My Dearest Subjects, here and abroad.

I never wanted to be revered. That was never my goal.

I never wanted to be seen as a ruler nor a conqueror of lands. I have only ever wanted ponies, creatures of all Equestria, to live without fear and to find their purposes in these lands and across our seas.

Entry 002 - A Stable Relationship

The strange pony I found in my shelter, wearing a worryingly well-fitting cranium upon his own head, was called Elmwood. Elm to his friends...

Friend.

Me.

I'm the only one alive to call him Elm, really. Gypsy used to nickname him Woody and everypony else called him Deadwood, if they wanted to be polite. Elm was not a well-liked stallion outside of the present company and that suited him just fine. He relished the disgust he earned from the other ponies we met on our travels. I think it gave him a sense of purpose to be the revered Deadwood, biggest dick in the wastes.

I'm not going to bore you with the details of how Elm, Gypsy and I met, that is for a different time. What I will tell you without any shame in it is that at the point of discovering Stable T-Thirty the three of us were all riding with a band of raiders. We called ourselves 'The Scoundrels' and we were damned proud of that title. We were not ashamed of it then and I am not ashamed of confessing it now. That was the claw we were dealt with to survive, just like every other Wastelander in Equestria.

Every day you get a choice whether to live life as one of the wicked or die with a clean conscience. The highest and mightiest ponies have lived by eating something that once belonged to their dead neighbor. If you didn't get a chance to eat it before expiring to the humongous, glittering Canterlot in the sky, then it didn't belong to you anymore.

Everybody has a fair choice. You can be a Wasteland scavenger and do your best to survive without corrupting yourself further, although the lands and situations this world leaves you with do not allow for many feel-good options. Then again, you might have a few illusions of grandeur, in which case mercenary work is right up your alley. Shoot at the big bads, get fawned over and blown by your adoring damsels and dams in distress, be a big, damn hero. Just note that your life expectancy is in minus figures.

You can be a Raider, roll with a team and although your morals are despicable and a rad hog wadding through its own shit could have a healthier hygiene than you, you’re more likely to get the good shit. Food, drugs, drink, guns. It wasn’t a good life but it was a helluva lot of fun. However, if you think I chose the worst of the worst to swing with, you’re sorely mistaken. That accolade went to Slavers.

Slavers don’t show remorse or pity for you or your family. They’ll happily fuck you with a spikey club then use the same club to finish you off if you’re lucky. If you’re not, they’ll send you off to let other ponies and critters do the same, over and over, until you dream of death. You either join their ranks then hope you don’t buck up, or you accept that Celestia always hated you and now she’s going to teabag you into oblivion.

Gypsy, Elmwood and I chose to join a gang of raiders together. Someday, the next Sun Goddess may show up on our doorstep to bring a new day to Equestria and we may all be dealt the true vengeful justice for our crimes. I would not blame them for doing so, but we all wanted to live, and we did not have a reason back then to worry about the survival of anypony else.

On the night in question, Elm had been missing for some considerable time.

Leaving the group to travel on his own was not unlike Elmwood. Doing whatever the Tartarus he liked was one of his favorite past times, to the annoyance and fear of the posse we were moving about with. There was often angry talk about him leading an attack on us from a rival Raiders, purposefully or accidentally. But they couldn’t stop him if they tried, nor could they deny that he did not come back with useful items or Intel.

If an enemy group was approaching our camp, then he was often the first to tell us. On numerous occasions he asked me to speak to the leader of our team and arrange for us to travel in a different direction, often reaching plentiful scavenger sites. Once or twice he had even been able to reveal any traitors in our little band, which made him a valued member of the team in the leader's eyes and an even greater unpopular ass to everybody else.

What was unique about this one occasion was that he had been gone for more than a few days this time around. His previous long excursions had been up to four days before he came swanning back into the fold. This time around he had disappeared for a full two weeks, which was long enough to generate concern within myself and Gypsy and force us to arrange a search party.

The party consisted of me, Gypsy and just a few other members who were only interested in the caps we had bargained for their services. Despite the knowledge that they would receive full payment for looking for any sign of our missing friend, they were still lackluster in their attempts to locate him. They quickly grew bored and condemned him to death, to the dismay of Gypsy.

As the others trudged away, I ruefully sent her after them. She would have an easier time convincing them to come back rather than me, she had a gift when it came to talking to other ponies. I would spend a little longer looking around, in hopes I might just find my friend lazing around having lost track of time.

An hour, or what my broken pocket watch considered was an hour, passed. I figured Gypsy had been unsuccessful in her attempts to recover the search squad and I was considering making my lonely return as well when I rounded the corner and fresh hell broke loose.

“Who the buck~?” All I heard before the shooting began. I backpedaled fast with a thrust of my wings to rush me behind a wall, feeling the heat barely missing my feathers.

“Yo, A griffon!” called one.

“She got some bucking nice gear too,” yelled another.

“I’m gonna make pillows out of those feathers, bitch, and then I’m gonna buck you on those pillows until I-” BANG! The one shooting his mouth off the most had made for an easy target. I barely even had to aim.

My rifle still smoked as I ducked back into cover. Raiders are not a social collective, and even less so when they bump into one another. I’d had the misfortune to step straight into the line of fire of a small nest of them. Luckily, these ones couldn’t string a brain cell together if their lives depended on it, and I was glad of that. I just had to trust my instincts and avoid misjudging them. Speaking of which…

Clink-Clank! A silver orb bounced over broken stones and busted masonry, finding its way to me.

“Oh, Shi-!” I didn’t wait around as soon as I heard the clang of metal, kicking myself off of the ground and spreading my wings.
“Come on, junior speedster lessons, don’t let me down-“

The rivals began to holler elatedly when I did not reappear from the smoke and dust kicked up by the apple grenade. They made orders to come forth and collect me, or my belongings, whichever had survived the explosion. Hooves clopped over the uneven surface towards the place I had been and a pair of mares, the two of them more like walking chainmail with the number of piercings they’d collected, came to check the spot I’d last been seen. Both were earth ponies, carrying pistols in their mouths, which made it nicer and easier for me to put extra holes and steel in them. It’s harder to swing a gun around in your jaws than it is in a magical grasp.

Bang! Bang! Bullets flew from the place I’d hidden, one missing but the other striking mare number two in her unprotected throat. Her eyes bulged, her head flipped back and her neck erupted in ribbons of scarlet. Metal mare one didn’t stop for futile attempts to save her dead comrade and immediately retreated, with one more shot skimming her hindquarters.

“Buck, buck, buck! Bitch griffon is still alive!” She cried, gunfire blasting but hitting nowhere near my location. Another explosive was thrown, and I hooked my wings into the triggers on my gun-saddle. When the first clatter of the grenade hit the street, I shot out of the corrugated sheet I’d covered myself with and jumped over the ball, kicking it back with a hind foot.

I didn’t look back at the explosion behind me as I raced for the offenders, pulling the pair of levers with my wings to light my twin saddle rifles up. I managed to scratch two more of the angry little scabs from the wounded wastelands before I reached the wooden barricade of their den. Able the see three more ponies inside the camp and once more outside of it, I took fresh cover behind more protective iron shielding, over the body of the victim of my first headshot.

“Give it up, dickheads!” I snarled as I reloaded my handheld rifle, preparing to shoot the last stallion holding up the fort entrance. Somehow I managed to hear the scrape above me before I was too deep into shit creek. The surviving metal mare had climbed up onto the blockade on the other side and was now tugging the pin from a fresh metal apple, preparing to tip her hoof and drop it onto me.

Thinking didn’t factor into the process. Just lifting the gun, pointing it up, and shooting. I’d hoped to hit something, I just never expected my metal pellet to fly through the silver ball and set it off prematurely before it had even left the poor dumb broad’s grasp.

I was back down to four, and then three as I took out the guy who had been gawping in shock and awe at the bloody remains of my freak shot. That left the final three inside the fort made of debris and trash.

“I’m going to kill you!” screeched a surprisingly young voice as a gun levitated over a metal bench when I stepped through the threshold. I didn’t have to duck from his fire, every shot was wild and miles away from doing me any damage. The mare that sprung out from a wall to attack me did take me by surprise, and I felt red pain in my claws as she smacked the rifle out of my claws with a bat tangled with barbed wire.

I parried sideways to avoid more whizzing metal bees racing past my head, seemingly from the pony I hadn’t seen yet as these shots proved closer, one scratching the skin on my shoulder and leaving a bloody crimson line. I screeched in pain, and my anger hit its limits.

In the blur of my next memories, I recall the bat hurtling towards my head, the mare brandishing it in a murky magical grasp screaming abuse at me. I dropped, the wood and iron thorns whistling repentantly over my head. Not giving her time to bring the implement back down on my cranium, I darted in, talons pulled back, eyes on her neck. My wings beat to propel me, my beak released a squawk, and my claws flew, impacted, dug and dragged flesh away from bone and sinew.

I skidded meters from where the body fell. The mare was convulsing, gurgling on terrified and dying whinnies, head partially parted from the rest of her body. I rose up, my left talons dripping the evidence of my hand in her fate. A sound drew my attention.

The last mare was covering the foal, her gun levitated in my direction. I took a deep breath and held it, expecting her to fire. Only five seconds later I realized she wouldn’t. She couldn’t.

“Kill her, Mom! Kill her, kill her!” shrieked the foal, as its mother tried to hold my gaze. We were wild animals, and she was just trying to protect her cub.

“Stay away from us! I will shoot you, bitch!”

I sighed, collecting the bastardized bat coated in old and congealed blood. Then I collected my handheld rifle and examined it. A couple of scuffs but it would work.

“With what, hen? Air? Because that’s all that you’ve got in that wee peashooter.” I flung my rifle over my good shoulder and took a moment to look around at everything they had left. It wasn’t much unless they chose to turn into cannibals, and that wasn’t as long a stretch for ponies as some might believe.

I took a cursory glance at the weapon shaking in her wavering magic and then flipped open my other bag, tugging out one of two boxes of bullets I had for the rifle she owned. I showed her the box, turned it upside down and tipped the contents onto the floor at my feet.

“Collect ‘em, keep ‘em, use ‘em, but not on me or you and your wee potty mouth brat are history,” I informed her with my hawk-eyes staring into her confused gaze. “Once you’ve done that, pack up and buck off. Don’t meet me again, aye?” I gave one last important look around, collected a Power ponies comic and a box of snack cakes, and anything else I could find of use, informing her, “these are mine now.”

The youngster still insisted that she kill me as I trawled around their battered basecamp, looting their chilling dead. She only spoke once more when I was done and had turned to leave.

“Why?” I stopped, looked back and thought quickly about my answer.

I wanted to save my bullets.

It’s no fun when your opponent cannot fight back.

I didn’t want to kill another foal.

“I don’t know,” I said lazily in the end and left the survivors confused that after everything, the three of us had been unlucky enough to survive.

With Elmwood considered a goner, the Raiders had no reason to stay in the same place. The group moved on from our current camp and in the interest of safety and because all our resources from the current site were running dry. Water was scarce, and the food was nearly depleted. We had no choice but to head back into more populated areas.

Gypsy and I were forced to move with them, even though we had not completely given up hope that Elm might yet find us. We tried leaving signs of where we’d been as ‘breadcrumbs’ for him to follow, whilst the band upped sticks and moved across to the eastern side of Manehattan’s ruins.

We made camp near the Crystaller building. We had scouted beneath the tallest building in the city but with its gigantic mohawked pony head threatening to come crashing down any day from now, we decided to build our settlement on a rooftop a safe distance away from it. The building we took seemed to have once been a restaurant with enough space for all of us and shelter for our supplies, injured and pregnant.

We had kids in our group, some born into it and some enlisted. Our leader was extremely insistent that we needed young to preserve and grow. She had a few illusions of grandeur for our mucky splatter of thieves and vagabonds, I’ll give her that.

What I did like about our current base was the view. Our camp was made in an area where the most alert of our team could observe most of the Manehattan wastes easily whilst the tired, sick or injured in our team could take a break, eat, sleep, buck, do whatever they needed to do to get themselves back to full strength.

Particularly, I liked looking up at that huge bust atop the tallest building and wondering whether it would come down that day. I knew it was going to be a spectacular sight when it did, and I often wished I’d be there to see it. Somepony more adventurous than myself had been up there with a can of paint and doodled glasses and a mustache on to it, along with a speech bubble containing the words, “Im mentall 4 Party Time Mint-ats (n a gd hrd bukkin)”. Based on the rest of the sentence, I was quite impressed that they had managed to spell Mint-als correctly and included the hyphen. That was until Gypsy suggested that they had more than likely taken a tin of the drugs up there with them and used it as a reference as well as inspiration to perform the daredevil act. I confessed that I had not thought of that.

That night, I chose to hit the traveling bartender we had in our band, with the sole aim to have one drink and hit the hay early so that I could spend a few hours looking out for Elmwood the next morning.

I wish now that I had stuck to my single beverage plan as I might have had the clearer mind and wit that night.

Instead, one drink of the hard stuff became six. I bet some hard-earned caps on a game of blackjack and lost. I won them back in a leg wrestling competition, but only just.

I’m being modest, I wiped the floor with the floppy maned fool who thought she was tougher than me, several times over. Ponies, they don’t realize claws trump hooves every time. They were good natured about their defeat however and paid up their share of the bet.

Unlike Elmwood, Gypsy and I were well liked within the Raider mob. We were useful, we were able to hold our own, we genuinely wanted to get along with our fellow Raiders and we didn’t insult anypony else’s intelligence without good reason. ‘Floppy mane’ didn’t have a good reason to be offended by my sharp tongue.

Finally, I bid goodnight to my drinking buddies and really did call it a night. It was late, but I had nothing to urgently wake up for. We were living completely bohemian lives as a unit; we did what we needed to do when it needed doing and otherwise got along with our other desires just fine.

I was drunk. Rat-arsed beyond compare. I don’t recall the walk back to my tent. I found bruises the next morning that I am certain came from tripping over guide ropes and loose debris, but I cannot be sure.

What I do know is that I sobered up swiftly when I saw him sitting there in my bunk, with half of an ivory white and polished skull perched upon his head like a zebra death mask.

We stared at each other blankly for an awfully long time in silence. Then I gave the stallion a poke to satisfy that this was not a spiked drink creating illusions for my brain. Nope, it was him alright.

Between us, we heard a couple of ponies in the camp not far away yelling angrily at each other about something unrelated before interrupting themselves with the lewd and cringeworthy moans of intercourse. Further out in the wastes there was the sound of clattering and popping weapons, too far away to be concerned about tonight.

“I didn't kill this one,” he said at last, pointing to his hat.

“Hello to you too, Elm.” I replied, staring as best as I could with my booze-addled vision into the skull sockets where I could just see his cool as ice eyes.

“She was already way past expired before I found her,” he continued, ignoring my greeting, “I just polished her up a bit and put her on. She fits very nicely I think.”

“What happened? Where'd you go? Did you find food? Gypsy's been worried sick about you.” I tried.

“This mare was some real clever clogs though.” He tapped his new and ghastly mask, “I call her Clover. She was a pretty filly, too, paid attention to her looks. She never rose to violence but was a glutton for punishment, especially in the bed. Must have given amazing head, she did it a lot. She loved unconditionally, was not a massive wielder of magic, she preferred to use her head over her horn unless you are talking about her bedroom antics again, because she- “

“Stop!” I finally growled. I was livid that this idiotic stallion had me so worried for weeks and was now blasting out facts gleaned from a dead mare's skull without a Luna-damned thought to the situation he put us in.

Thankfully, he did stop this time. He stared like a foal unsure of what he had done wrong. It was my duty to tell him.

“I don’t give a crap about your new friend. You bucked off for a fortnight and left us, left Gypsy without telling her where you were going. You could have been dead for all we knew, and we paid a shit load of caps to convince the trackers to look out for you. Despite all of that you just turn up, sit in my bucking chair in my bucking tent, with a hard-on for somebody’s damn bony head and you still aren’t telling me where in Tartarus you’ve been hiding!”

I could see him studying my angry, panting expression through the bone holes as he decided his first words.

“I wasn’t hiding~“ he started.

“Carry on being smart,” I snapped, “If you want Celestia’s horn resurrecting and putting in your unhappy place ...”

“Alright alright alright alright, Crow, alright!” He grunted quickly for my benefit more than for his safety.

His hooves reached for his grisly helmet first and he tilted it up off his face. As he slipped out of the chair into the moonlight, I caught a view of the guy I’d not seen for two weeks.

Elmwood’s skinny yet tall Earth pony frame was covered in brilliant white fur, which he managed to keep cleaner than any pony I knew.

His mane was messy, shorter at the back and longer at the front. Not that mane styles differed that much in those days. Most ponies had the small choice of a long, short, spiky or non-existent mane. His was pale, light grayish arctic blue with streaks of ivory. His tail matched in disorder and pigment, cropped as short as it could possibly be whilst still existing as a tail.

One of the unusual differences that unsettled anypony meeting Elm for the first time was his eyes. He had bright and often sociable eyes with sapphire pupils, but around them were deep permanent scorch marks, the color of coal.

On my first chance to get a closer inspection of these, I’d seen that each old wound had been made by several straight and thin burn lines. I could only guess that somepony hadn’t wanted to sear out his eyeballs, but instead to cause this barbaric kind of branding. It was scary how precise each disfigurement was and how close to bucking up his eyesight the inflictor had gotten without accidentally ruining it. It made him look like a bad guy to buck with.

If that wasn’t unnerving enough for some ponies, his Cutiemark truly upset the applecart. His mark had once been a single elm tree with a big green leafy head and an orangey-brown trunk. But at some point, Somepony had scarred both marks with a hanged stick-corpse swinging from a branch with crosses for eyes. If they’d wanted to make an example of my friend here, then they certainly accomplished their mission.

I never asked Elmwood why he looked the way he did, but Gypsy chose to when he was at his most approachable. The story he told implied that his mother had hit the jet so hard she had melted her brains to mush. Before she ended her days in a vegetative state, she had harmed the pair of them grievously, an act Elm had allowed her to do out of love and grief.

Gypsy and I later decided this was unlikely to be the true story, there were too many inconsistencies and Elm liked to tell tales regardless of the facts. All the same, we accepted his story for its face value and never asked him to repeat it or back up his claims. Regardless of the lesions, he was still an attractive stallion even then, if stallions were your thing.

His hooves clacking on my wooden boards as he walked across my personal space were one of the only sounds in the settlement by now. The gunfire had ceased, the overdramatized orgasm-screams from the tent a few spaces over had been silenced minutes ago by their neighbors yelling and hurling heavy objects at them. Now all that could be heard from them was snoring, which was as loud and as obnoxious as their lustful wails had been.

Elmwood held his gaze with my tipsy and annoyed stare. My indignation was made worse by his shit-eating grin.

“I’ve found a Stable.” He announced to me with a vain flick of his head. The skull hat slipped off his mane as he did so, shattering his proud stance as he scrambled to pick it back up.

“Sorry, Clover,” I caught him whisper as he rubbed off the dust and popped it back on, “I’ve found a Stable.”

“I heard you utter that nonsense the first time. We’re not raiding open Stables anymore, remember? Not after the beefed-up radroaches nest we disturbed in Stable 105...”

“This is different,” he proclaimed, acting like a statue of absolute confidence in his own cleverness.

“How could this possibly be different?” I remember thinking that this had to be good if he thought he could erase that memory. His grin widened.

“Because, my badflank little griffon friend, this Stable hasn’t been opened yet.”

“Why does he have a skull on his head?” Poxy was a gaunt mare with tanned fur and a grey mane, shaved at the sides but limp and tussled over one eye whilst teardrop tattoos decorated the other cheek. She looked exhausted, but I had woken her up from half a night’s sleep. Despite that, she’d looked pleased to see me until she saw that I had Elm by my side.

As our leader, Poxy didn’t speak directly to Elmwood. She much preferred to speak about him and to him through me. This wasn’t too much of an inconvenience for me, as I often had to get involved as a peacekeeper in the few times they had spoken to one another. She’d confided in me later that it wasn’t that she wanted him out of the group, rather that she wanted his brains without the mouth that came with it. Elmwood, for his part, stuck to the bargain and did not speak directly to her either, although he did like to find other ingenious ways to frustrate her and amuse himself.

“He found it outside the closed up Stable,” I explained.

“Why is he wearing it on his head?” She muttered, giving him a disgusted look.

“This would have gone much faster if you’d let me tell you all about Clover’s exploits, Crow!” Elm cackled behind me.

I had already explained the story to Poxy as Elm had detailed it out to me, yet I knew then that she’d missed the point whilst she had been more focused on my friend’s attire.

“Because he’s Elmwood and that’s what he does.” I grumbled, “Ignore it, let me summarize; he found a Stable that hasn’t opened its doors to the Wastes yet and it’s not too far from here, in Bridleway before you hit Fleatown. If we’re the first ones to get to it, we could talk the Stable ponies into ‘donating’ supplies to us in exchange for protection from this shitty world we live in.”

This time the explanation was sinking in.

“We don’t do Stables, remember?”

“I hadn’t forgotten.” I instinctively rubbed a pair of marks under the feathers on my neck. That was the worst wound I’d had during the scramble to escape that Stable, others hadn’t been as lucky.

Even now I could recall the disembodied head of a stallion that had rolled past me as I was in mid-run towards the exit. Even now I could still remember how it felt to have the pincers clench tightly inches from my jugular. Even now my skin itched with the droplet of venom I’d endured afterward. If it wasn’t for my friend with the dead pony on his head, I’d have died an agonizing death.

“So why are you suggesting we do this one?” She moved closer to me, whispering it as if she were asking me to reveal some great secret to her.

“Supplies, shelter, maybe some new recruits. Food, running water. We have ponies who haven’t seen a clean drop of water in nearly a year, we’re all hungry. As far as risks go, this is a necessary one.” I replied fiercely. I’d glanced around her quarters and was more than a little annoyed to see she had more treats in here than some of our members saw in a lifetime, but them the breaks of being a leader I guessed.

“And if it’s another hole filled with stinkin’ killer bugs? What then?”

“If we follow Elmwood’s plan then that won’t be our problem.”

Poxy’s eyes darted from me to him and swiftly back to me.

“We could just send him in first, couldn’t we?”

“Nah, you’d miss me, Queen Pee~”

She grunted sagely.

“Tell me his ‘wonderful’ plan one more time.”

"It's really simple," I suggested, "we send somepony else in first."

"Who?"

"The Snips."

"Ohhh...." A grin. A nod. "That would work for me."

Poxy signed off on the plan and encouraged Elm out of her shack for the night since it needed a clear head and daylight and a team. She put her good leg out to stop me in her doorway.

“Stay the night.” It was no secret that Poxy had a thing for me. She had asked and accepted other mares and stallions to warm the bed with her, but she wanted me. Sometimes I’d taken her offers out of loneliness and as a survival instinct, it was wise to find a heated body to share the cold nights with.

“Not tonight,” I answered as kindly as I could. I didn’t want her. It wasn’t that she wasn’t a good-looking mare, it was that we were sat on the same side of the same cap. Opposites attract but Poxy and I were too alike. Besides, I knew what I would miss if I took her up on her offer.

If it was anyone else, they’d have been out of the gates on their ass and given a ten-second head start before the guns turned on them. But like I said, she liked me.

“Fine. If you change your mind, don’t even knock. Just come straight on in.” I could see the flicker of longing in her eyes. With a respectful nod, her leg dropped to let me pass and I hurried off without another word. Better to cut the cord straight away rather than create false hope later.

Twinkle, twinkle.

As I caught up to Elm, something caught a moonbeam and reflected it into my face. Momentarily I was blinded, then I was seeing the light flashing across the end of my beak.

“Oof~“ The distraction caused my feathery breast to collide with Elm’s rear. I blinked sporadically as I regained my balance, looking about for the source of the rays in my eyes.

“Looks like the pair of you got Starlight mites. Woody musta found them out in the wastes and brought them back to the camp. Could be an infestation.” My heart skipped a beat.

The creator of these so-called Starlight Mites coolly slipped the mirror she’d found back into a scavenger’s loot and took several loitering steps towards me and Elm.

“Oh no, not Starlight Mites again,” The stallion in front of me quipped as the mare shimmered into visibility, “Curse my attractiveness to tiny things. What’s the cure this time, Miss Breeze?”

The most beautiful creature I had ever known. Loveliness didn’t even begin to describe her, sexy doesn’t come close, I am not certain I could find the right words without going through every single one I’d ever heard said to compliment another pony.

Rugged. I know that’s not the kind of word you use to admire a mare with but nonetheless, when I first saw Gypsy Breeze, I thought she had a rugged rogue-ish charm. She was like a proud rogue in the way that she posed, the way that she walked, the way that she spoke.

Most romantics gush about their muse’s eyes when they’re in polite company and whilst her rose-tinted gaze could light a spark of hope in the most villainous heart, I preferred to look lower.

Her mouth. She had pearls for teeth and the reddest tongue I had ever seen on a mare. Her throat, covered in mulberry fur, pulsed and quivered when she spoke. I could watch her talk all day and all night until the wastelands take us, turn us into dust and let our ashes become one.

Her blonde and sunflower mane was long, curled and tangled, so that when she played with it or shook it then it all moved as one. She kept it clean, which I could attest to because she’d let me bury my beak into it and sniff it once or twice.

Although I had never smelled real lavender before, I knew that was what it smelled of. It swelled over the back of her head, most of it keeping behind the ears except for one rebellious strand that she was never able to recapture. It all ended in a swirl along her shoulder, like a cat taking a nap with its tail loose and flicking. She’d taken to tying several rainbow-colored ribbons into it that she’d found in an abandoned mall, which fluttered and twisted when the wind blew them.

“Only darkness will treat Moonlight Mites, you have to expose yourself to the blackest of blacks.” Murmured the self-assured filly of my dreams to the recently-returned wanderer. Her voice was smoky, clear and precise with a tinge of thought to her words.

“I thought it was Starlight Mites,” he replied as she tiptoed nearer.

“It can be both. Don’t get pedantic about this,” she stopped inches away from him and her pale eyes darkened.

“Am I boring you, Elm? Two weeks~“ there was hurt in her voice.

“Tell me more about the Starlight Cure. Why's it got to be darkness? Why not a brighter light?” He'd always avoid a question if it wasn't in his favor.

She stared at him for a while and part of me imagined she finally might snap and slap him. The other half of me knew she’d kiss him.

It was that part of me won that round.

“To fight the light, you have to accept the dark.” She gave her answer as a matter of fact before their lips eventually met.

Jealousy was just another emotion I’d become numb to by this point. I loved Gypsy from the first moment I saw her, but she was never mine. I watched her fall in love with my friend Elm, listened to them make love, accepted her friendship and my inevitable life in the friend zone.

The unicorn mare finally noticed that I had turned my head from the damp slurps and slaps of mouths and she gave me a quick nudge.

“Tell me what he’s been up to.”

“You don’t want to hear it from me?” Elm asked with a curious blink.

“You’ll just tell me about the stupid skull on your head.” She answered with a smirk.

“She’s not stupid. She’s pretty and her name is Clover. Probably. She’s also super important. Super-probably.” The big child in the Nightmare Night mask pouted.

“Then you’ll be banging her super-important eye sockets tonight instead of me then?”

On the walk back to Gypsy’s shelter, I updated Gypsy on the Stable which Elm had found and the plan we had concocted to break into it. She listened carefully, posed a few questions I hadn’t thought of and a few that Elm had. I listened to the pair challenge each other whilst I interjected a few ideas of my own. We laughed, we fooled, and we collapsed together onto Miss Breeze’s bed of straw.

When it could not be held off any longer, Elm’s endeavor to tell us how he met ‘Clover’ was allowed.

There once was a mare called Cloverleaf who lived before the Great War. She was a total Brainiac from day one, swatted up before, during and after school. She loved her books and her studies, swelling her brain nice and tightly inside her skull.

The little filly became a tall, smart and very pretty mare, with no shortage of admirers. With her suitors came the carnal interests. She wasn’t scared to give anything a try, the rough as well as the smooth. One stallion got a little thorough with her horn job and left teeth marks in the bone. Another was particularly heavy on her muzzle, chipping a front tooth partially in the process.

After “sampling the menu” she finally settled down with the love of a good stallion. She found an important job which suited her brainy brain which was all about the paperwork and not at all about the magic. She had a tiny horn, just good enough for picking stuff up and peeling oranges and maybe signing signatures. Unfortunately for our mare, the Great War struck before the family planning began.

She was awarded a place in the Stable designated T-Thirty with her colt friend and her siblings. When the Balefire bombs fell, there was a mad dash for the Stable. They may have made it if tragedy had not struck.

Her mother tripped, and she twisted her ankle. They all tried to help her get to the Stable in time.

They may still have reached the door if the passageway had not collapsed over their heads when they were in sight of their sanctuary.

Some, like the mare’s beloved and her mother, were killed instantly, but the mare was not. She scrambled through and reached the Stable door, only to find it shut. She pleaded for them to open it for her and her surviving young siblings. Unfortunately for our mare, Stable T-Thirty’s door never reopened.

With little hope left, the mare turned and tried to crawl back through the rubble of the passageway. Her siblings dropped like flies around her, yet she kept going. She barely made it through, by then her energy was all used up.

She finally fell a few steps from the spot where fate wounded her mother’s leg. She gave the resting spot of her family one last cry of remorse, and her heart gave up.

“Sing, mmm… your songs, ohhh… little bird,

T-then the~AH~ s-ssssssssss-sun will r….riiise...

spread your w-wings, little birrrd~ ooohhh ohh…”

Melodies from a long-gone era jingled over the wireless. The voice singing to them quavered and rippled with the sweet whimpers of coitus.

Luna’s specter was still traveling across the night sky, crawling over snowy canyons where the pegasi used to dance. It must have only been an hour since I had dozed off and yet I did not need to open my eyes to know what my friends had gotten up to without my stimulating company.

I broke my eyelids open a crack and waited for the sleep to wash from my vision.

Two silhouettes tussled in the dark not far from where I roosted. A pair of shadows stuck in a moment, struggling half-heartedly to part.

I tried to close my eyes again, to avoid witnessing the pairs’ very public display of affection, but in the end, I had to spy and watch them from the beginnings of gentle lovemaking through to the noisy, passionate end. And throughout, Gypsy sang her song.

I could swear that her eyes darted to mine at the point that her song ended with the show. Was that last line directed to me?
I tried to hide the fact I’d been watching, but once breath was recaptured, I heard a very smug Breeze gasp a horrible line my way.

“Mornin’? Enjoying the show, Squawk?”

“ARGGHH!” I howled, pulled the prickly blanket over my head.

The two giggled, and I felt a dainty hoof nudge at me.

"Come on. We know you enjoyed it..." sang the mare's voice through the scratchy fabric. I grunted to them that they could both promptly buck themselves into a coma for all I cared and kept my cloak of invisibility over me, waiting until the pair’s pillow talk reduced to snoring.

They did talk. For a long time, they talked about nothing. They talked about songs and ponies and even about me. I say they because Gypsy did most of the talking and Elm just grunted in the affirmative.

Once her voice dropped to sleepy mumbles and finally silence, I slipped my protective cape off and looked at them. I could tell Breeze was asleep, yet I had the slight inclination to believe Wood had just closed his eyes and assumed the position. I do not think he ever truly slept.

All the same, I got up from my mat, shook out my feathers as quietly as I could muster, before I tiptoed away to freshen up and find the remainder of my slumber in a secluded spot.

I'd be glad I got even one wink of sleep, knowing what the next day would hold for me. For us.

<sub>Footnote: Quest Completed - Deadwood
Quest Perk added - Clover the Cold - Intimidating speech checks are 20% more effective.

Level up!
New Perk: Peeping Turkey - +1 to Success

Quest begun - Snip Snips</sub>

Author's Notes:

Want to discuss the story? Follow me to the Scoundrel’s Settlement on Discord...

Song for this chapter; Little Bird, Little Bird by Elizabeth Mitchell

This is the first true chapter of a 3 or 4 part story, maybe 5... I know where it’s going but how it got here has already changed dramatically.

EDIT: So I cleaned up that ending. "I CAME, THE END" never sat right with me.
Hope this makes up for that earlier cheap ending.

Edit 2: HAAAA!!!! How optimistic was I? 4 or 5 chapters?! Opps!!!

Hope you enjoy everything to come and that you can look past my writing.

My characters and I are happy to answer any questions, no spoilers.

All good things,
Dusk