestured, and two bandits shoved Stardust out of the crowd. “Finally, somepony who can speak! Praise Celestia, for she is kind!”

If I hadn’t been scared shitless, I probably would’ve raised an eyebrow at that. Celestia? The fairy tale? If his earlier gleeful psychosis hadn’t already made itself apparent, that would’ve been more than a little strange.

Carrion whistled as Stardust finally stood before him. “Well, you’re a big guy, ain’t ya? I might need two for you.” He broke open the shotgun again and ejected the spent shell, then pulled another one off of a bandolier around his shoulder and slid it into place. Closing the breach, he simply let the firearm balance against his shoulder as he looked Stardust up and down. “Now, what do you mean, ‘encrypted?’ because if you can’t get me that code, then pshh, that’s really unfortunate for everypony standing here. Or I guess I should say kneeling.” He grinned at his own awful joke, then tilted his head to the side and rested his cheek in a hoof. “Come on, big guy, we’re all friends here. We don’t need any secrets between friends, right?”

Stardust swallowed, then gestured with his hoof. “Whatever it is, it’s encrypted. Onyx Star. It’s the highest level of—”

“Oh, I know what Onyx Star is,” Carrion said, waving a hoof and cutting Starburst off. “All I want to know is if you can break it.” He rocked his shotgun back into the crook of his foreleg and wiggled his eyebrows. “Think carefully before you answer, now. We wouldn’t want anypony else to get hurt,” he added, kicking the body at his hooves.

“We can,” Stardust said, frantically nodding. “My team and I, we can break the encryption. We just need time, and codebooks, and any other resources we can get our hooves on.”

That made Carrion grin, and I had a sinking feeling in my gut that this wasn’t about to get any better. He holstered his shotgun and began to clap his hooves, while Stardust breathed a visible sigh of relief. “Wow! Bravo! See, somepony with the guts to just buck up and tell the truth. I applaud you, good sir, well done.” Then, turning to the rest of us, he began to pace. “Now, I know the truth can be an ugly thing, but it hurts a lot more to lie to somepony. So I’m going to be very honest with you. We’ve split you guys up into five groups for a reason.”

He cantered over (dare I say ‘gaily’) to the elders in the first group. “Now, my momma raised me to respect my elders, so I’ve decided to be kind to you. Instead of putting you to backbreaking labor or leaving you to starve in the remains of your beautiful town, I’m just gonna kill you and put you out of your misery. Sound good?”

My eyes widened. He couldn’t be serious! If I had Fortitude right now, I’d gun him down, consequences be damned! But Fortitude was in some bandit’s loot stash, and I’d be lucky if I ever saw it again.

Carrion trotted to the second group. “Now, you lot can relax, because I’m not going to kill you. At least not personally. You guys are going to become slaves. We’re going to take you back to our little base, burn your cutie marks off, and then sell you to the highest bidder.” He held up a hoof as some ponies angrily protested and others began to cry. “Now, now! Come on, think of it as doing your part! The Wilderness ain’t gonna civilize itself without some sacrifice, right? Think of the better future you’ll be building with your blood, sweat, tears, but mostly blood! Think of the future your children will be living in when they grow up to be beautiful Crimson soldiers!” he said, gesturing to the third group. He smiled through crooked teeth and tousled a colt’s mane. “Hey, don’t cry too much! We’ve got cookies!”

Then he literally hopped over to my group. “Ah, such beauty! I tell you, whatever’s in the water in the valley, it doesn’t make pretty mares. But you!” He was suddenly leering over me, and before I could back out of the way, he wrapped his massive forehooves around me and hauled me up to his eye level. Brown eyes bored into me as he studied my face and grinned—I felt violated just by the look alone. “Firm, tender, curvy. Like I always say, there’s only one thing better than looting, and that’s fucking. And girl, am I going to fuck your pussy raw.”

He leaned in close until we were brushing muzzles, then stuck his tongue out and ran it across my lips, down the side of my muzzle, over my cheek, and ending just below my jaw. “Mmm… salty…” He winked at me, then dropped me to the ground, where I fell over and curled into a ball. I didn’t bother trying to stand up. I just wanted to lie there forever. To this day, that’s the most terrified I’ve ever been in my entire life.

It was a day full of milestones, wasn’t it?

I missed what Carrion said to the techies and greasers—I was too busy being a pitiful waste of space. In fact, I didn’t notice anything had changed until ponies began to move around me, and Nova’s piercing shrieks split the night in two. My head jolted upright, and I saw her struggling against one of the bandits as two more pried Gauge away from her, shepherding him to the slave group with their hooves and metal rods they wielded like batons. I was on my hooves as fast as me and my concussion could manage, ready to sprint over and try to… I don’t know, do something, but I didn’t even manage to take one step before a gunshot rang out and something whizzed into the ground between my hooves. I recoiled and fell onto my flanks, and looked at a nearby rooftop to see my half-faced friend shaking his head at me. I growled at him, but that only turned into a snort of surprise when somepony put me in a headlock and held me down. Before I knew what was happening, I had a makeshift rope bridle around my muzzle and head, and I was forcibly dragged away from the group, along with many of my fellow mares.

I tried to protest and fight back, but the bridle didn’t offer a lot of room for me to speak or pull away. The most I could do was let my legs fall slack and force the bandit to drag me along, but he was strong enough that that hardly seemed to bother him, and instead only rubbed hot ash into the cuts and scrapes on my body. Suffice it to say that I gave up on that pretty fast, and resigned myself to limping off after him.

And then I heard the screaming.

The bandit led me a few streets over from where we’d been assembled, to where a score of bandits and mares had gathered. The mares were all bridled like me, and they’d been tied to poles and other scrap jutting off of ruined buildings so they couldn’t run away. An old oil drum had been filled with wood and other fuel to make a blazing fire, from which a metal rod protruded. I watched as a bandit trotted over to the rod, grabbed the insulated end between his teeth, then trotted back to a nearby mare, with the end glowing a bright orange. She tried to retreat, but he knocked her over with a hoof and held her down. Then, lowering the brand, he pressed it against her left cutie mark, searing a black heart into her juniper coat.

My head was yanked away from the gruesome sight by my captor taking me over to the side of the road and tying me to a twisted length of rebar. I pulled against the bridle, trying to break free, and even began to try to untie the knot with my magic despite the searing pain my concussion sent through my skull. But the bandit simply walloped me over the head with his baton, leaving me a sprawling, twitching, gasping mess on the ground. After I fought to regain my breath, I tried to stand up again—only for a hoof to hold me down, and a scalding pain to burn through my left flank

I didn’t have the strength to scream anymore. All I could muster was a pained cry that ended in gasps.

The bandit, apparently satisfied with his work, left me alone to chat and laugh at us with his friends. And as I laid there, I felt my terror and anguish being replaced by anger and determination. These ponies had taken everything from me. They’d destroyed my home, kidnapped my friends, and killed my mother. But perhaps worst of all, they’d stolen a piece of me as well. They’d burned a heart onto my left flank, right over my cutie mark, branding me a sex slave. They’d made me less than a mare. I wasn’t Ember to them; I was a tool, something to be used and discarded as they felt. And I knew if I got on that flying machine, I was going to spend the rest of my life as a fuck bucket for some stallion’s dick.

I wasn’t done fighting yet.

I managed to stand up again and lean against the post I’d been tied to. My leg hardly cooperated without sending pain through my flank, and I tried my best to ignore the mark I’d been branded with. Instead, I simply waited for my captor to come back to me. When he was just a foreleg’s length away, I leaned in and whispered into his ear, “Take me somewhere private and I’ll do anything you want. Fuck me all night long until your dick falls off. Just promise to not put me on that ship.”

That certainly got his attention. He stopped, moved his jaw from side to side as if trying to figure out if I was serious, and looked me over. I made sure to curl my foreleg and lift my tail, showing him the promised land underneath long enough to tease him before lowering it. I even batted my eyelashes for good measure.

Admittedly, I wasn’t a very good seductress, but thankfully the stallion I was dealing with didn’t look older than twenty winters. He definitely didn’t look as hardened as some of his comrades. Without discipline to curtail them, hormones spoke a lot louder than common sense, especially when you’re a psychopathic killer.

I don’t think I’ve seen anypony untie a knot as fast as that stallion did. Actually, now that I think about it, he must’ve been only sixteen or so winters. He was definitely too scrawny to be a stallion. I wondered if this colt was another captive who’d been kidnapped and raised to be a Crimson soldier like what Carrion had said. But that didn’t matter to me; all I wanted was out of this nightmare.

So, of course, the very first thing I did when I was untied was trip and fall flat on my face. Yay for me.

I didn’t get much mercy from my captor, as he used the bridle to literally drag me to my hooves. I winced and stumbled after him, keeping my jaw clenched and my head down. Our destination seemed to be one of the buildings that wasn’t burnt out or still currently on fire, and when we approached the door, the bandit bucked it open and shoved me inside. I didn’t protest, and instead went right to the bed and draped myself across it, sweeping my tail to the side in an inviting manner. The bandit, stupid colt as he was, didn’t waste any time shedding his armor and trotting after me. That was when I noticed that he too had a brand over what must’ve been a cutie mark a long time ago, replaced with a knife seared into the flesh. Still, I didn’t waste any thought on that trivial detail, instead moaning slightly to try to draw him over faster.

I didn’t spit out the piece of metal in my mouth until he’d rested his forehooves on my shoulders and I felt him searching for my hole.

Whirling around, I aimed a hoof at the side of his jaw. I connected surprisingly easily; apparently, he wasn’t expecting a fight. As he stumbled backwards, I wrapped the triangular piece of sharp steel in my magic and thrust the makeshift shiv forward, finding a fleshy space between two of his protruding ribs and pushing until the thing disappeared into his flesh completely.

That doesn’t mean I let go of the metal shard, however. As the bandit writhed in pain, I continued slicing and cutting with the shiv within his abdomen, just trying to find his heart and end his agony quickly. Unfortunately, the bandit wasn’t done fighting yet, and with some primal fury, lunged at me, knocking me onto my back. I twisted the shiv inside of his body cavity, and he responded by puking blood onto my face. But even as he drowned in his vitality, he continued to struggle, throttling my head and my horn with weakening blows that still managed to put stars in my eyes. Then the steel twitched in my magical grasp, like something had pushed against it, and I drove it forward with as much force as I could muster. The colt gasped (or gurgled, rather) and locked his limbs, managing to stare into my eyes with a look of pure hatred and agony, before he simply fell limp with a sigh.

Gasping, I only had the strength to shove the body off of me and crawl under the bed before passing out, letting sweet oblivion take me away from the nightmare.