This story is sort of unique, in that we are taking a trip back to before the balefire. Before the megaspells, to the war front of the Great War against the zebras, following the story of White Bishop and a war she will find goes on for far longer than she can possibly have imagined.

White Bishop is a character owned by Snipehamster, and is a player character within an FOE tabletop game (PnP) that I GM for others. This was part birthday gift and part thanks for the amount of work he does editing for me. As such, near the end of this story there may be some references to things that raise an eyebrow to those who don't know the game it's based from (ie - Likely the vast majority of readers) however the themes and ultimate story of this do not rely on them. You shouldn't be adversely affected by it.

There may also be a cameo from a character many of you may recognise from a certain other large story I wrote...

I hope you enjoy a look at a very unique perspective on the world of FOE, one we all know about, and have seen on dozens of characters, but (at least in my experience) is rarely looked at the impact of.

Three harsh buzzes shattered the quiet of Equestria’s snow-tipped mountains, and everyone knew what they meant.

They repeated, an audible cluster of harsh artificiality in an otherwise natural valley of yellow rock and irregular dusted bush that echoed back on itself until its sounds were confused and intermittent. Remote species of birds, disturbed by the racket, fluttered into the air and quiet mammals and seldom seen creatures scurried away from rows of sharp green tents amidst a plateau upon the valley slopes.

Mere seconds after the buzzing started, an ambiance of frantic professionalism followed. Tent doors were flung open and ponies clad in khaki fatigues erupted forth at the gallop. Mugs of hot drink were downed or spilled and the clatter of weights in an outdoor gym preceded a barrage of shouting and organising into groups. A campfire was extinguished below a central pole that bore a dozen signs detailing the many hundreds of miles to each of Equestria’s great cities, and one to the most commonly known zebra capital. Firm words were exchanged. Standard issue canvas bags - every one of them bearing three butterflies - were thrown or telekinetically floated to and fro between the cramped, stuffy tents in the day's heat as eighty-six ponies ran to stations.

Finally, the buzzing stopped and a warped mare’s voice, scarcely comprehensible in its fuzzy radio tone to any but who lived to wait on it, made an announcement with calm rigidity.

“Stand to. Stand to. Incoming pads two through six numbering twelve casualty three minutes. Resus-team to two repeat resus-team to two. All staff present.”

Dodging under guy lines hung with drying clothing and layers of camo-scrim, Second Lieutenant White Bishop of the Princesses’ Own Royal Canterlot hurried with them. Outside the insulated tents, the air was horridly dry and the sun so proudly displayed on half her regiment’s flag beat upon her. Long legs galloping, the earth pony ignored the stinging pain in her right thigh as much as she was ignoring the orders to stay bedridden. Already she could see five dots in the sky approaching rapidly.

Five chariots. That was more than they’d seen in weeks.

Gurneys and stretchers were being run down the so-called ‘Castle Avenue’, the stretch of dirt between chariot landing and the main infirmary tent. Limping, Bishop stepped out the way as a frantic resuscitation team dragged their heavy equipment, then hurried on behind them, using the clearance they were granted in the crowd to speed her way along. Each of the pads was set alongside a dirt landing strip cleared of thorns and bracken. Ponies were bent over, the clatter of instruments being prepared matched the growing pile of discarded packages from one-use emergency equipment. Bishop hurried to pad four, its assigned response unit understrength following a bout of regional heatstroke. Why Appleloosians hadn’t been assigned there was anypony’s guess, and Bishop’s recurrent frustration.

The whistle of sky-chariots came over the wind. Each was pulled by two burly pegasi, the long-bodied wooden shapes behind them dipping and wavering in the mountain winds. She could hear the chatter on the ground-control’s radio as squadron attachees talked them down.

“Strawberry Two-Six Strawberry Two-Six pad four repeat pad four.”

“Pad four!” The pegasus’ tone was rasping and exhausted. “We’ll come around ninety degrees and face the wagon to you! Wagon, smooth or fast?”

“Fast, fast, fast!” came the strained reply from the on-board frontline medic.

One of the chariots dipped, and Bishop heard the heavy beat of wings approaching as it dove ahead, skipping the cue on a non-standard landing approach.

“Corpspony, you aren’t our unit.”

The voice caught her off guard, but she knew it. Bishop straightened up, grimacing from the pain in her leg and threw a salute even while turning, an eager smile on her face. A tightly uniformed stallion who insisted on wearing medals even here, with a frankly ridiculous thin moustache that in no way suited his red coat, looked over to her from the other line by the pad. “Sir, Second Lieutenant White Bishop! With respect, you’re understrength. I can help!”

He looked at her, then at her bound thigh. With a stiffening of his upper lip, he nodded. “Speciality, corpspony?”

“Not corpspony, Sir. Field medic.”

“There’s a difference? Last month it was ‘combat healer’.”

Bishop hesitated. She honestly didn’t know. Terminology changed so rapidly, sometimes month to month. Once it had been just ‘healer’, but over time it had become defined between field or backline, then ‘nurse’ as they were sworn to the same as hospitals, and then new more militaristic words started cropping up as Equestria’s muddling through the idea of forming a modern military had slowly progressed.

She looked up at the hastily converted wagon from a mail fleet bringing their two or three casualties in. “Surgical and trauma trained, Sir. Canterlot University Hospital prior to service to the cause!”

He wrinkled his mouth and nodded. “Perky, aren’t you? Take point three on the team you’re standing with.”

Contented, he returned to organising the response team opposite the pad. Every pony knew their position: one team either side of the wagon. Point three put Bishop on the left mid-section of the outcoming casualty, responsible for common chest-area and barrel wounds and in support of airway sustainment. Flipping her saddlebag open, she upended it and tied it to herself, giving her an easy access toolkit of scissors, dressing, a set of needles bearing yet-unnamed pain relief that had been rushed into service only a few moons ago, sutures, tourniquets, scalpels, an intravenous kit and a host of tapes, gloves and antiseptic pads. A far cry from the clean boxes and prepared trays of med-school only a scant year ago.

In a rush of air, the chariot swung its end around, and in a rough clank of metal-studded wheels, the pegasi at the front laid it down exactly where they had promised. Already, the shrieking and pitiful cries of panic and agony began to reach her ears, and she tried her best to suppress them. Put them to the back of her mind. Above, she could see the other chariots struggling to land as procedures started to break down on priority from half a dozen screaming medics conflicting landing priorities, each insisting they had the highest needs. It didn’t matter; her one was down, and that was all she had to think of now. Island of focus. That was what he’d said. Island of focus in the chaos.

The ramp slammed onto the ground, and medics scattered from its unexpected angle toward them. The smell hit her like a wall. Blood, dirt, sweat and metal rushed into her nostrils. Three stretchers were borne out, becoming tangled. They bumped, one almost dropped their patient in their hurry. Bolt action rifles of various patterns and calibres tumbled off one. She saw one team rush to the wrong stretcher, expecting two, not three coming in. Between them, crudely bandaged earth ponies lay there wailing, one stained medic trying her best to staunch bleeding and pleading at someone to help. The one near Bishop was making the most horrific squeals she’d ever heard. Her eyes went wide at the sight, he was scarcely as old as she was, but blackened burns covered his left side, melding the cotton uniform onto his body.

“Team two! Team two get to the right one!” The officer was barking, panicking as he saw his post starting to break down and struggling to shout loudly enough. He was new; he’d never seen a mass influx before. Bishop wouldn’t call herself a veteran either, but she’d at least seen a few months of duty, on both sides of receiving and being delivered here herself. She watched ponies arguing and spitting bile at one another over who was in the wrong spot. Some of them were leaning over until their helmets fell over their own eyes. Or worse, onto their patients.

Forget the island of focus.

“Pad four! Control yourselves and act like the oath you swore for Equestria!”

White Bishop raised her voice high. She hadn’t the powerful lungs of a drill square sergeant, but no-pony grew up in the private schools of Canterlot and didn't learn how to project. She saw heads turn, officer included. Her fine, articulated accent stuck out amongst the prominently Manehattan raised regiment around her, and as she stood up her lengthy height and striking black mane over a white coat and clean uniform made them pay attention.

“You there! You and you, Sir! Take that stretcher, see to his leg!” she snapped, her long foreleg pointing to each in turn, then down. “The rest on the right, middle stretcher, numbered from you down to you! GO! Rest of you fall in with me on the burn victim. Do your jobs like you were shown! The Ministry is watching!”

Finally, with some confident direction, the teams started to get themselves organised. Panic gave way to operations procedure, and she saw the training kick in. Kneeling down, Bishop finally let her attention drop to the squirming, crying pony before her. She took the precious anaesthetic shot from her pack and administered it without a moment’s hesitation, digging it into his shoulder. The slowing of their motions, and the horrid, high-pitched squealing turned to a slurred moaning. It gave her a chance to assess them.

At first, Bishop didn’t understand what she was looking at; the piece of paper that the medic at the front had taped to his fatigues stated two gunshot wounds on the left side, but she couldn’t see any holes. Hideous burns coated the flesh, and even as she cut some of the blackened fabric from them, there were still none to be found.

“Four, holes on lower extremities?” she briskly spoke up to the pony on her right without looking away from the examination.

“None, Ell-Tee!”

Wrinkling her brow, Bishop paused, then made a decision. “All points, hold, roll onto good side. Three, two, one, roll!”

The casualty’s delirious mumblings suddenly returned to a horrific cry at the motion, but Bishop could finally see under them.

Two exit wounds, opposite the burns. Bishop felt her blood run cold.

Resting the pony back down, she double checked and found no entry holes facing the exits, but knowing the locations now, she pinpointed where they should be. Sick lumps of knurled flesh covered the physical wounds amidst the burns, and she realised with horror what had happened.

“Luna’s moon…” she whispered, then spat words in anger. “It’s true. Those sick, terrorising monsters! Okay, okay, triage done. Lift stretcher, get this pony to the main surgical tent immediately, carry report of two cauterised entry wounds, fourth degree left-side with internal burns.”

They stopped and stared in confusion. “Internal burns? How do you-”

“Move!” she barked, already cleaning her hooves and moving to the next casualty. Reprimanded, the medical team lifted the stretcher, hurrying off at pace.

It took another twelve minutes to clear the pad. The next casualty bore shrapnel, and the other concussion and heavy bruising of the head from an impact on the helmet that had saved their life. Bishop gave first treatment, before sending them on to the infirmary. The officer in charge of the pad - a captain - remained quiet throughout.

Immediately, the weary pegasi beat their wings and the wagon was once again airborne, heading back up into the mountains to the ferocious cliff fighting taking place up there. Left on her own, an anomaly amidst the unit she’d been sent to for medical treatment, White Bishop stood and sighed in a pile of medical trash and the remnants of her own pack, taking a moment to breathe as the work moved into the camp itself. Her leg ached, now a burning that shot up into her hip, and the heat of the day suddenly reasserted itself on her after a quarter hour of frantic, sweaty work. The metallic tang of her canteen’s water was hardly a fitting counter to this dry, distant land on Equestria’s very frontier.

“Quite impressive, Second Lieutenant.”

She immediately knew the speaker was not a member of the Manehattan regiment. The words were too specific, lacking the fluid, almost grungy informality of that accent. Turning her head, she saw a yellow bodied and maned pegasus stallion in a thin grey jacket with pink tinted lapels watching her. The badge on his chest made his allegiance clear. She stood to attention with a twist of her mouth at the pain, but he waved her down. “No need for that.”

“Sir. I wasn’t aware the Manehattaners had a Morale attachee.”

He smiled and shook his head. “They don’t. I’m more of a scout.”

Bishop raised an eyebrow. “Scout? The Ministry does scouting now?”

“Not of the enemy.” He smirked, and she sensed he was coming to enjoy the role the Ministry had been setting up of late. “That casualty, what was that? It seemed to rather shock those in attendance.”

Bishop sucked her cheek and looked over toward the surgical tent. She felt the fury rise all over again. A driving hatred that had been ebbing and flowing with every month out here. “Rumours are true. I’d heard them everywhere, that the zebras had bullets that erupt into fire when they impact. That’s almost certainly a confirmed case. They burned him inside and out, the poor kid. Didn’t look more than eighteen, and they’re throwing weapons like that at him!?”

She swung her eyes back to the Morale officer, but his calm collected reaction gave her reason to snort and look at the ground. She heard him click his tongue.

“I’ve seen it elsewhere in this theatre too. Terror weaponry. But I do declare quite the striking performance there in the face of it. Even cowed a superior through competence. Standing up, wounded yourself, fancy accent and - if I may say - a dignified and graceful look to you with height and slender limbs. ‘Act like the oath you swore for Equestria’, ‘the Ministry is watching’? I particularly liked the latter one but the former, perhaps more accessible.”

White Bishop felt trepidation in her gut. The Ministry of Morale was about keeping people happy, but something about this stallion’s casual chat was giving her hesitant feelings. He hadn’t even told a joke yet as most did; he just talked like this were some chat on a train platform. “This is about propaganda, isn’t it?”

“Very observant, Second Lieutenant. But no, I’m not looking to recruit anypony. We’re just making a little list of ponies who have a knack for standing out for the right reasons. Now, may I ask, how did you come to join the effort?”

White marble gleamed in the spring sun, so brightly even the most hoity of Canterlot’s upper class had taken to designer sunglasses to protect them from their own white city’s reflected light. They stood in cliqued crowds about the grand bowl of Canterlot Square itself, the largest overhang on the mountain through which the river flowed prior to a several hundred metre drop over the edge. Lined with trees and bushes, it was a common site of festivals, event showcases and markets accessible both from the castle itself, the high district, and the low town equally.

Today, it bore witness to the largest gathering White Bishop had ever seen.

She’d already made her decision. She’d made it the day she’d heard the news.

Trotting past stalls with offensively dressed stallions declaring the justness of war bonds and Royal Army displays helping foals to lift the heavy wooden rifles chained to desks, White Bishop hurried to make it to the front in time. Already crowds were pushing forward. There hadn’t been an announcement, but somehow everypony just knew it would be any second. The Princesses had a knack of that, making their presence felt long before they were even visible.

“Donations! To those of you of such high esteem and good fortune, consider donations to victims and families of the Littlehorn Massacre!”

The twins, both earth ponies, repeated their cries in tandem from loudspeakers. Behind them were racks bearing smiling photos of the lost foals along their stall. Near them, Bishop could see others. Some were busking or throwing booklets on the zebra homelands, others had small machines that could walk on their own with mechanical gears and were seeking investors. Protest groups shouted and argued over the heads of Royal Guards sweeping mighty wings to separate them.

Bishop didn’t care about any of that. It didn’t matter. She’d made her decision. The scene in her family’s home that morning had been vile and troubling. She hadn’t expected them to understand, but the vicious shouting prior to her slamming the door and leaving had lacked all the eventual understanding she’d hoped they might come around to. The thought made her gut feel hollow. Even after the attack, they still wouldn’t see why defending Equestria was necessary and she hated to go without their blessing.

With any luck, they’d come to realise this was too important to sit out in the end.

Squashing through the crowds, Bishop finally wriggled her lanky body to the fences by the front, just as a staggeringly loud cry erupted from the crowd. Trumpets blared, banners dropped from windows, and confetti dropped from somewhere she couldn’t even see. Pegasi? Higher castle walls?

She didn’t care - she could, at last, see the dark blue shape above.

“Ponies of Equestria!”

White Bishop felt revulsion vanish, replaced with utter glee. That voice! That loud, crowd defeating, confident tone! She had expected Celestia, not Luna!

Wings spread, the younger of the ruling alicorns strode onto a balcony above them all. She raised a hoof, and quiet began to filter around Canterlot Square. “I come to you today with great news! Tidings and hope in the face of a fiendish menace!”

And with those words, Bishop saw six ponies emerge either side of the princess.

Six ponies she knew of well, and whom filled her with all the justification and commitment she needed. The plans, how wonderful they were, the ponies that brought Luna back to them all, would now bring about the end of the war with Luna at their head!

Caught in the hysteria, Bishop screamed and cheered, so unlike herself, until her throat was hoarse and her joints ached from the frenzy of the crowd. Until her heart was filled with the cause.

Until her name was signed on a document at the recruitment stands before she even left the square.

Fire streaked from the night sky, howling like a gale. It arced, trailing sparks until it erupted. Tendrils of red, smoking heat exploded thirty feet off the rooftops below, popping and hissing in the rain. The evil sounds were followed only by terrified screams as the suffocating, lung-burning smog coiled and grew, sparks eating through clothing and flesh alike.

“Fall back! Fall back to the next street!”

The major’s bellowed cry was scarcely audible over the earpiece, leading Lieutenant Bishop to look up from her work. In the thrice fought over neighbourhood of what was once a tranquil village on the slope of a dormant volcano, one of a brace in the valley that controlled access to the greater town beyond, the fire team she’d been attached to was dropping back. The soldiers leapfrogged in reverse, covering one another’s run out of the line of dark stone retirement homes with automatic fire from standardised rifles. This was the last thing she needed. Her body ached all over as it was. Sprains on both hindlegs, a still bandaged shoulder and a headache she was moderately sure might be a concussion were making her vision hazy. A grasp from below her made her focus.

“Don’t… Don’t leave m-rrrreee-” The mare below her, gutshot, padded at her.

“I’m not. Listen to me, this might get uncomfortable.” Bishop muttered as she worked, drawing one of her last ten Med-X quick injectors to slam into the mare’s flank. She’d had one already - two was beyond the recommendation - but Bishop had seen enough casualties to know her tools better than that. “Hold on! You! You! Help here!”

Two squaddies answered, forced to abandon their stationed grenade machine gun without the time to dismantle it. Bishop and the couple dragged the moaning mare with them on a tattered curtain yanked from a shop window. They ran up the slope toward the merchant square, toward the second line of defences that were already opening up over their heads with indirect mortar fire, trying to dissuade any vanguard chasing them. The pop-whine of shells passing over detonated amidst the already burning buildings, phosphoric mist blowing throughout where they’d been minutes before. The latest weapon the zebras had gotten to first, Bishop grimly figured.

Yet through the gaps in the haze, she saw flickers in the alleys and cramped stone gardens. Places the wavers of rising heat seemed to move differently. She swore, a word she only learned a couple years back - now they were firing at medics and the wounded in retreat? She bellowed in rage. “Cloaks! Third alley on the right!”

Their medical evacuation was exposed in the centre of a cobbled street, Bishop knew they had no chance of making it to cover. She grabbed the casualty’s rifle from the curtain as the sharp crack of suppressed fire smacked off the cobbles around them. “Keep moving! Don’t stop!”

Turning, White Bishop didn’t even try to run for a door or a window. She took a solid stance and laid the unfamiliar rifle’s irons over the alley before opening up with rapid bursts of automatic fire. Smacking rounds off the fences and gaps between buildings, the incoming fire lessened, and she saw blades of grass in the orange haze of the fires depressed. She looked behind her; the two pulling the curtain, and the limping, bleeding squad were still stumbling toward the t-junction ahead where the major was trying to orchestrate a desperate line of defence.

They needed more time, and she had nothing like the supplies on her as the only medic for ten miles to treat that sort of massacre. A bleak resolution stirred in her weary, years-worn heart. She took aim again and screamed at them as she pulled the trigger again and again, chasing every muzzle flash in the dark.

“You won’t have them! Not through me! Back! Get back you striped fuc-”

Her vision swirled. The impact on her armour was savage, crushing it into her ribs as it took the shot and threw her down in a crumpled heap like a yak had just bucked her chest. She could smell her webbing burning and when she rolled, hot pain lanced through her midsection. Gasping, breathless, she saw the embers of the fire-enchanted round fall from the indent in her plate.

Everything sounded so far away. The crackle of flames, the thump of the mortars and the screams of those trying to pull back. Everything hurt, but it was muted beyond a veil of creeping black. A tiredness that threatened to swallow her. Her body felt numb and lifeless.

‘Oh Princesses, I’m paralyzed,’ she thought, surprised at her own resolved calm. Staring up, she could see through the trails of fire ripping across Luna’s beautiful starscape to the twinkling lights beyond. At the very least, it meant no more being out here.

But amidst the deep sounds, the call only went out.

“Medic!”

Before Bishop even realised the pain it was causing she felt her body rise, like it was moving before she could even think about it. Trailing the smouldering webbing with her, her lanky body rose tall to see the pair struggling up the slope, having been accidentally left behind. A stallion and mare, both unicorns, the former pulling the latter in a trail of blood.

On weary automatic, Lieutenant White Bishop raised her rifle, ignorant of the shots whining around her and sparkling flame on the stone walls, yelled out words she never thought of, and hurried down the slope again.

Behind her, a dozen others came galloping, screaming, hearts aflame into the firestorm. Suddenly Bishop found herself at the tip of the spear, the weight of their fire pushing the shadowy, misted shapes back beyond their own terror weapon’s breach in the village’s border. Skidding to a halt as she reached the pair, her hooves clattering, Bishop saw the cut artery immediately in the mare’s thigh, hit Med-X into it, and tied a tourniquet right above it. The mare’s shriek of pain despite the fast-acting drug had to be ignored. Already zebras were digging in, fire lashing by them, and she could hear the clank and whirr of robots coming up behind the attackers too. Between them all, they dragged the wounded mare with them. Somehow, miraculously, with pauses to turn and flay the degrading cottages with fire to keep the zebras’ heads down, they made it back up the slope and around the corner of the t-junction.

There, with her two battlefield casualties groaning, Bishop grabbed a radio operator to call for a medical airship and did her job all she could. Looking at the pair, gutshot, and cut artery, Bishop stood in the dark street under the glow of flashlights alone.

The gutshot she could treat with coagulant foam. It was critical and would take her full attention, but was not as bad as the mare’s artery. The latter however was such a slim hope to find and pinch, let alone keep for however long evac took to arrive. If it took more than ten minutes…

Sitting, long mane falling free of its binding behind her head, Bishop made her decision with a tired professionalism. She hit the mare with another Med-X to quell the pain, and took to work on the spilling gut-wound of the stallion. No-one argued with the look on her face.

Twenty five minutes later, the chopping of rotors and the drizzle of cloud-engines passed overhead, and there was one stabilised survivor and one black bag to take aboard. Bishop handed over the details, briefed the on-board medic, and then sat slumped against a wall below a smashed window as the battle drew down to desultory potshots in its new status quo.

Dragging a numbing shot out with shaking hooves, she pulled back her fatigues to fire it into her thigh. The thudding, burning pain in her heavily bruised chest faded, and the lukewarm water in her battered, original issue canteen did little more than sting her dry throat. She felt so tired, so detached, that she never even heard the approaching hooves.

“Quite impressive, Lieutenant.”

Downing the canteen, she saw him. That suave, effortlessly calm pegasus in the same effortlessly smooth Ministry jacket. He stood amidst a narrow street torn by ruined glass and blasted cobble, flames lighting up only one side of that smile. “It’s been some years, hasn’t it? Promoted up from Second? Long overdue, in fact long overdue once more. I dare say they will make you captain for this.”

White Bishop sipped again from her canteen, not moving to stand at all, yet her narrow eyes never left him. “Thought you’d long put me aside.”

“Oh.” He trotted forward, shaking his head with a brightness in his eyes. “We never forget anypony. You can trust us on that.”

“So I hear.” White Bishop kept her voice monotone and her throat croaked to speak. “What do you want?”

The pegasus - ‘Had he ever even given a name?’, she thought - stood off to her side, gesturing back down to the t-junction, toward the slope. “Like I said. Impressive. That line, ‘Forward for our friends, forward for Equestria! With me!’. You turned the tide to save a life. You have a knack for this.”

“Like hell I do.” Bishop snorted and looked away. “I didn’t-”

“You did, Lieutenant. I saw it all.”

Hazy memories of the mad rush were already blurring in Bishop’s mind. War had a way of doing that. Remembering the stupid moments, the dumb pranks and that day someone found a pile of zebra ration packs to spice up the mundane Equestrian ones. But five minutes ago? She could scarcely even remember if she’d hit anything. Bishop simply shrugged. “We say dumb stuff in the heat of the moment.”

An altogether too perfect a practised chuckle reached her ears. “Well, your ‘dumb stuff’ has caught our eye once more at a very opportune time. I have seen fit that your wounds will grant you some leave, and in doing so, I would offer you a chance to talk to some of my associates scouting the front. This war, it’s consuming years, and we believe we may have a way to help end it. A way to both give us a tool to cut it short in our favour, and to inspire those back home like you so inspired them today. We desire to bring harmony back to these lands, Lieutenant. We think you can help in doing so.”

“I’m not appearing on some stage.”

“Oh, you won’t, you can trust me on that.” He smiled, and Bishop found herself wondering how he always seemed to be creating new smiles yet never finished one. “You’ll be rather too busy for that. Contact the local Ministry of Morale hub in whichever base you end up in and they will put you in touch with the section of the Royal Army responsible for organising this.”

“Not Ministry specific then?”

“Indeed.”

Bishop thought for some time in silence. Ten, perhaps twenty seconds. He stood patiently. She sighed. “What the hell, I’ll see what it’s about.”

“Thank you,” he concluded. “Now, for my report… White Bishop, the triage you committed, the dedication to care, it’s quite something. That’s more than standard training. Where did this stem from?”

“Six Princess-blasted hospitals lacking enough staff to use even half the intensive care beds they have, lines out the door to A&E because the few GPs there are so saddle-sore from their jobs they’re taking twice as long and a metric wagon-full of manure about to hit their windows once the winter comes, and you’re going to damn well deprive me of one more?”

Doctor Weathervane barked the words, cantering over thousand year old tiled patterns, his harsh voice loud and uncaring of the dozens of junior doctors, trainee nurses and university faculty looking up or peering from ancient mahogany doors. “Where do you think all those wounded-in-action come after the front you uppity lank-stick!? Off home? No! They come here! I’m trying to fit six hundred a month into the facilities here, and the staff I need are all off at the front sending them to me! Not to mention half the ones I need to train you lot-get back in your rooms and learn, this isn’t a spectator sport you wretched curious welps!”

White Bishop trotted ahead of him, stomach clenched into what she could only guess was a rhomboid from how sharp and yet out of place the gut-pain was after she’d hoofed over her resignation from the University Hospital to her senior professor. Gritting her teeth, she looked back with one eye. “I’ve seen the reports out there, Doctor! The amount dying because there’s not enough healers at the sharp-end! I’ve got experience from here, and I’m fit and able; the cause needs me!”

“Celestia damn your cause, White Bishop!” Weathervane accelerated, coming around to block her path. They stood in the colossal ray of light cast by one of the twenty-five foot tall stained glass windows of the Royal Canterlot University Hospital’s education wing, a window that depicted a gentle mare in a white coat caring for a sickly old stallion. “There’s a dozen ponies that can do that job over a single one who can become a doctor! And you’re most of the way there already! I’ve got students getting their title and turning immediately around to teach another classroom to meet the demands of this yak-flanked nightmare!”

Bishop tried to meet his eyes. She couldn’t. Her heart felt the strength of her need to get out there, but this was hard. As hard as telling her family. She rolled her lips against her teeth and breathed out. “Doctor, Sir, there is a critical shortage of those who actually know what they’re doing out there too. Half of the patients we get back here are suffering from rushed malpractice. If… If I can take half of what I learned here out there-”

“Are you trying to convince me or yourself, Bishop?”

She stepped closer. “I have a chance to make a difference, Sir. You’ve been out there too! Why should I not have a chance?”

Weathervane grimaced, and Bishop briefly wondered if she’d just lit the fuse on a crate of dynamite. Instead, he grumbled quietly, his old eyes bleary. “It’s precisely because I have, and will again, that I know we need to be building doctorships here, White Bishop. We won’t lose this war out in the field, we’ll lose it back here if we lose those who will swear that oath and be what Equestria expects them to be. We have a moral duty to care! Not just by a sickbed, but to oppose anything that goes too far! And without ponies like that who will stand by those morals, those ethics, where will Equestria go when this escalates? We don’t need more soldiers for the meat grinder, we need doctors!”

“I’m taking those lessons with me, Doctor! I’ll save lives, improve the treatment in the field and bring what you taught us to them out there.”

“Bishop, it won’t work like that. Damn it - you’re so close, I can’t let you quit now! We need you here!”

There was a pregnant, quiet pause. Eventually, she breathed in. “Somepony has to try.”

“Try to what, Bishop?”

“I don’t know, Doctor. Okay!? I don’t know! But I know I can do this, and I’m going to try!”

Weathervane stared at her, and she saw a gradual, resigned sadness in his eyes. He didn’t nod, he simply looked down, and Bishop felt the weight of his disappointment rest heavy on her. He turned and walked away, speaking at a startlingly low volume. “You’ve already signed the contract with the army. Promise me this at least, Bishop. Remember what you aspired to once be. Don’t let them turn you into something else.”

“I won’t. We’ll do it, Sir. We’ll save Equestria.”

He turned, sighed deeply, and kept walking.

Harmony Squad Post-Action Objective Outcome: Tactical Victory, Strategic Stalemate

White Bishop’s hooves ached as she slowly typed out the end to yet another entirely mundane report, her will to dress it up nil at this point.

In fact her whole body hurt. The shrapnel from a zebra pop-mine that had been lodged in her gut had a knack of finding ways to make her whole body hurt. Be it the old thigh wound that still acted up from too much marching, the seemingly perpetual headache she had from her sixth concussion in as many years, or the sluggishness that had come over her limbs. It felt like her muscles were strung thin, stretched and pulled and twisted too often. She smirked with dark amusement at the thought of a masseuse running screaming if they saw the rigidity in her back.

Manehattan East-Side General Infirmary wasn’t helping. Even with a private room the yells of military and civilian mixed wards reached her through the walls. Calls for nurses who were dead on their hooves in their thankless, critical, often disgusting and entirely underappreciated job. Sudden cries of those suffering from Wartime Stress Disorder waking up to find they weren’t back in the trench. One old mare repeatedly shrieked for everypony to go to sleep. It was two in the afternoon.

Lying back in her hospital bed, knowing she had at least a month more of downtime, White Bishop stared at the paint on the ceiling; it was fraying, despite the hospital being less than a year old. She ran the last mission through her mind. A deep, sweltering trail en-route to locate some suspected zebra magical shenanigans in the dark of a forest near three great peaks of the frontier. Always ‘the frontier’. Never anything of strategic geography. Just land. Empty land being fought over for the sheer sake of some invisible border that ninety percent of the ponies dying for couldn’t even point at with their hoof without a map if they tried.

And Harmony Squad, great beacons of ‘the magic of friendship taken to the front’ or not, would still suffer when a mine filled with twelve-ounces of explosive shot hundreds of shards of barbed metal at you from behind a bush. Just the same as any other infantry. She’d been lucky ‘Tron had been in the way with his powered armour. Yet another ‘win’ by routing a zebra guerilla team that she was certain would be passed to script writers by the end of the month to become a great victory. Briefly, she wondered how many zebras the ‘wounded’ White Bishop would have killed while dramatically seething in pain to fulfill the mission. Probably tear off some clothing, make sure that cutie mark was visible in the recreations series for broadcast. Perhaps even tell the zebra commander ‘sorry for your interest in it, but you’re not my stripe’ for a pun and a quip before pulling the trigger. Commence cheering ponies in the street theatre.

Hell, she could probably write it herself at this point.

Sometimes she really regretted taking that offer. If that Ministry stallion (what even was his name again?) were there, she’d be all too eager to tell him to stuff any more of it. But then she’d hear the next mission. The next reason her skills were needed. The next downed pegasus they had to go pull out of the frying pan who needed a medic to come and gallantly rescue them. Then it would all kick in again, and her hooves would be moving to the door. Fast forward a month, and that pegasus would mysteriously be a Ministry Mare once the story got ‘adapted’ for the public - and probably on the moon.

By the Princesses she still couldn’t believe they’d actually done that one. She’d thought it was a joke.

Grumbling, she shoved the terminal trolley away from her bed and painfully swung around to get up. The mare next door was still crying out for everyone to go to bed, and some stubborn push drove her to disobey it. Her doctor (and an irony she knew that was) would have her neck for leaving the room, but she needed some quiet.

Limping the green corridors, ignoring the confused look of passersby, White Bishop made her way out of the ward. The reek of antiseptic, body odour and the robotic chitter of the mechanical floating assistants brought in for the shortages gave way to a barren white and black tiled hall. Automatic doors hummed loudly, and Bishop passed by the elevators toward the one spot of solace she knew in the building. Around the sixth floor’s far corner, short of the cardiology suites, Bishop knew there was a nurse’s break room with a set of two seats by a small table at a window. It was empty, hard, and at midday the sun shone far too brightly into it, but it offered a view of Manehattan’s river and something other than the grey rock that characterised this brute of a city. The nurses never bothered her. Sometimes fame, however massaged from truth, had its benefits.

Sometimes, she knew a friend in another ward would come by too: an old war buddy from the Princesses’ Own who’d taken up nursing after taking a shot in the field. A chance to complain together, hear who was getting promoted, and just for a moment forget it all.

To Bishop’s delight, there she was. The unicorn looked up and smiled wearily, bags hung under her eyes but seeing the look on Bishop’s face immediately brightened up. “Ah, one of those days? Come on, get that tea on - proper stuff’s in the cupboard - and come over here.”

“Proper tea? Now you’re spoiling me.”

And so Bishop sat by the window and waited, complaining about the very nation she was watching in its final minutes.

She was still there, on the opposite side of a tiny table and plastic flowers from her old comrade, when the flash lit up the room.

“What th-!”

“DOWN!” Bishop yelled, and the glass blew inwards with a concussive bang. She dove towards the nurse, but both of them were hurled across the room, grabbing the screaming unicorn even as lancing shards tore through them both. Thrown down, Bishop felt her friend’s weight crumple atop her, struggling to get up, one side facing the window.

Outside, Manehattan was torn asunder by scathing necro-flame that climbed and hunted every nook and crevice with hateful intent. Waves of viridescent horror broke across skyscrapers, some carried with it, tumbling down. Her ears felt like they’d burst. Bishop turned and gaped in disbelief at the scale, the magnitude crossing her from unthinkable sights, and watched it sweep in across them both. She inhaled to scream.

But nothing came out.

The rumble.

That was what she remembered most, the quiet rumble.

Not the crumbling of the hospital as it slowly collapsed over the next week to leave an external shell. It was that quiet, ominous rumble in the embers, one she never truly realised the origin of. Wind that had been inaudible in the city before, perhaps. Or so many buildings falling in the days after that it became one continuous note. It could have been the storms created by the cataclysmic effects on Equestria’s ecosphere as the pegasi closed the sky.

All she knew was that what could have been hours or days after she felt the searing itch below her flesh wake her into the nightmare beyond, there was a deep, shallow reverberation that only signaled the ruins. The deepest sleep she had ever creaked her eyes open from revealed only the dark green mist that enveloped the city in the year following the megaspell, wreathed about the graves of millions, a bright midday turned to darkness and deep shadow.

Her clothing torn, the room blackened and ripped open to the corridor, her old friend a still body, decaying quietly. White Bishop’s eyes stung with the effort, and her throat felt indistinct and impossible to shout out through. Her vision swam, and she felt sluggishness reign supreme on her heart. She tried to move - and passed out. It could have been days more. Tiredness drained the time from her mind.

But in her nightmares, reliving the green fire again and again, she knew only too well where the fires had come from, and she remembered an angry young mare on a mountainside searching for bullet holes.

It was tempting. To finally cease, and let it be over. To fall into that anger alone and let it be her final regretful bark of hatred toward those who had done this. But a noise scattered through the long drop into the black ocean of unconsciousness: scant wails, as a dead city slowly began to wake up. As those ones in millions remaining pulled themselves out of the rubble and found grim reality waiting. She heard their mournful voices echoing for miles in an empty city.

Lost. Terrified.

Hurt.

Pleading for help.

White Bishop felt a coughing gasp erupt from her throat, and wearily got up.

The reassuring hum of the Equuleus’ powerful Moon Drive a deck below did little to quell the haunting rumbles of the storms breaking over the vessel’s bow.

That same rumble. Even two centuries on.

Outside through the vessel’s thick window was a land of depths unknown. Of fates deeper and darker than any that had been thus far seen. Upturned slabs of ashen world heaved and groaned, rimmed by twisting hateful green that flowed from the gaps between and coiled about the scant remnants of what had once existed here. It stretched to distances impossible, and to violence unseen below a blanket of storms that carried it out into her world.

Her world. She hadn’t thought of those words with such power in a long time.

‘Captain’ White Bishop stood alone on the common deck of ‘her’ airship, and watched the blasted land roll by. Her own quarters lacked windows, and in some sense she was thankful for that, as she saw jagged fragments of Sweet Peaks below drawn apart by the fires that tore the very earth itself asunder. The balefire storm cracked and thundered in succession, ripping at the Equuleus’ hull. Embers slashed against the faint blue of the runic shielding protecting them, but there was no hiding the turbulence that would lift and toss them every few hours. A harsh reminder from the Grave itself that it could still reach them. Still affect them. Without Castor and Scuttler’s skills at the helm, without Ritzy’s direction, without Alloy’s runes or without Data, Flickerbeam, Leaf and Gallant maintaining the Moon Drive it would all come apart.

So many things had to go right. And yet several lifetimes told her that so often it took only one thing to go wrong.

She grimaced at the flash of green across the horizon, the clouds lighting, and curled her mouth in a snarl. “Do you ever shut up?”

A hammerstrike of thunder that shook the window in its frame and jostled the kitchen’s metal behind her was her only answer. She winced back, weary limbs and wearier spirit twinging at the violence in the sound. It sounded like a megaspell. It in some ways could well still be.

‘What even are you?’ she asked, the question hounding her mind more than ever. This place, this ‘Grave’ had torn open a whole new chapter for her. The megaspells shattering Equestria had been the end. The darkest day, exhibiting the true worst possible outcome. But now this - this apparition that promised that there were yet far far deeper depths to which the path war had led Equestria down could go.

That the fires could burn away so much more than she’d imagined.

They’d already burned her friends. Her home. Her. Even memories, it felt like. Burned so viciously that she sometimes struggled to remember portions of it all. Some names, like what was that bastard who’d set her up to be an icon even called? Or her friend in the hospital? She was sure she knew it, but it came and went.

And now, two hundred years on, the pit it had all fallen into had revealed that it wasn't even the bottom they'd all hit. It was merely a plateau, and that the depths were worse than she’d ever imagined. The body’s eventual passing was no longer a safe end, and the thought perplexed her as much as it did terrified.

The storms growled, ominous green thudding away within smoggy clouds of a thicker, sooty consistency than mist, like fire smoke stretching across a country.

This constant fall had all started with that one bullet, the way she saw it. The start of the terror-fires. And the fires had only spread all the way to now.

And it was still her standing in the path of the flames, being expected to try and figure out what she was even doing.

Below her, she saw the ground move. After a few seconds, she tweaked her glasses until the varifocal lens picked them out. Hundreds of moving forms, a wave of flesh, bone and violence following the ship on the ground below. ‘Converted’ as CPI would put it. ‘Graveforms’ as she’d heard Lance, Castor and Data say. All euphemisms, and Bishop would never tell them how inadequate she found the terms for what they represented. Selenite aside, no-one else on board perhaps understood the real horror that they implied as to where Equestria was going next if they were to fail.

Rolling her aching shoulders, feeling the long burns down her side itch, White Bishop stared down the very depths of the Grave itself. Somewhere deep down, she felt that old anger bubbling away. Her whole life, she’d watched fires ravage her home, her own body. It broiled within, and sometimes she was faintly sure it was all that was keeping her up. She’d sworn to do it. To her family, to her professors, to her superiors, to her country. And if that oath was all that was going to keep her fighting, was what would drag her to have to willingly set hoof into this nightmare and risk more than just her life, then that would have to be what she would do.

“I’m going to figure you out.”

The words were quiet, but intense. A whisper to be heard by the world outside that shimmering glass.

“No more, you hear me?”

She felt her nerves surge, and outside there was a fiendish crack of powerful balefire magic. Her eyes widened, and she saw the lightning bolt a fraction of a second before it struck.

With a shattering bang, it struck the Equuleus from above. She felt the floor buckle and spread her hooves to stay upright. Lights flickered, and she heard voices cry out from above and below. Plates fell from the table and the entire vessel lurched, turning a full quarter to starboard. An alarm began to cry, then was rapidly cancelled. In the quiet after the strike, the lights returned and the savaged vessel began to reassert its altitude and heading. Alloys’ runes had held, if barely.

Below decks, she heard a sudden scream and spark of something erupting with energy, but the storm held her gaze, like someone staring back at her. Past her eyes, to something deeper. She could hear someone, Leaf, shouting for her that someone had been injured.

Pulling herself back up, Bishop looked outside at the storm blowing away behind them. She felt a mocking dismissiveness, like a gesture with but a fraction of its power, its attention, had still hurt them, a reminder of how little they were. She could almost hear its intent.

‘What can you possibly do, old mare?’

The shout came again from below, and Leaf rushed upstairs, spotting her. “Bishop! Captain Bishop! Gallant’s taken burns to his claws! The capacitor overloaded in the strike! It’s still shorting out, come on!”

White Bishop didn’t look around immediately, the bright pegasus rushing below to repair the malfunction. She gave the storm one more stubborn glare first.

Then reached down to grab her medical kit, sling it once again over her tired, hurting body, and run toward the danger.