Fallout Equestria: Sola Gratia
Chapter 10: Lullaby for My Favorite Insomniac
“Embrace democracy or you will be eradicated.”

I stared down at the orbs; they sat snugly, cushioned within the ornate box, set in a single row.
Red, Blue, Gold, Pink, Purple and White.
Blood Red, Atmospheric Blue, Holy Gold, Eternal Pink, Sickly Purple-Green and Snow White.
The colors were tints, emanating from the memory’s hearts, visible as if submerged in deep water.
I had watched the red orb, it was passion, it was blood… and it was roses.

My shift for the watch was over, and though I hadn’t woken Ash, she had eventually come to relieve me. After our conversation she left to sleep beside the long-unconscious Caliber, only returning hours later to insist that I retired, so that she could take her turn.

But I couldn’t sleep, in between the red orb and the ‘stake-out’ my body had rested enough, I simply couldn’t force it to do any more. I would have stood guard all night, but Ash had essentially forced me, in her own indirect way, into the dark room where Caliber still lay dreaming. Now I sat across from her, looking into Damascus’ ornate box of memories, while the technology around us blinked and breathed.

Blue was next, the blue of his eyes, of his daughters. I predicted it to be another painful rending, the destruction of happiness that I could do nothing to stop. My curiosity was making me think it a good idea, promising me that it wouldn’t be as bad as the last one, that it wouldn’t be a recount of how Damascus had torn his life apart by the zebra’s ancient magic. It would be a bad memory that he removed, it claimed, he would break his oath to the Princesses and ask for a sin to be erased, and wouldn’t that be nice to see? Damascus getting some peace?

I wasn’t buying it, I admitted to myself, but I’m willing to endure. If he wouldn’t remember his happiness, then I would. Perhaps someday he would let me tell him about what I had seen, about the pieces of his mind that he had burdened to me. Perhaps someday I could give him his family back.

I focused on the second orb, trying to direct my magic right into its core, right into the pure blue of its heart. It seemed to grow, to engulf me like a thin mist as my focus grew stronger, and then it all stopped. The exertion was over, the colors were gone, and all of it was overcome by the blackness.

<-=======ooO Ooo=======->

I recognized this place…
I felt as if I had been here before, seen it, lived it.
Wind rustled through the pristine trees outside; the sound of their life filled the cave.
The narrow slice of sky that I could make out between the nearby cave mouth and the distant mountains, between the rocks, was almost blue. There were no clouds here, there was no radiation, ash or bullets, as this wasn’t Wasteland… this wasn’t Equestria.

I felt the device on my head, the extractor, and I relished the warmth of the burning fire in the center of the ritualistic cave. My skin wasn’t burning, though it was undeniably uncomfortable, gnawing softly at me, impossible to forget. My desire to go outside, to see the calling life, was outweighed by my own reluctance to feel the cold searing again, not that my desires mattered.
Damascus’s body was old again, hurt again, the last time I had been with him he had been a young buck, being watched by his older self and I as he relived a memory for the last time. What next? I wondered.

“What next?” she asked. The zebra was gorgeous in the firelight, eyes both youthful and wise danced with the flames, shadows merging her stripes together across her strong gray body.

“I had a daughter…” Damascus sounded confused, like he wasn’t actually sure, like he was asking a question rather than making a statement. “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like she’s an idea rather than an actual little filly. She shouldn’t exist, I… I can’t understand her.”

“A lot of things will feel that way as we erase their reasons.” The zebra stirred a small pot that sat very close to the heat. “You don’t know where she came from, do you?”

“No… and her age fluctuates from a foal to a walking, talking little filly. There isn’t an in-between; she just exists when she exists, as if her life is in pieces.” I felt the strain that he was undergoing by trying to comprehend the vaguely remembered fractures, a filly with no mother, who was never born, though she was spread across his life sporadically, randomly. “But I know that I have to forget her.”

A gust of wind brought a cutting chill to my body and a fade to the fire, tiny pieces of snow darted around the cave, disappearing again as they melted into the rock.

“You remember what to do?” she must have explained everything again, while he wasn’t creating a memory that was going to be erased. Everything she had said to him in the last orb had been removed along with his wife; and everything he heard now would be removed along with his daughter. There was nothing they needed to say to each other, nothing that would matter.

Damascus took the brewing alchemy, it emitted a gentle flow of steam that immediately caused us to tire and droop as we inhaled it. This would take us into the memory that epitomized his daughter, the moment that was the most powerful between them. We drank it and slept.

------------------------------------------------

“Daddy?” the screen pulled closer and closer, carrying the soft face of the little girl with it, her blue eyes were like faceted diamonds replicating over themselves, growing as we entered her father’s mind. Her hair was an intangibly light blonde, like her mother’s, I thought, like nopony’s, thought Damascus.

“Yes, sweetheart?” asked the third variant of Damascus’ voice that I had heard. First had been gravelly, cold and powerful, second had been young and idealistic, this one was in between. The youth was gone and the authoritative power had begun to lace its every word, though it was not without emotion.

“Do you like my dress?” the light-beige filly wore a layered blue dress ordained with glittery stars and imitated embroidery. Crude stitching somehow made the sight of the diamond-girl heartbreaking; Damascus may have stitched that dress himself. It was cheap, but she looked like a princess.
A patchwork princess.

“You look beautiful.” They nuzzled together before Damascus turned to a mirror to inspect himself. He wore a collared shirt, black tie and a formal, if slightly weathered, suit jacket. His cinnamon hair had traces of faded color in it, like pepper, but his face looked only a few years older than it had before. He pressed his tie into the suit jacket and frowned at his wavy hair.
“You look very handsome, daddy.” She laughed, still tripping over words; her accent was that of a filly just learning how to speak. She was young; young enough to make it clear that she knew more words than most fillies her age would… perhaps her father had forged this education in the scripture of his gods.

Damascus chuckled and turned away from the mirror. “Alright, I get it, we’ll go.”

“I mean it,” she giggled. Damascus lifted her in his hooves and spun her gently around as he balanced on his hind legs, she laughed wildly as they pirouetted. Strands of her neat hair came loose as she flew in his arms, solitary strands becoming invisible in the fluorescents. They didn’t care.

He set her down and they laughed together for a moment, wobbling slightly in a dizzy haze.
“You ready?” he asked, after they had recovered.

Her smile dropped, as if she had forgotten what they were dressed up for until this point. “I’m scared.” Whispering, we held a hoof around her.

“They’ll leave us alone,” he promised. “Once I make them see.”

“Why do you keep your friends here with me whenever you go downstairs?” she asked, burying her head into my strong chest.

“Just to be safe, baby.” He kissed her smooth forehead. “I couldn’t just leave you two alone, could I? No Daddy would do that.” Damascus smiled at the space beside his daughter. There was nothing there.

“Will this make them stop?”

“They would never do anything to hurt you, they’re good ponies sweetheart, remember that. But good ponies can do stupid things sometimes, so I need to make sure.” He stood up, helping her along with his hoof. “I’m going to say some things that might sound scary, and I wouldn’t usually say them with you around, but Daddy needs you today, alright?”

“You’re saying them to scare the bad guys away?”

“Yes Marie, this needs to stop.” They walked together out of the room, the same room I had started the last memory in, and the same room that I had seen in the flashes that had ended it. Instead of walking downstairs Damascus led the filly in the opposite direction down the hallway. They passed what would become my room, the door was shut but I could almost visualize the inside perfectly. They were all the same, after all. We were going to the main atrium.

The hall was crowded, it reminded me of my trial, as that was the only time I had ever seen it this full. Ponies I had never known, ponies that were long gone - all ascended, damned or dead - sat in rows and murmured at Damascus’ arrival. These were my ancestors, I thought, everypony I had ever known in the Stable would be born to their lines, would come from this audience.

The Prophet sat, not on the stage, but within the crowd, and he didn’t look happy about it. Damascus stepped up; he walked past two important looking bucks and a unicorn that could only be the Overmare. Damascus emanated the same aura of instinctual power that the Prophet did, but he sat on stage while the latter drowned in the teeming audience. Things had changed in the years since our last memory.

Marie sat alone, beside an empty chair as Damascus stepped up to the pedestal near to them… her.
Rose was gone, erased from this memory, Damascus didn’t notice the difference, but I knew that she was supposed to be there, with their daughter. It was awful to see that empty chair and to know that the wife who had once sat upon it no longer existed in this realm of memory and dreams.

Damascus stayed near to his daughter, as just an erased memory divided them. The crowd looked on expectantly, Prophet frowning deeply at the new order. In a way, I was glad that I didn’t know what had happened, Damascus deserved that knowledge more. Just as he deserved to remember the two mares he had loved the most in his life. It didn’t make sense that I should experience this when he could not.

“Good morning brothers, sisters, friends” we smiled softly and looked back at the Overmare. “And I see some enemies” a few ponies in the crowd laughed and applauded. “Because in these volatile times that is what we have become, that is what we have been reduced to: enemies, even though we share a home, we share a living and we share each other. We still may call our neighbor: enemy. And that’s what I’d like to talk to you about today. I’d make reference to a personal matter to start off, if you all are alright with that.” He spoke as if he shared a connection with his listeners, as if they were taking part in a two-way discussion rather than a speech by one to many others. His audience waited, seceding permission.

“I am still a member of the Faith.” Excited Applause again. “And I still hold my mentor, my teacher, my Messenger… in the highest regard. Because he brought the Faith to us, let us not forget, and I know some of you may think badly of him, those of you who are against what our group stands for may resent him for what he brought into your Stable… your home. Let me tell you: he brought change.” Damascus met eyes with the Prophet; though the acknowledgement had not improved his demeanor.

“And though it may surprise you, I would ask that you take the particulars of my belief out of this discussion. Because what I believe is not what most of you believe, I know that… some of you have gone lengths to make that clear. But what I want to talk about here, in our atrium, is the change that the Faith has brought, not with its doctrine, but with its founding. And I want to address the reactions to this change, to this ‘threat’ as most would call it.” Some murmurs and exchanges passed in the pause.

“Being able to think for yourself… is not a threat, being able to subscribe to the beliefs you wish to subscribe to… is not at threat, and the Faith… is not a treat. Change is not a threat. And it’s time we all get accustomed to it! It’s time we all think for ourselves, and look at the way we’re living, to see what we restrict ourselves to with our Commissary and Destinies. We need to see that we limit ourselves every day when we talk about Ascension, we limit ourselves each time we use every ounce of our being to work towards a false goal, to work towards the validation of a synthetic sham!” I could almost hear the Overmare growl from her position behind us.

“I was allowed here today, that’s right allowed,” he spoke the word in disgust. “Because your Overmare realized that we need to find a solution to this problem, that we need to reestablish equality in this Stable. The Faith made itself known and the ground began to shake, ponies began to think, so we grew. But still we are limited, all of us, by what we think we can or can’t do, by what we think we can or cannot believe. Some are scared that questioning the system will cause removal from it; they’ve become complacent to it, scared of it, even! They worry that the glistening doors to their ‘Ascension’ will close if they dare to think out of line, to think there may be something else to brighten a black and white existence!” he declared.

“Some are so scared, in fact, that they choose to enact their system by force.” His tone became gentler. “Now, I want to be careful here, you all need to know that I do not blame the Overmare for what I’m about to describe, I blame the way this Stable makes some of us think, how it makes some of us blindly obey it.”
“I have gotten threats on my life, threats against my family and my religion because of this obedience. That’s why we’re all here today, because lives are in danger,” he stared fondly at Marie.
“And that fact alone should make it clear that something is wrong with the way we are corralled to think. Something is clearly wrong when we would turn against ourselves to protect a system!” The way he kept looking at his daughter… it was like he expected to lose her.

“And the Faith needs those of you who would harm us to understand something… We aren’t weak.” Cheers from few, fearful looks from most. “You come to us with violence and hate, we will respond appropriately, we will reduce ourselves to your level, because that is the only way we can see to get through to you. Violent minds respond to violence, as that’s all they understand, and so we are willing to explain things if it comes down to it. If violence is the only language we can use to settle this issue, then we’ll be very willing to talk.” He promised with a begrudgingly honest tone.

“We’re trapped together, that’s the way it is now. We are trapped. Is that how you want to live? Trapped in a place that you have no alternative to, trapped in a system that drives ponies to threats and violence, trapped in a mind-set that keeps you complacent, keeps you ‘good’ so that you can get some reward at the end of the line. Let me tell you, that isn’t goodness, that isn’t fair and that sure as anything won’t make you happy!” Some more hooves applauded together, he was winning ponies over.

“That is not the way I want my daughter to live! Afraid and alone? We are living in the damnation you so fear; we are living in a place of fear and loneliness, sadness and imprisonment! There is no freedom here, there is no safety. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to those who sheltered our ancestors in this preservation of the now dead country outside, to find equality, to find freedom!”

“We do not need to fight each other for it! That’s what you need to take from this, if you take anything at all, know that we are on the brink of conflict, violent conflict, and we need to save ourselves. Leave your religion, or lack thereof, at home and think about what we’re doing to each other, think about what we have reduced ourselves to! I’m talking to some of the Faith here too; In fact, I’m taking to them most of all. You can go down to the lower atrium, let your ‘Prophet’ lead you along as you try to earn your way into another variant of Ascension, you’ll sing your songs and say your prayers, but for what? What good does that do? Who does that help apart from yourself?” the applause was loud now, but through his eyes I saw that some of the ponies who had been behind him all along were hesitating to join the others in their appreciative stomps and cheers.

“You can’t sing your way to freedom, you can’t sing your way to salvation!” he announced passionately. “You can’t SING your way out of second-class-citizenship! And that’s what some of us are seen as: second-class, and until that inequality, that bigotry has been resolved; we are sitting on a bubbling conflict more dangerous than a balefire bomb, because bigotry and inequality were the real driving forces, the real reason behind the death… of Equestria.” We watched as Marie applauded along with the crowd.

“We are the last light of that country, we’re all that’s left of it… and we’re not going to go out like this. We are not going to fight each other until one side, one system stands as oppressor over the rest, in fact we are going to fight our way out of that oppression and embrace our own individuality, our own freedom, our own control over our community. We must be good for the sake of being good, not some otherworldly or mortal reward! We are going to get out of this darkness, get out from under the hold of systems long failed, get out and see the truth that we choose to see and get- our own freedom!”

“By any means necessary…”

The audience’s reaction spanned wide ranges of emotion, but applause sounded clear and loud over the disheartened silence of fear and disagreement. I didn’t get to see them for long, as Damascus turned almost immediately to his daughter; this was for her, to protect her and to give her life in a place that deserved the title: ‘Last light of Equestria’.

As he went to her time slowed down, this was the moment, this was what he remembered most strongly of his Marie, the look on her face as he came to her. The confused smile of a filly who didn’t know why she was happy, why she was so proud of her daddy, but who still wore an unarguable expression of love and reverence, of blind gratitude and appreciation.

And that face stayed frozen. The memory stopped, as the light in her diamond eyes and the beauty of her innocence and care were what he would remember… so that he could forget. The little patchwork princess before us began to burn, not as a pony but as a photograph. The edges of the screen blackened and melted like a piece of waxy paper held to a flame, darkness grew over her smile, and the black void consumed her entirety as she burned in one last display of color and light.

I shouldn’t have come here…

Was she still here? I wanted to look for her, to see her one more time before the zebra removed the orb, severing the link. No… I wanted Damascus to look for her; I wanted him to need her, to realize what he was losing…had already lost. This had all already happened… there was no stopping it. I just had to sit by and watch as he fed her to the extractor, burned her into the diamond blue orb that I now inhabited. And then, finally it was pulled away. Dragging what was left of Marie with it.

The doctor handed me a wide-eyed foal, no explanation as to where she came from, or why she was mine. I didn’t know her, I didn’t feed her. She was just there sometimes, impossibly important.

Her first word was my name to her… What she called me, a title that seemed to fall to me by default, luck.
Daddy
I read her to sleep sometimes, sometimes I didn’t even know where she was when I went to bed alone.

A child played, a filly, rolled and laughed in between the toys that lay scattered across a steel floor.
Marie.
She was young, too young to speak, too young to run. She had the bluest eyes.

She was there beside me sometimes, always alone, always independent. I gave speeches, I met ponies, sometimes they asked about her, sometimes they didn’t know that she existed, sometimes she didn’t.

Soon after her birth, came red. Too much red to comprehend, all over my hooves, all over my home. Marie was crying in the corner. But she was silent, she wasn’t breathing, and she couldn’t look at me.
Rose.

The trial: the filly cried for me, she cried in fear and maybe anger…. I didn’t know why she was crying.
She was alone again, but this time it seemed genuine and whole, this time she was actually on her own.
Before I could assume she was with another… that someone was waiting for her, but now she was alone.
Repent.

<-=======ooO Ooo=======->

I woke with a start, still surrounded by machines, still lying in the darkness, orbs before me.
This time nothing had changed, this time it didn’t have to happen, I could’ve stayed out…
Separate but safe…

I wasn’t old, I wasn’t Damascus, and neither of us were fathers. Not anymore.
We became more alike with every extraction; his past becoming as lonely as mine had been, as empty. He was a fool to give it up, a selfless, wasteful fool.

All we knew now was that our mothers had died on hospital beds, our fathers were both forgotten. Except I had never had anything, and he had just given it all away, now all that was left of his family was with me. The last traces of Rose and Marie were surviving only in my mind… This was all that could keep me from wishing I hadn’t bothered with the orbs, wishing I had never accepted them, this thought is what made me keep them. So I packed them back into their case, four remaining mysteries, and slid it into my bag.

Caliber wasn’t sleeping across from me anymore, and neither was Ash. When I had entered the blue orb it had been the part of morning that counted as night, the part that that annoying friends would insist counted as the next day if you had been through a late night together. But now it was that next day.

I peeked out of the hatch; it was light, but barely. I scanned the room one last time; everything was as it had been when I first entered it, nothing but the blinking machines. I pushed myself out of the hatch.

Caliber and Ash sat together once again, overlooking the horizon, waiting for me to exit the orb. They were dressed and packed, a couple of cans and strips of tough red stuff lay before them on the grating.

“Good morning,” I said, rubbing my eyes with my hoof as I limped up to them.

“Food?” Caliber asked, mouth full of an unappealing mush, she kicked at the meal set out in front of her.
I was used to nutrient paste… I had only ever seen real food being imitated, or in advertisements.

“What is it?” I stuck my round snout into one of the cans, and as I lifted my head it stayed stuck around my muzzle.

“Pork and Beans.” Caliber reluctantly giggled as I tried to shake the contents of the metal cylinder into me. I didn’t know what ‘pork’ was… but it was good! I kept my head up to the soft gray cloud cut and tipped the rest of the ancient, hopefully preserved, food into my greedy, salivated mouth.

“It’s good!” I mumbled, voice echoing, into the can. Ash stood to help me get it off my face; she gripped the other end of it in her mouth and began to pull against me. The can went flying as we stumbled apart.

“Try some jerky… Caliber made it herself.” Ash offered. I bit into the tough band of salty deliciousness. Everything tasted! And all so differently! I chewed viciously at everything that was given to me, savoring the textures, flavors and warmth of it all. It was such a welcome change from the monotonous, masquerade of paste that I was used to. And the fact that I hadn’t eaten in days didn’t do anything to stop me from pigging out on the pork, beans and jerky.

“Ooooh…” I moaned, in a dizzy, shameless ecstasy. “It’s all really good!”

“Do you want some privacy?” Caliber smiled, watching my tirade from a safe distance. I became a flurry of consumption and gobbled down as much as I could before collapsing, satisfied, against the tower.
“Tell me I get to do that again!” I begged, hooves resting against my warmed body as I lay back.

“I can even say that you will literally die if you don’t.” Ash assured. They both seemed amused, if a little disturbed, at my reaction to the glorious, glorious concept of actual food!
The cold morning air was light and contrasted perfectly with the heavy warmth that filled me. The Divide lay ever-scarred before us, below an empty sky. Despite how content I was in the moment, I knew my friends had been waiting for me long enough already. I pulled myself to swaying hooves.

“So…” my breath was heavy, nearly panting after the effort of lifting myself from the gluttonous splurge. “What’s the plan?”

Caliber slipped her hot-plate and the surviving food back into her bags. “Well, Ash and I both think we need to do a little scavenging on our way into Zion.”

“Yes, I have taken a look at Caliber’s battle saddle and think that I can fix it if we find a few things first. We might also need more food than expected.” She implied.

“Sorry about that.” Of course food was scarce! You glorious idiot! “I got a little carried away.”

“We’ve got enough for now, though it won’t last if you get freaky with it again.” Caliber teased. “Anyway, I saw an old border-security building down the wall a ways east. Might be a good place to scrounge some.”

“Okay, let’s head there then.” I agreed. My pip-buck had already marked it down as ‘Equestrian Border Security’. We would have to walk back across the wall and along the Divide until we could get back in.

We made our way out of the tower, picking through a couple of boxes and piles of junk on our way. The turret I destroyed last night had thrown one of the pieces Ash needed across the room when it exploded, but the tech was still intact. I disarmed the fragmentation mines that trapped the barricaded front door and slid them into my saddle-bags. I found I could almost perform the action reflexively now.

Mottled corpses, blood and feathers lined the hallway out into the open. Caliber and Ash had killed at least half a dozen of the oncoming ghouls on their own, and outside we found quite a few more, lying still and scattered. My grenade had left burn marks and shrapnel in a few of the bodies, and its blast mark was surrounded by a sporadic circle of charred ghouls.

“That really saved our flanks.” Caliber thanked. “Most of them scattered after the explosion, I don’t know that we would have been able to get rid of them all on our own.” We stepped over the crisped birds and continued on our way down the gentle, still-Equestrian slope. I worried that, if there were any surviving ghouls, they would accost us at any second now, but the trip was blissfully uneventful.

The floodlights in the ruin and along the wall shone on, almost indiscernibly in the soft morning haze. The last three corpses lay were we had watched them die. The first’s beak and face were crushed to a pulp and smeared against the dusty concrete, conclusive and messy. The second had burned to a fraction of its original size. Most of its body, its feathers, had dissolved into black ash around it. Ash balked at it again, giving it a wide berth as we walked past the landing/cremation site.

The last had wholly been my kill. Its eye was hollow, black and empty, though in the light it was clear that its entire skull had suffered the same fate. Its face was matted with the now dried fluids that had melted from the boiling eyes, feathers stiff and stained, looking as if a wax mask had been set over them.
We hugged the border, keeping a brisk pace. The corpses reminded us of the odds we had survived last night; we wouldn’t get that lucky again, not out in the open. The crag of the divide was dulled as the floodlights were; its green glow was almost visible but the air still sat heavy and unhealthy with radiation. However much of the stuff there was, it turned hordes of Griffons into ghouls, so we kept our distance.

I took the time to enjoy my last moments under the sky before we stepped over the ruined wall again to enter Equestria. It was laced with golden sunlight but was an expansive, empty gray. There were clouds every now and again, but they were so different from what I had come to expect, their shapes were creative, random and unpredictable. Some towered into bulbous mountains while others striped the sky in thin wisps; they were barely identifiable as the same things that made up the shifting, shaded ceiling that we were about to step back under. Far off on the horizon, some were white as virgin snow.

I turned my back on the Divide, and we clambered our way into the lost country once again. The Earth Mover loomed on this familiar horizon; mountain ranges that I knew and understood filled my vision. The feeling of coming home filled me, to my great confusion.

“Sometimes you can see Canterlot if you look far enough south.” Caliber said, as we stepped off of the broken concrete and onto dead earth. “In between the Earth Mover and the gas station.” She gestured to the giant machine and then to the spot where the highway lifted off the ground before it curved around the mountains and into Littlehorn. However there was nothing to be seen beyond the white, morning mist.

“That reminds me…” Ash chirped as she caught up to us. “How did you get your cutie-mark Cal?” We had argued last night over whether the black and white thing was a compass or a crosshairs. She had been prudent to ask for how it had originated, as that would give the best indication of what it meant.

“Well back when your grandfather and I were just little kids, bright-eyed and able-bodied, a great snow-storm befell the land.” She told the story with great consideration and a mock venerable voice. “Coldest one we’d seen in many winters, all our winters, in fact. Now I know you deep-Northerners think nothing of a little snow on your Great Plain, but we were West of Littlehorn you see, in a place where the cold actually went away sometimes.” She looked at me. “Now you haven’t seen a storm of any sort so I’ll give you a little bit of context: everything was bleached white, you couldn’t see the cart in front of you when walking in a caravan line and you sure as shivers couldn’t see the pony pulling it.” Compared to the light snow that had been falling ever since Ash buried her pilgrimage, this sounded unimaginable.

“Winds blew at gale force and little fillies were ushered inside just so they wouldn’t get swept away. It was the one time when you didn’t have to worry about Slavers or Raiders… ‘Cause everybody was too busy trying to survive the elements to bother with fighting one and other.” That almost sounded preferable. “Now if you ask those fancy-suits or the cloud cowards, then you’d hear it differently, but to us normal folks the blizzard was life-threateningly brutal, and the harvest yielded very little that year.”

“So you were a farmer!” I said in glee, getting caught up in the story.

“It’s an expression.” She refuted. “Anyway, like I said: it was cold, it was hard to see and scavenging was nearly impossible, but it was still sure as anything necessary. My parents were long gone by that time, and I had started to pick up whatever jobs I could to get by, wouldn’t have called it mercenary work myself, but there was some fighting when it came down to it.”

“Wait, you started this line of work as a filly?” I imagined my childhood, when I had run around the Stable with my make-shift tri-beam laser rifle, pretending to defend my home from ‘the bad guys’ of my creation.
“Every wasteland line of work is going to involve fighting at some point… I wasn’t a mercenary exactly, but I did what jobs I could. Scavenging had always been my primary provider though, and the storm was making it difficult. Now me and your grand-father…”

“I’m not buying that.” Ash laughed sweetly.

“You’re smarter than you look, little Ascella.” She quickly returned the pilgrim’s smile before slipping back into character. “Now me and a little colt, name of Candlewick, were out in the snow, looking for a ruin that was rumored to be in the area. Chock full of ammunition and, more importantly, food. In those days we had to rely on rumors alone, DJ Pon3 didn’t talk about the North much...”

“I thought that I was the Northerner.”

“A lot of things are north of Manehattan, Calvary and Canterlot most notably. Now stop interrupting!” Ash blushed silently, “So the DJ didn’t pay us much mind, though he mentioned the storm, as that’s all the traders who came up this way could talk about when they got back, ‘The Great White Wall’ they would call it. Talked about how everything past Canterlot was a big snowy haze, which it pretty much was.”

“Didn’t you see this storm?” I asked Ash, she would have been only a few years younger than Caliber at the time, and even further North, in the heralded Great Plains that we were going to enter through Zion.

“I must have been too young at the time to remember it... Or she’s exaggerating.” She said, gesturing accusingly at the story teller.

“You dare!” Caliber exasperated in a perfect mimic of offense. “I’ll have you know that this story only gets sadder from here, and I will not be accused of anything while trying to tell you kids a sad story!”
Ash gave a courtesy look of apology. “Good, now let me get on with it.”

The Border Security building loomed along the wall ahead of us. It was almost as high as the border itself and beside it the tall skeleton of a reinforced gate, which would have opened into the Divide, stood flimsy. It was a square building; the top was wider than its base, creating a thick, heavy overhang over the front entrance. It wasn’t huge, two or three stories tops, and no wider than the Atrium a couple times over.

“So me and Candlewick are lost, blind and completely alone.” Caliber and Candlewick, I liked the image of juvenile friendship conjured up. “We think we’re going to die out there… and one of us is right. We’re getting cold, frostbitten, sluggish and hopeless, when it gets even worse. We see figures in the distance, they were dark silhouettes, hunched and slow, but anything is better than dying alone in the cold, right?”

We nodded.

“Wrong, these ponies turn out to be feral ghouls. We should have known, seeing as they’re the only damned things in the Wasteland that would still hunt in a blizzard. And that’s exactly what they did.”

“Did you make it?”

“Well, I did obviously, But Candlewick was slower, they caught up to him, started tearing him apart.” She spoke in a disturbingly emotionless voice. “He’s screaming out and the snow is getting bloody and starts melting underneath him. His own warm bleeding is turning it to mush and I can barely see him under the heavy-packed snow around him, and the circle of ferals gnawing at him.” She sighed, releasing a plume of cloudy breath to the gray. “I’ve got old Apollo strapped to my side, so I start hitting them with all I’ve got; I barely drop three of them before their done turning him to pink ribbons. I shot the three all clean through the head, but I couldn’t hold, I mean, bits of him are flying everywhere and I’m… just a little girl.”

“Goddesses, Caliber, you don’t have to justify being affected by that.” Ash comforted, shocked at the mare’s insecurity with admitting weakness, no matter how appropriate it was.

“So they finish him up, I know you don’t stop screaming until your dead when you’ve got ghouls on you.” She ignored her. “So I know he’s gone, but they’re still chewing on him, like they’re cannibals or something. Ghouls aren’t hunting you ‘cause they’re hungry, they aren’t after brains like some drunken barbucks will tell you, their just violently unstable, and killing is all some of them have left as an instinct.” She met my frightened eyes. “I sincerely hope you never have to see a feral, Grace. It changes you, there still so similar to ponies, still so familiar… So I run, logical decision… Bullshit, I was scared out of my mind. I run, my sides hurt and my vision starts to blur and pulse.” I imagined the little copper-headed filly, with the oversized black rifle at her side, crying and sprinting as she fought her way through a snowstorm.

“Now I’m alone… completely, no ghouls no Candlewick and no idea where I Am.” The grandmother act had dropped completely, as the story was getting poignant, and she was beginning to remember it vividly. “Everything is white, and screaming, so I have no idea where to go. But then I get this feeling… like an instinct and I follow it, and the next thing you know… I’m Home.”

“Just like that?” Ash asked.

“I walked for what felt like forever… for all I knew: could’ve ended up on the other side of the world, but I didn’t… I was lost, hopeless and alone one minute, then the next I was back in town.”

“And you had a compass on your flank.” I yielded. Ash had been right. It didn’t seem to matter now.

“In a crosshairs.” She added. Ash and I exchanged a look as we stepped onto the concrete base of the Border Security Building. “I guess it means I’m good at finding things to shoot.” She laughed. We had both been right; I didn’t feel like saying anything though. The story of Caliber’s cutie-mark had depressed me, her reaction to it even more so. It was supposed to be the happiest day of a little filly’s life, finding out their purpose. But what did you do if you had to watch your friend get ripped apart, only to end up running from a pack of corpses? What did you do when your talent turned out to be survival? If you’d been fighting to survive your whole life, how did knowing you were destined to be good at it help you?”

“I’m sorry…?” I didn’t even know how to react. Ash didn’t look as disturbed as I was, empathetic yes, but not intrinsically disturbed.

Caliber gave me a confused look. “For what?” I didn’t know.

“How about we split up to look for parts.” Ash chirped in, recognizing my loss for words. “You’re not seeing anything on that thing are you?” She asked.

I pulled myself together, but was appreciative of the chance to be alone. Out of apologizing distance from Caliber. “No, it looks all clear.” Two white bars stood out nearby, according to my E.F.S, and that was all.

“Alright, if you see anything that looks useful, grab it, and I’ll check for what I need from you afterwards.” Ash called as she made her towards the dead army vehicles in the parking lot ahead of us, along the wall.
“How about we dig around inside?” Caliber offered, smiling despite her story, smiling despite the life she had lived. I felt spoilt but managed to follow her as she headed for the double-doors.

The entrance room was an amalgam of scattered stationary and paper-work, the tiled floor was almost invisible under the sheet carpeting. Desks lined the wall, spearheaded by a semi-circle that stood, circumference facing us, in the center of the room. Terminals whirred, glowing green at some desks, but most were quite and dark. A long-stopped clock was tilted on the brown wall, I wondered if it had stopped at the moment the bombs fell, or whether it had broken sometime in between then and now. A door opened into a storage room to the right and a staircase rose up in the same direction against the far wall.

I instinctively slipped my way over to the nearest terminal, nearly losing my grip on the floor through the loose papers. A bulletin board ordained the wall above it. A lot of posters were stuck to it, and though most faded or torn: some were legibly intact.

EQUESTRIA’S FIRST DEFENSE! One yelled at me from above a picture of a stoic looking unicorn mare levitating a rifle at her side in pink magic as she peeked over a wall. The wall was spattered in mud but the mare wore a fresh pressed military uniform and a rounded helmet on her pink head. I wondered if she was actually a soldier, or a model.
KEEP YOUR COUNTRY SAFE! It ordered. I’m on it ma’am! I thought as I saluted the long-dead mare. Whatever this war had been about, the soldiers that had fought and died in it still deserved my respect.

A few of the other posters were less appealing.
THIS IS YOUR ENEMY! A picture of an insidious looking zebra buck, armed to the teeth and dressed in the tattered rags of a uniform made up the bulk of the poster. I knew this couldn’t be a real soldier. I wondered how many zebras, the actors who had posed for these posters for example, the citizens of our country, had had to deal with the racism that this kind of propaganda instilled.
KEEP THE STRIPES OUT OF EQUESTRIA!

PINKIE PIE IS WATCHING YOU!
I knew Pinkie Pie! She had been the element of… laughter? That couldn’t be right… I strained to remember the mare’s inconsequential title. Whatever the stories had made her out to be, she looked down-right frightening in the poster, despite her smile. A streak of gray in her cotton-candy mane reinforced my belief that those stories had come from long ago, in a happier time, a simpler time. Ministry of Morale, huh? I guess that worked with her element.
FOREVER! The poster didn’t make me feel like laughing though.

SHE MAY BE LOADED! This one did a little.
An attractive mare straddled a comically large pistol just under the caption. Her make-up was heavily applied and she was wearing an outfit that was somehow more suggestive than being out-right naked.
DON’T TAKE CHANCES WITH PICK-UPS!

I turned my attention back to the terminal; though I could hear Caliber rooting around through the mess behind me, I felt the urge to use it. My hooves danced over the wide keyboard, reminding me of my long days in the Stable, which I mostly spent reading and writing on a terminal similar to this one.
Except mine hadn’t been locked.

The security screen popped up. I quickly bypassed it and set to work on figuring out the password. Numbers, symbols and, most importantly, letters, flashed before me. I filtered my way through some duds during my scan, improving my chances to find what I was looking for. The lock wasn’t particularly advanced; and I didn’t think I would have to back out at any point. Eventually, after a few near hits I determined that the password was: ‘Gateway’

The terminal housed a couple of reports dating back almost two hundred years, I couldn’t help but investigate. The chronological first was written by an author identified as Corporal Fern.

Communal Log: 104
Cpl. Fern: 3rd patrol regiment, West Zion Border Security.

The Griffon immigrants have stopped being a problem.
The last reported attempt to cross the border illegally was over two years ago, meaning we are now down an alert level. Though I think we can safely say that immigration isn’t going to be a problem for a while. Even the most desperate know that Equestria is no place to be right now. Consider the issue closed.

However, we have a more pressing issue to shift our attention to: Invaders.
The soft-hooves up at Strategic Defense think that the zebras are bound to try and sneak their way into the country, with a small task-force or regiment of specialized operatives at the most.
I wouldn’t think they’d circle all the way North to do it… but we don’t want to be the post that goes down in history as the one that let the Zebras in. Not when we’ve been warned.

I know I don’t have to remind you about what happened at Littlehorn four years ago. And that was reported to be a sole zebra insurgent working in retaliation to the issue with the immigrants. Needless to say, the zebras are nothing if not exceptional at stealth and infiltration. And with the weapons technology both sides have access to… the megaspells they’re testing?
One soldier could destroy a city; one soldier could end this war, taking the world with it.

I’ll assign the watch tomorrow morning, I expect you all to be ready to march at 6:00 a.m. You’ll be at your posts for a long time so bring everything you can. But remember, we’re just being careful; I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ll have more use for a deck of cards than you do for your rifle.

Littlehorn was the valley that everypony seemed so afraid of. And it sounded like whatever had happened there, had been a turning point in the war. The log was surprisingly informal for what I imagined from a military leader, and I suspected that this base had been a lot less important, a lot less impersonal, before the war-time escalation.

Reading the logs, displayed chronologically, from more than a dozen decades ago, gave me a surprisingly warm feeling of Stable nostalgia. My terminal had always been one of my favorite things then. I hadn’t done much of anything nearly as often as I had read through the data-files it stored.
Unfortunately quite a few of the next logs I looked into had been corrupted or damaged, maybe even erased. The next was over a year later but still written by Fern, though she had evidently been promoted.

Communal Log: 149
Sgt. Fern: West Zion Border Authority and Liaison.

Good news everypony!
You all have obviously heard the news about the new suits the MWT has been working on?
Well they’re putting them out in the field.
Unfortunately, the word is you need some freakish amount of training, even a license I think, to operate them. So while we’re not going to be getting new, top of the line, tech to use, we are going to be getting some new recruits…
Though I wouldn’t call them that, considering they outrank us…hard.

So let’s get ready to embrace our new leaders, huh? Things are going to get a little tighter here but I would hope that you all are ready for that anyway. Things are getting hot, there’s talk of another insurgence attempt, and it’s the kind of talk you need to pay attention to.

We’ve got some problems with the mountain guard, and we know that the Zebras are tenacious, and may be determined enough to attempt an entry through Zion. Problem is, and as you know, we don’t even have a physical border there; the mountains have always acted in place of a wall. But now Defense is positive that the Zebras are not only willing to circle the country to get here but that they’d climb a damn mountain right afterwards.

We’ve always been the weakest point. Even with the Steel Rangers they’re sending we will still be the weakest point, but that’s statistics for you. We need to be the ones making the difference, not with numbers but with hard work, and I know you all are ready to bear the brunt of some long cold nights ahead. I know we all have something we want to protect, something that’ll keep us guarding our country, even if it kills us.

So let’s show those glorified tin-cans what kind of soldiers we are!

I didn’t even know if Fern was a mare or a buck but I couldn’t help but associate her with the pink soldier/model on the poster above me. This was how I imagined her, a gritty, pretty, sergeant on the brink of the world’s end. Rallying her troops, her friends to stand strong and together in the face of war.
But to my dismay the next discernible report, dated only a few days later, wasn’t from her.

Communal Log: 1
Junior Paladin Orion, West Zion Front Line.

Steel Ranger patrol arrived on site approximately 0700h, five hours ago.
Equestrian Border Security: West Zion
Junior Paladin Orion first report:

Commendation to the troops of this station is due.
Troops, led by Sgt. Fern, lined up in accordance to the correct protocol.
They fell out at our order; the process was seamless and precise.
Exactly the kind of commitment and respect we’re hoping to see in more soldiers working for our country’s defense. We expect them to keep up the good work.

I assigned one Knight Commander to four of the five watch divisions.
Our tally on arrival was six, myself, four Knight Commanders (listed in your dossiers) and Journeymare Scribe Kit, who I have assigned to Sgt. Fern’s third division.
I will be spearheading the watch from here as well as on the lines.
Report anything you see to your commanding ranger, who will then relay it to me.
I ask that you would follow our protocol religiously Sgt. Fern; Strategic Defense believes that we have developed the most efficient method for guarding Equestria’s borders.

Lastly… enjoy today, as we begin the real work tomorrow.

That report certainly felt more military. I looked around the room again, trying to find some sign of the Steel Ranger’s inhabitance. On an adjacent wall a poster emblazoned with their name and emblem caught my attention. A winged sword, blue and gray, sat against a backdrop of three cogs circling purple stars spread over a large green apple in the very deepest layer.

I glanced back at Caliber, her head was buried into a filing cabinet on the opposite side of the room, and she had a steadily growing pile of salvage near the door. I felt a little guilty for sitting idly by while she did our job for us.

“Do you need any help?” I called out.

“Don’t feel bad, Grace.” Her voice came out echoing but muffled through the metal cabinet. “It’s nice to see somebody interested in something other than scavenging.”

“Thanks…” I turned eagerly back to the terminal and skimmed through a couple of the Paladin’s logs, they became more and more spread out, but less concerned over time. Eventually he almost seemed as relaxed and at ease as Fern had been. The Rangers had been at this station for months, no invasions, no immigrants, all they could do was become friends with the troops originally stationed here.
I got to the last log he made, almost a year after his first, before Fern took over again.

Communal Log: 34
Junior Paladin Orion, West Zion Border.

I know it hasn’t seemed like it here, but the war has gotten a lot worse.
I have two pieces of disturbing news to relay to you all, as Sgt. Fern has conceded the task to me.
Firstly, to my fellow Rangers, the lesser development:
A near deadly anti-material, anti-machine gun has been developed…
In Equestria…

The Ministry Mare of War-Time Technology tried to keep them out of production, in fear that the zebras would get a hold of the technology on the battlefields down South, but they are now being mass produced nonetheless. They are capable of tearing through the extent of our armor plating, possibly rendering us immobile, or killing us instantly, depending on the shot.

Now I wouldn’t worry about insurgents on this Northern frontier having access to these guns for some time. But we may need to worry about our brothers and sisters in the South. Minister Applejack tried to stop development, but ponies have gone to more dangerous lengths to win this damn war. So I hope your thoughts will go out to those under threat of these weapons, let’s hope they’re worth it in the long run.

Secondly, and more upsetting, news for everypony.
Our job here was in question for a time, as it was believed by the Defense Strategists that the commodities we have invested here would be better served elsewhere. But now our position, our task, has become imperative, undeniably crucial.

It has been confirmed that the zebras have acquired megaspell capability.
And they have most likely weaponized the technology already.
We’re all that’s keeping them from sneaking them into the North… and so we will do our jobs, we will keep the line held, and hope, for our countries sake, that this war will not escalate that far.

I knew what that meant… the bombs.
The ancient, though timeless, story’s end was getting close. Only a few reports left.

Sgt. Fern, West Zion Border Security.

As some of you at the station already know: Paladin Orion and his regiment have been recalled.
They left last night, soon after the siege on Canterlot began.
We’ve got a description of the attack; it came with their orders to re-group with the rest of the Steel Rangers. Long range Zebra missiles are bombarding the city…

Dammit, I don’t have to do this, do I? You can see it happening, for Celestia’s sake!
Just look south, if you’re further along the wall you may not be able to see it… but if you can see the ring of fire… that’s Canterlot. That’s the missiles hitting our Princesses’ shield.

There are so fucking many, all you can see are the explosions.

Stand strong, the Princesses will hold the shield. And we will hold the line.

Reading through the increasing small number of remaining logs was like watching a countdown. A countdown to the end of the world.

Sgt. Fern

Canterlot is nothing but a smoking pink bubble.
We don’t know what it is but the missiles are still not penetrating, the Princesses are still holding strong. The Zebras are firing at us from out of the country, they’ve got more weapons range than we expected.

We… we don’t know if they can get the megaspells this far.
But nonetheless we sure as shit are NOT going to let them sneak a bomb past our borders!
SO STAY ON YOUR POSITIONS!
If we ever arraign Flake for running to the Stables at the first sign of trouble, believe me she is going to be court-marshaled as soon as this war is over!

The next three logs were all made on the same day
three…

Sgt. Fern

They hit Cloudsdayle!
They wiped the whole fucking city out of the sky!
The missiles are coming from out of the country…
I don’t know if there’s anything we can do…
I think the Pegasus are planning to stop them from targeting anything, block their sight with the clouds.
Maybe it’ll work…

For now we’ll follow our last orders, and I’ll be damned before I leave this post behind.
We’ll hit them back! We’ll stop this! Just hold the Line!

two…

Military is collapsing, Maripony has gone quiet, we’re alone now.
This was in the last report I got:
Manehattan was hit from the inside…
They got a balefire bomb into the country. They got a bomb across our borders.

The cloud cover is up… did you see the Pegasus?
Like an infinite flock of migrating birds…

I think something is going on… but I can’t get a hold of the Brass.

Report in, if you can. If you can still read this then fall in.
We need to get organized, try to get to Calvary, help with the evacuation.
Unless it’s been hit too…
It’s a bombardment… they can’t even aim and they still won’t stop.

We must have hit them back.
And if… when we survive this, we’ll march over there and finish them off ourselves.
Report in!

one…

The shield is down… but the bombs have stopped.
Either the cloud cover was enough to dissuade the zebras… or we cooked them.
I honestly don’t care anymore.

The shield is down…

The Princesses are dead.
All I can see of the capital is pink mist. Like a Cloud.
That might be all that’s left.

All I can see of the sky is clouds, except to the North… there it’s fire.

Where are you?

I suppose it doesn’t matter now… the war is over.
The military is gone…
The Princesses are gone…
Equestria is gone, this border is meaningless, this post is meaningless…everything…

Do you remember what they taught us about Fallout?
When the megaspells were weaponized, the course they made us take?

If you’re still out there… if you’ll still follow me…. Then report in.

We’ll fight this together… We’ll wait it out… then we’ll go to the city, like I promised.
Maybe it survived… maybe we can survive.
I sat still for a moment, eyes damp and shining in the green light of the terminal.
I felt like crying for her, I felt like doing everything I could to save her, but I also knew that it was too late.
She had watched her country die, she had always done her job, defended the border, held the line, but still she watched her country die…

The Cloud had consumed Canterlot… killed the Princesses.
Fern had died as her leaders had, in the defense of their country.
Fern, Luna and Celestia…
That in itself was too much for me to take in.
Cloudsdayle, Manehattan, Maripony… names that meant almost nothing to me… were driving me to tears. I knew the name that mattered, and I understood what we had lost, what had died that day.

For what? I slammed my hooves against the desk, again and again. What was the point!?

“Grace!” I fought her as she tried to hold me. I didn’t want to remember where I was, I didn’t want to remember what was waiting for me outside… I didn’t want to exist, because I was a product of the war. The Stable, my ancestors being forced together to survive, had been because of the war.
The same war that had killed them… that had killed us.

I curled up tight, like I had on the highway just a day before.
But this was worse than the revelation about the Stables… this explained why they had come about, it told the story of fear and panic that had been the last moments of Equestria, the story of cowardice and death. I didn’t want to know it; I wanted to pretend it was just a story, a twisted fairy-tale.
I had been doing that up until now… denying the truth of the Wasteland. Seeing this dead earth as the same Equestria - their Equestria - had been a lie, a naivety, an indulgence to my sheltered mind.

This time Caliber didn’t pause to stand above me, she didn’t hesitate to hold me as I wept. My hooves ached, the desk was cracked and had left splinters and scars on my legs, but I couldn’t feel them. The mare held my head into her tear-dotted scarf, her warm, beating chest. She rested her muzzle over my head, her arms around me, she held me tightly, unyieldingly in the embrace.

Her whole life had been reserved to this suffering… this damnation. She was as much a product of the war as I had been, but she had never thought for a moment that there could be something better, she had never been foolish enough to believe that Equestria could still be saved.
A filly got her cutie-mark alone, consumed in fear of snow and blood, and it was a cross-hairs.
I apologized again and again, so she whispered to me, trying to console me, saying hush and that we would be alright, implying that I was forgiven for the crimes of my fore-fathers. Crimes that I wasn’t guilty of, crimes that I was created by.

“Hush now, quiet now.” She hummed, half singing as she rocked gently back and forth. I was a child.

That’s how we stayed for what felt like forever, and yet still seemed like too little a time when it was over. The patch of exposed chest I had burrowed into between her scarf and vest was damp and matted. I felt l as if I could drown in my own tears, but she was so warm, so I stayed gasping softly against her. She didn’t seem to mind and kept whispering for me, comforting me like a mother would her scared filly.

“Why did they do it…? Why did they have to die?” They didn’t, I knew that to be my brutal answer, I knew that it had all been futile, and for that I wept. So much life wasted, entire generations would never come to exist, entire civilizations were brought to their knees, and for what?
Soldiers had laid their lives on the line, mothers had sent their children to war… to die for a forgotten cause, to fight for a forgotten country.
Stables divided what little the old world could preserve from what was left of it, divided its inheritance from its corpse… kept us from the truth we so blindly denied.
We thought the world was bigger than us, beyond our perception or control, and yet we had ended it.

“Everyone has to die…” she whispered. “Everything has to end… we aren’t going to change that, but we can foght it… remember that there are ponies out there, fighting to survive the place they have no choice but to call home, and take comfort in the fact that despite it all, we’re still here. We have survived, we still haven’t lost ourselves…?” she awaited my agreement. And I knew that I had to be her paragon.

“No,” I choked out. “We haven’t lost ourselves yet.” I had to be better than this. I couldn’t condone the ponies of the past while I lay curled up, weeping in the arms of a mare, doing nothing to improve the future. This new Equestria would never be what it once was, it could never be restored to the ideal of the old world… but the old world had ultimately destroyed itself in violence and balefire. “Redemption.”

I pulled myself away from Caliber, softly and thankfully. She smiled into my drying eyes, dying eyes. “We are the last light of that country, we’re all that’s left of it… and we’re not going to go out like this. We are not going to fight each other until one side, one system stands as oppressor over the rest, in fact we are going to fight our way out of that oppression and embrace our own individuality, our own freedom, our own control over the lives were living. We must be good for the sake of being good, not some otherworldly or mortal reward. We are going to get out of this darkness, get out from under the hold of a system long failed, get out and see the truth that we choose to see and get our own freedom.
By any means necessary…” I recited. “Damascus said that in the orb…”

“Aren’t the first orbs memories of the Stable?” she seemed surprised that his words from decades ago, from a place detached from what she knew as home, fit so well.

“War never changes.”

That was the truth I now knew. That knowledge had hindered my ability to believe in something better, but it now reinforced my will to fight for it. The war had lasted two hundred years; the bombs had simply been its peak, not its end. We were still soldiers, but we had more reason to fight than money, pride or patriotism, the sides were clearer now, though the wasteland was not black and white… it was gray.

I couldn’t say that the Zebras had been evil, and that Equestria had been their victim. Though they had fired first, they had once been a peaceful country, just like we had been. They had been our enemies on paper, by order and by declaration, but now what was left of us, all of us, fought the same enemy… that enemy was war. Equestria was alive… but war had scarred it, burned it, though as long as we fought the Good Fight we would symbolize what it had once been. No flags flew anymore, but our morals and values would unify us against war and its incurable extremities.

“You’re alright?” she asked, gently nudging my muzzle up so I looked her in the eyes.

“I promise not to put you thought that again.” I smiled, I had broken down exactly like this on the highway yesterday, and just as she had now, Caliber had helped me come to terms with the new truth that I faced. “I never had myself pegged as a Drama-Queen.” I wasn’t done thinking, or even done hurting, but I could hide it for her sake, for my own sake. If I couldn’t be good… Stable-pony, old-world darling… who could?

“I have no idea what it’s like… seeing all of this for the first time. And I can’t imagine what you’re going through; I’ve always been used to it. It’s almost sick that this all seems normal to me, isn’t it?” She still didn’t know what I had read, but what else could have affected me so much apart from the nature of the wasteland? “You can always count on me whenever you need somebody to cry to, Sugar.” We hugged; the difference in the embrace was that we were both sharing it, while just moment ago she had been the one comforting me, a one way gift.

She walked up to her pile of salvage, showing each article to me before she put them into her saddlebags. I showed appreciation for every single one, though I barely knew what any of them were. Needing to give her something back, I revered her for her scavenges, trying to validate her.

Content within each other’s friendship, we were interrupted. A third white band popped up onto my E.F.S, it was in the direction of the front door. Before I had counted two, Ash and Caliber… no, I realized, not Ash. She was the approaching band, she had been too far out of range for me to pick up until now, the band I had assumed as her was the unknown, and it was in this very building.

Ash burst through the door as I was waving them over to look at my Pip-buck, her hooves were leaving a trail of thick, viscous, blackening liquid behind her. Her lower legs and underside made it look like she had been splashing around in the stuff, but apart from that she looked unchanged, unharmed.

“Wha…” I began to ask.

“Gasoline,” she grumbled, waving one hoof and inadvertently sprinkling droplets of the substance onto us. “I was scrapping the army vehicles for parts when I found one that seemed amazingly intact, the keys were in the ignition… I couldn’t help it.” She was almost apologizing. “Once I started it up it pumped gallons of this stuff out of a hole somewhere in its insides. The whole parking lot is covered in it now.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Caliber forgave. “So we won’t smoke, big deal.”

That’s right, I remembered, gasoline was incredibly flammable. For a moment I worried about Ash, she was partially drenched in the stuff. The third bar didn’t help.

“My E.F.S is picking up another non-hostile here, it might be upstairs.” I was whispering, despite my recent, uncensored sobbing. “You should probably stay here and find something to dry off with.”

“It is probably just a bird or rodent.” She dismissed. “If it had a gun then your thing would label it as a hostile, yes?”

“I don’t know, that’s why I’m still worried.” She seemed shocked that the E.F.S didn’t work the way she had expected.

“How else would it judge something?” she was more confused than concerned for herself. “It’s just radar so it’s not like it can gauge intentions or moral credibility…” murmuring to herself more than anypony in particular she went on, pacing the room. “It would have to factor in heart-rate or some other vital signs to be able to determine aggression… there’s no way it can do that at these kinds of ranges.”

“So you’ll wait here?” I asked, not expecting an answer. She continued pacing and mumbling in response. “Thanks, we’ll go check it out.” I tilted my head for Caliber to follow me, quietly.

Ash had already tarnished a lot of the paper on the floor with her tracks of gasoline; they slipped out from under me faster and looser as we walked, nearly making me lose my hold on the floor.

Eventually we made it to the stairs; they were a single set that rose up a single floor, to the top of the building. The room above was separated by a door and the stairway was only lit by a blinking yellow-white light. Ash may have slipped down them by her own accord; they actually posed a more direct, believable threat to her slippery self than the non-hostile did. I hoped she would remember that if she got curious enough to follow us once her tirade of confusion had ended.

We snuck our way to the door; which now stood ominously breathing before us in the on-and-off lights. I pushed against it, and finding it unlocked I slowly proceeded to creak it open.

The room within was dark, but a forest of metal bars were lit up as I held the door open for Caliber, rows upon rows of them rose through the blackness. One set was visibly gnawed and worn, though they still held strong. A retched panting came from their direction, the same direction that the white bar was indicating our non-hostile was. The panting became excited breathing, what almost sounded like giggling in reaction to the inconsistent light that now sliced into its room.

I didn’t want to close the door, as it would leave us in complete darkness with the creature. Before I could gather up the nerve to do it another source of light appeared just ahead of us. A barred window was abruptly revealed after what must have been a shroud or blockade was removed from its obstruction. I let the door swing close as I stared in horror at the imprisoned lightbringer.

At first I thought it was another Griffon Ghoul, but only for a brief moment before I recognized the familiar shape of my own form. This was a pony, like Damascus, but so far decayed that instead of mortally wounded it appeared decaying and long dead. Her flesh was pink, like everyponies, but it covered her like a torn coat, completely bare; her eyes a cloudy green, irises bleeding its color out just like Charon’s did. What hair she had left were pale strands and flaking patches peeking out from underneath her rounded military helmet. Her uniform was in rags around her, barely recognizable as the outfit of a sergeant.

She stared at us expectantly, body constantly retching and shivering, looking like it was in just as much pain as its skinless, rotting pink hide implied. She looked like the mare in the poster, she looked like Fern.

“Sergeant… sergeant… third patrol regiment… Fern.” The words seemed to bleed from its crooked, gasping mouth. I instinctively ran up to the cell that contained her, scraps of paper lay scattered on the floors around her along with what I couldn’t deny were flakes of her… chunks of meat and skin.

“Fern…” I whispered. I couldn’t get the door open. I pushed it to every direction that I could but it wouldn’t slide or shift. The bars were chewed, wet with saliva and the blood of pounding hooves. The sergeant just stared at me as I panted in desperation. The tendons visible on her face pulled her lips back into a snarl; I watched the complex muscular movement in awe. She was like a living cadaver, a doctor’s perfect study subject. Before I could resume my assault on the cell door, its prisoner lunged at me.

Caliber pulled me out of the way as the ghoul that had once been Sergeant Fern of the 3rd division slammed against the bars, repeatedly, spit flying and teeth gnashing. Slivers of meat stayed behind whenever she pulled away until the bars looked pink on the inside at the end of her mad assault.

“It’s feral.” Caliber held me back while it secluded itself into the dark corner of its prison. It was chewing… chewing on its own loosened flesh.
“Do they need to eat?” If this was really Fern, then she had been here for almost two hundred years… she couldn’t have survived if she had to eat, unless…

“I’m not sure.” Oh no…nonononono “Don’t think about it, Grace.”

“Sergeant … Equestrian Border Security Sergeant Fern… report in…” she begged in her wet, horrible voice. “please… report in…” She repeated her last orders… she had waited here for her troops, but they hadn’t made it. The radiation had beaten them to it.

“How does this happen?” I asked, staring wide eyed at the ghoul as it continued to slowly eat itself.

“Ghouls?” I shook my head, I knew why Charon was the way he was… this was different though. “Ferals…” yes. “It can happen at any time after initial ghoulification, some believe that every ghoul is destined for this, others say that it’s chance.” Fern attacked us again, bursting out in a violent barrage against the bars before settling down, pieces of flesh dislodged again.
“Isolation… is the most likely cause.”

“Then who locked her in?” Fern was dead, I had accepted that, but now I knew that she had died alone, her body left to become an auto-cannibalistic, endlessly perpetuating monster.

“She must have done it…” Caliber said, as she tried to open another nearby cell, fruitlessly. “Once she realized that she was losing It.”

“She wouldn’t even have known what a ghoul was.” I realized. “She must have thought that she was becoming a monster. Or dying…”

“Locking herself in that cage is what turned her into a monster.” She sat back at my side; the whole room was locked down. “Although I doubt she would have been taken in by any of the other first survivors as a ghoul, feral or otherwise.”

“So this was inevitable.” I wondered if every first-generation ghoul had been driven to madness as the barely surviving world cast them away in fear. Maybe some ghouls had found each other, I hoped, together they could have avoided this fate: Begging for companionship while spinning slowly into madness, guarding the last and only place you knew that existed.

“report in… survives this together…” Fern pleaded, looking out at us from under her over-sized helmet. She had undoubtedly become much smaller over the decades, literally eroding away into nothing.

“Fern?” walking up to the cell again I whispered her name, searching for her in the husk. “Sergeant?”
I stepped from side to side as I spoke, but her faintly glimmering eyes didn’t seem to follow me.
“We need to get her out, Cal.” Staring at the curled up corpse of the mare who had documented the end of the world for me, I knew that I had to help her. “Do you think you can pick this lock?”

“Grace…” she protested softly.

“We aren’t leaving her to die… to rot in there… we have to do something.” Fern rested her head against her hooves, obscuring her face under the helmet. “Even if we have to shoot her after she’s out.” That grim compromise was enough to get Caliber moving. She examined the lock to the door closely, clenching her blackened eye shut as she peered into the mechanism with her other.
“It isn’t too advanced, but neither am I.” The room was barely lit; only two cells were clearly visible, it would be impossible to find keys in the black mess. She saw my disappointed look. “I can try.”

“I’ll watch her.” I promised, she had lunged at me not a moment ago, but now lay still in the torn paper.

“This must have been where they held the illegal immigrants that they caught before the war.” Caliber mumbled, nearly indiscernibly, as she dug at the lock with a seemingly invisible pin clenched in her mouth. “Though it looks like they upped the security to ready themselves for any ‘zebra insurgents’.” There was a loud click from the lock. “Fuck.”

Before I could ask her to explain the crude outburst, we heard a machinated whirring come from the darkness on the opposite side of the room. It was the sound of ancient technology waking up.

“ALERT! Non-combatants are advised to leave the area. Security sweep in progress. Lethal force may be used without warning!” A metallic, audio log bellowed from the shadows.

A short horizontal line glowed red appeared twice my height above the ground. Metal creaked and heated as the robotic beast we had awoken began to move. Caliber shot me a desperately apologetic look as she pulled away from the lock. I pulled the cell door, assuming she had unlocked it, but it wouldn’t budge.

“I’m so sorry… I screwed it up.” Caliber stopped my exertion against the bars. “We need to leave.”

“What!? No! We need to get her out of there!” I continued to rattle the cell door; Fern looked up at me, eyes glowing in the gray light of the window behind her. Caliber forcefully pushed me away from the bars.

“Hostile Detected! Commencing neutralization.” Rumbled the huge sentry bot as it rolled its way into the dim morning light emanating from Fern’s window. I resisted Caliber’s pushes and prompts; Fern was looking at me, her empty, somehow infinite gaze followed as I was slowly corralled to the door. The sound of a mini-gun readying itself for a bullet barrage of periodic thousands broke my empathetic haze.

“Sergeant Fern, 3rd Division Patrol Regiment, West Zion Border Security.” She retched out; I could never decide whether this final cry had been directed at me by the remnants of the mare within the husk or if it was just the barely coherent ramblings of a feral ghoul stuck on repeat. I turned tail and ran alongside Caliber before we dove out of the room, rolling painfully down the stairs in the light of the other side.

A hail of bullets came tearing through the briefly open doorway, though they continued to tear through the door itself as the reinforced sentry bot persisted in its attack. Splintered fractions remained swinging limply on the hinges as I regained my composure at the bottom of the flight of stairs.

The sentry bot pushed desperately at the door’s frame, too large to fit through. The sight would have been comical if I wasn’t so afraid for Fern and my friends. Ash had waited patiently in the room that we had just rolled into and now joined us to regard the stalled threat. Its guns were each stuck on either side of the exit, though if it shifted itself slightly then it could easily get one of its arms through to fire at us. With Rocket-Launcher or Minigun. Caliber looked at me expectantly.

“Run…” I ordered softly. Reinforced steel, thousands of bullets and high explosives, we would die if we stayed here. We had only moment until the sluggish AI figured out how to bypass its entrapment.

“You lead.” Caliber insisted. She suspected that I would attempt something stupid and honorable.
Celestia knew that I wanted to.

But I ran, Caliber and Ash close behind me, I bound over the oiled papers and gasoline, barely missing a solid step. We barged out of the front door, running though there was nothing chasing us, we kept on. Although our frantic haste didn’t seem entirely necessary at the time, it saved our lives.

Only a few moments later we stopped on a hill just several dozen feet south of the border. I turned around at the top of the hill and sat back to see if the sentry bot would be able to follow us, resting briefly to prepare myself for another bout of desperate sprinting. Fern was undoubtedly dead by now.

The upper-right side of the building exploded in a cavalcade of rubble and debris, the close-mindedly programmed robot must have fired off a missile with the confines of the small holding room. I could see metal jettisoned out of the building by the forceful explosion, cell bars and scrap came bursting through what remained of the wall. Though the initial explosion was small it sent flaming pieces of paper and shrapnel flying over the parking lot. The parking lot where the army trucks were… the parking lot that was drenched in gasoline.

The first soft flame, dancing gently downwards through the air, touched the flammable, wet asphalt turning it almost immediately into a huge arena of fire and melting tar. The fire spread so rapidly that it seemed as if it had all lit up at once, the insides of the station brightened as Ash’s tracks led the flames into its source. For a moment I thought the orange and gold death would come for us, along her hoof-prints, but they had grown far too sporadic and small for the burning monster to track.

The inside of the Border Patrol Station, which had stood for two hundred years, was consumed in the blaze. The flames rose up against the desks and paperwork within, engulfing history, cutting off the bridge between our times. Fern, borders, military, Equestria, all of it had some vestige in that building, all of it now burned into oblivion, destroyed by its own defenses. Gasoline and missiles, military and security, all triggered by our curiosity and scavenging, now served as harbinger to the eradication of our past.

“We should move…” Ash whispered, eyes set, coals burning on the rampant fire. “Those trucks…” Before she could finish her warning of things to come, those things came to pass. The flames on the parking lot, dulling in the cold wind compared to the vibrant energy from the tinderbox patrol station, licked up against the army vehicles. One in the middle of the lot suddenly exploded in an astoundingly loud resurgence of fire. The conflagration of the nearby building was outdone by the stout mushroom cloud of heat and color, shrouded by black smoke, which rose where the truck-load of gasoline had once stood. Shrapnel, pieces as large as a pony, flew off in every direction around the detonation, high and wide. At any moment any of us could have been speared by the charging shards of metal and yet we all sat completely still, silently overlooking the holocaust of our inadvertent creation.

Trucks followed suit after the first and the burning clouds rose out in either direction, each triggering the next. The gray morning became brilliantly lit in the bonfire and the outbursts, the paroxysm stood out bold and bright against the black form of towering Mt. Zion and the stretching wall of the Equestrian border. The last truck stood against the Border station’s wall, its dangerous proximity and impending detonation let us all know what was about to happen, though we couldn’t help but to stare on in silent awe.

The detonation started from an engine flame that burst through the front of the vehicle’s chassis, smoke was rising out of it, barely noticeable compared to the aftermath of the explosions beside it and the internal burnout of paper and wood in the building it parked up against. But the ensuing mushroom cloud joined the cataclysms of the burning building and the scorched parking lot; it came up with such force that the rest of the previously blown-out wall was sent rocketing in on itself, collapsing half of the station along with it. The tilt sent smoke and paper blossoming out of the burning wreck of concrete and woodwork.

Rectangular specks of white, occasional carrying their own orange and gold passenger, danced against the haze of black smoke as they both blew West along the wall in the pressure and currents of nature and collapse. Rubble buried half of the historical military building while heat consumed the other. We sat by and watched the smoke leak, ever slowing, out of the ruin, the fire dying at an equal pace under gentle, involuntary assault by the soft, snow laden air.

Large chunks of metal, the shrapnel and barrage, lay embedded in the soft earth surrounding the site, there was nothing to have rationally assured that those pieces wouldn’t have embedded themselves into us, and yet we hadn’t moved, I hadn’t even flinched. This ruin, as it was now, a skeleton of its former self, was not like most in the wasteland: it was fresh. This was what the world had looked like as the bombs fell, it had been choked by smoke and fire, hailed with metal and wreckage as cities collapsed, Fallout. This was no longer a piece of history; but a distant recreation of it.

“Caeli…” the fuel-spreading mare coughed out ritualistically. The fire had fed itself on her mistakes, she no doubt held herself responsible for the destruction ahead, but luckily she knew nothing of Fern. I had wanted to bury the mare, that had been my original intent; to free her, with a lock pick and a bullet, and then bury her. But the job had been done for me, clumsily, messily; and she now lay within her collapsed station, the place she had been held in, by duty and cell bars, for two hundred years. Gravedigger…

“The white bar was the sentry bot,” I lied. “It activated while we were poking around the room upstairs, turned hostile. Good thing the explosions dealt with it for us.” Caliber looked uncomfortable but there was no reason for anypony to question my lie, so she had no obligation to reinforce it.

“Lucky us…” Ash agreed. We stared on for a while longer until the smoke dissipated into the wind and the flames no longer melted the lightly falling snow.

The wreckage became ruin, another cold, scorched scar on the warzone that was the Equestrian Wasteland, another piece of the past that faded into the dead winter of our apocalypse. The conflicts within it would rage on, the war would burn forever in its eternal assault against Equestria, continue to rot it as it lay, never finding the mercy of sleep. We could, we would, do all we could to bring it peace, to find it respite and rest we would march on, restless as the land that we crossed. I watched the dancing lights fade in Ash’s deep black eyes, orange and gold giving way to the eternity of darkness.

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Robotics Expert: +25% damage to robots, your knowledge of their circuitry and lethal injection points means you can shut them down by sneaking up on them successfully . Try and remember that next time you want to blow a hole into Equestria’s border, huh? I mean it was one robot; you didn’t have to go all ape-shit gasoline-carpet-bomb-fires-of-hell crazy and bring the force of the Great War down on that mother. Are you even going to try talking it out sometime? Or are you too ‘cool’ for that now?

Next Chapter: Chapter 11: Ghosts of the Garden City Estimated time remaining: 9 Hours, 59 Minutes