Fallout Equestria: Sola Gratia
Chapter 14: Rivers and Roads
“Hey, local, shouldn't you be banging rocks together or something?”

Sweet mother this is good.
I burbled incoherently from my submerged lips as cold water doused my muzzle, the flow of the river barely stalled by my intrusive lapping.
The bird mess was clear and away, disappearing into the torrent of dark, and yet crystal clear water.
Now I greedily drowned myself in the fresh chill, letting its force crash into me, refreshing.

“How bad could Stable paste have been?” Caliber giggled, watching as I kissed at the babbling brook.
Food and water, words that now meant things to be desired rather than place-holders on a schedule.
I had felt guilty for my gluttony when submitting to the temptation of our dwindling supplies, but this river was infinite. I could drink or drown a million times over before it ran dry.

I pulled away, whipping my dampened face back and forth to loosen the water’s adhesive hold on me.
“Sorry…” I panted, still recovering from starved lungs. “There’ll only ever be one first.” This was apt; my reunion with Pork and Beans had been a lot more civil than our initial, passionate meeting had been.

“Well, it’s not like you won’t be seeing it again.” She pointed out. “Plan is to follow along until we find ourselves at the lake, right?” Our breakfast things had been packed away, although, much to my chagrin, the empty tin cans still sat neatly beneath one of the reaching pines. There was no recycling in the wasteland, Caliber had dismissed, to my halfhearted protests.

“Right,” I peered down the stream as it arched and bent over and around the rocky landscape alongside it, twisting off into obscurity beyond my field of vision. It was much wider down the way, though its thick black body was dispensed by reflections of the misty sky above. “Let’s move out!”
Caliber rolled her eyes, grinning as her damp-faced commander began another brief seizure of authority.

My enthusiasm ebbed, as it always did, after a few minutes of exited charging. Plus, I was already winded. The mares behind me sounded impossibly composed, barely exerted as they slowed to my side.
Forget running, what’s our hurry anyway?

“So, when you did see the buffalo,” I began to ask Ash before pausing for effect… and for oxygen. “Where?” Was all I managed before hurriedly packing it in to hide my gasping lungs.

“Well my congregation was based near the lake, and we never saw any near home.” She answered, already apologetic for her lack of specifics. “I imagine that it would be best to head south from the water, into the heart of the Plain, but not so far that we meet the Middle Passage’s rail or highway.” I glanced at the Pip-buck’s map, getting no better indication of what to expect.

“And the radio tower?” Caliber asked, turning the tables on our usual dynamic. She was not familiar with the Plains, but my Pip-buck somehow was, making me the closest thing we had to a navigator.

“Right in the middle, along the highway.” So Buffalo-DJ-Road to the Southern Plain? It almost seemed like a plan. “Here” I offered my arm, and the map, over. Her polished mahogany eyes danced across the screen, absorbing the spatial data: formations, ranges, rivers and roads downloading into her mind.

“Got it.” She smiled, happy now to have some bearing.
The river ran wild and rocky, forcing me to put some distance between us to avoid slipping on the wet stone and tumbling into the dark charge. Though that would make for a much faster way to travel, surely?
I peered over into the wash, gauging the speed at which the debris and subtle ripples passed by.

“I know it does not look like it.” Ash interjected, somehow starting up a conversation with my thoughts.
“But there are likely to be just as many rocks inside the river as there are on its banks. If you fell in: you’d be battered and bruised within a mile. Dead just beyond that.”

I realized that I had been swerving towards it, following some primal call to jump in and ride the cool surge in hopes of an impossibly easy and convenient short-cut. I put some bark sentinels between myself and the suicidal byway, rejoining the logically land-bearing mares a more comfortable distance away.
“Thanks for the warning.”

The branches were getting thicker, both in terms of girth and foliage.
Could it be that those deeper into Zion had been stricken bare by the coming of winter, rather than the apocalypse? Flashes of milky, misty white still dominated our perforated ceiling, but now it was joined with intermittent bands, both horizontal and vertical, of blackened green and beaten grays.

“Are there any living trees left?” I submit to the wondering. My imagination had painted a pretty picture of them based on terminal words and literary promises, but the orchard in Stable 34 had been the closest I had ever come to the real thing, despite its artificial nature.

“It’s always winter in the north.” Ash answered, quelling my hopes to see the old-world glories sooner rather than later, crushing my secondary dreams with her restrained, kind voice.

“Everfree’s a forest of ‘em.” The souther-rather-than-norther mare promised. “It’s a fair distance down Canterlot way though, past Manehattan even. But word is the place’s a death trap, so it’s just as well that we won’t be heading there.”

Stop playing with my aspirations! “Oh well” I’d have to make do on these.
As I peered into the network of bark and leaves, a rustle made the winding, wooden web creak in unison.
I held up a hoof, catching Caliber softly across the chest.
My breathing, having finally recuperated, quickened as a sudden fearful adrenaline rush washed over me.
There had been a shadow, undoubtedly, breaking through the ivory mist and crossing over the ebony silhouettes of branches. It had been recognizable in the vague due to its swift cut of solitary movement.

“Wha-“Caliber began to ask.

We were pelted by a shower of natural shrapnel, splinters of tree and slices of leaf, harmless.
Nonetheless, I sheltered my eyes from the barrage under the comforting steel of my Pip-buck.
A drill emerged from the canopy, spinning out in an elegant descent, shrouded by the nature torn asunder by its passage. Grays and blacks melded at first, but as the tornado slowed the monochrome became stripes and the drill became an ambushing warrior.

I had only just begun to comprehend the intruder when he commenced his attack and, almost simultaneously, ended it. A discharged round sounded out, loud and echoing, followed by the familiar tear of hot steel through winter air, and the unfamiliar crack of fractured wood.

“Caeli!” Ash reflexively yelped the old language as she dove in evasion of a bullet that could’ve been anywhere and so, to us, was everywhere. Caliber just peered down at herself, blinking as one would when overcome with the shock of an impact, or surprised by the absence of pain.

I could’ve been dying, I could’ve been dead, but the hanging zebra buck had missed.
He had obviously not been aiming to hit all of us, but had failed to hit any of us.
The ambusher was slight, as he would’ve needed to be in order to pass over the jagged branches of the canopy without collapse. Fleethoofed and agile, to limits that only a zebra could reach.

He was suspended by the vestiges of a leather strap, caught on an unbroken branching of strong pine, swinging due to the kickback that his fallen rifle had transferred into him. The culprit’s tool lay, dull and discarded, on the hard grass of the clearing below him, and just ahead of us.

I swept it up in my magic, almost instinctively swinging the levitated weapon around to face its owner.
The buck was alive, hanging by his black, dorsal equipment rather than his striped neck, staring us down with a dauntless hate, despite the barrel(s) returning his glare. Caliber and Ash both stood ready, saddle bits inches away from their triggering jaws. We all braced ourselves to blow apart the hanging zebra, as he dangled like a sickeningly sentient, gray-scaled piñata.

“Do it.” He spat, with enough virulence to begin swinging gently once again. “I have already failed.”

“Failed to do what?” Surely we had done enough to earn the zebra’s trust, and if nothing else: we should at least be afforded the benefit of the doubt by now.

He looked dazed; the upside-down frown fell from his face, replaced by a look of genuine confusion.
“You can speak…?”

“Of course I can speak,” I giggled. “What did you think I was? Some kind of…” Some kind of savage.
He didn’t know. What else would he assume of a Pip-bucked pony waltzing callously through his beautiful Zion? It was not as if the Zebra’s shared a hive mind or even any network of communication at all, aside from couriers, flares and enlightened monuments.

“You thought we were savages.” Caliber confirmed, not even bothering to phrase it as a question.
The zebra remained silent, rocking in the breeze; the branches above creaked with every subtle swing. “They’re dead.” I lowered the runic rifle, setting it down gently on the grass. I would help its marksman do the same, once he confirmed that his urge to kill us was gone, to a reasonably safe extent at least.

“All of them.” Ash agreed, neither mentioned our credit in the genocide. The elimination of the savages would be enough for this Zionist to take in, without added claims to glory by self-professed pony-saviors.

Though he didn’t speak, his eyes were alight with an unexpected reaction: fear.
The irises, light gray like old snow, fleeted and flickered from side to side, revealing a newborn terror, seemingly from nowhere and persisting for no reason. This couldn’t be for us.

“Zion is safe.” Caliber pressed, pushing the words onto the valley’s captive, trying to incite some calm into his otherwise frantic panic. “We will let you down, and then you can go home to your kin, to peace.”

There was something terribly wrong.
I wrapped my telekinesis around the indiscernible tangle of branches above, shaking them desperately.

“Not yet.” Ash whispered discreetly into my ear. I ignored her, though my blind jostling wasn’t doing much towards freeing the zebra. He wasn’t scared of us; he was terrified, paralyzed even. A warrior, trapped by his own haphazard attack, would not bristle and whimper at the mercy of three pony mares. No way.

“Listen to the river.” He murmured, eyes staring out of the pines surrounding this semi-circular clearing, lost and empty in their anti-focus on the charging black death-trap.

I released my hold on the crackling wood, subsiding the sound of splintering friction and shifting leaves. All that remained was the rhythmic crashing of the deep water, collapsing over itself on a winding course to the calm of the great lake beyond. Moving one way… no, that wasn’t all.
There was resurgence, another rhythm, a counter-beat, a gradually growing discrepancy in the pattern.
It sounded like a deep cut was being made through the body of water, a blunt knife dragging itself against burbling resistance, ignoring the cries of protest to widen the slit, to peel the scab.

“It cuts a path through the water, bleeding its way over stone and sand… older even, than the ancient ruins that died within our land.” The zebra recited, meeting the rhythm of the wrong. The expression of life draining out of his face in opposition to the crimson color seeping into it. “Listen to the river, children, listen for its cries, flee to heed its gentle screams, for the river never lies.”

“Your getting to much blood flow to your brain, zebra.” Caliber waved off the buck’s eerie chant. “Just promise you won’t do anything crazy, and I’ll cut you down.”

“The earth holds no secrets, it is simplistic and stark, but the river hides its horrors beneath the waters dark.” I could only stare at the ode’s subject, as it continued to weep in warning cries. “Do not drink the water, do not dare to tempt the tides, for soon enough and after which, its secret will not hide.”

“What is its secret?” I uttered, barely conscious of my own words, encapsulated by the rhythmic pulsing of words and water. “What is coming?” Ash stared on with me, leaving Caliber alone in conscious mind.

“What is this, a poetry reading?” she whinnied. “Grace, Stop listening to him!.”

“A monster older than the valley, a liar older than its stone, though you may falter and you may tarry, you are only truly lost, if lost alone.” The water heaved and hissed, bulging at an apex of the churn. “Serpent, serpent come to us, serpent, serpent rise, free us from our rotting coils, and break our mortal ties.”

The river gave birth. A colossal tower of layered scale and peeling skin, in sickly hues of green and purple, rose from the seething rage of swelling water. The serpent’s body thrashed and coiled beneath the veil, tearing apart the natural order and catching the river in its controlled chaos. No pines stood between us and the monster, no rock or ruin to hide us from its hungry eyes.

“Run!” Caliber barked, the first to react, the first in a group of catalytic paralytics. We didn’t move, though the water rose and fell, suddenly calm and perfect, an improvement on the monotonous course it had once followed. The serpent seemed to smile, meeting our adoring stares with its own ancient eyes.
It was draconic, with the face of a serpentine horse, adorned with scales despite the ink-black, bristling mane rising along the back of its neck. Its teeth were rotting, though the canines distinguished themselves in vicious purity, dripping in a dark, venomous salivation. “Ash!? Anybody!?”

How beautiful it was. Water slid off its sleek scales, returning to its home amidst the churn below.
Its fingers clutched neatly at the air around its sides, scales clawed and extending as fingernails.
In places its body was dark, the deepest ebony, only challenged by the absolute nothing of night or death, whereas glints of purple and green occasionally revealed themselves against the white mist still swashing against the living tower. The structure began to fall, no, to bend, as the serpent’s head approached.

This ruin did not crack or break, it was flawless, a curling rock of perf-

I collapsed against the base of a pine, my eyes torn away from the rotting river serpent and the pulsating waters below it. My side ached, the familiar, dull throb that followed the firm buck of wasteland-hardened hooves against my Stable-soft body. Caliber repeated the shock awakening on Ash, sending her tumbling amidst the pillars of bark beyond the clearing, then scampered to avoid the collapsing tower driving itself into the honest earth behind her. Not a tower, I scorned myself, an attacker.
The soil was upturned, the ground torn apart by the scaled helm, passing like a train over dirt and rock.

“Now Run!” This time I heard her, but ignored her, instead raising my Tri-Beam laser rifle in a desperate charge towards the river. Though this was not the direction she, or I, truly wanted me to be running.

Whatever hold the serpent had had on me was broken, blind admiration was replaced by foolish aggression and complacency had given way to a disregard for what little survival instinct I had developed. The hypnotic swells of the black water no longer caused me to stall, and I successfully stared them down, never slowing in my war-charge.

“Can’t: Zebra!” Was all the explanation I offered, and, thankfully, all the explanation that was needed. Caliber sprinted after me, quickly catching up, and together we darted into the shadow of the serpent’s arching neck. Scales glimmered, massive as individual giants above us.
The monster began to rise, straightening out to regard the free radicals insulting it with their rebellion, pulling its attention away from the snared meal dangling just a clearing away.

Tri-beam had startlingly little effect, glancing off the creature’s polished scales as concentrated light would against a mirror. Still, I fired desperately, never missing due to my target’s close proximity and impossible size. Glimmering eyes, a snake’s eyes, locked onto us and the tower came collapsing again, we dove into the ditch formed by the serpent’s initial collision with the soft, grassy earth, narrowly avoiding the tremulous brunt of its second impact. A massive upheaval of dirt was cast into the air at another sweep by the scaled and snaking horse head, passing over us as we crouched low in the shallow excavation. Pines cried out as they collapsed under a dauntless force, widening the clearing even farther.

Ducking and diving wasn’t going to kill this thing and, to my despair, neither was Tri-beam.
As I skittered out of the ditch, ant-like to the serpent’s distant eyes, I saw Ash pulling the vial of electric enchantment from her bag, desperately fumbling with it in her clumsy, oral grip.
Caliber broke off to the other end of the clearing, giving our gargantuan opponent too many options to contend with. It had made me love it, made me worship it as if it were a monument rather than a monster, only to have lost my exaltation to retaliation. It came to reclaim me.

Claws dug into the earth, fingers of conjoined bone and cutting scale, long and brittle as trees, tore up more clouds of brown earth, only making it easier to avoid the serpent’s scrutiny in the dusty haze.

In the corner of my eye, through the new, dirtier mist: Ash began seizing. Her body lifted into the air by way of almost comical convulsions, then collapsed. A panic attack? She was still beneath the relative safety of the nearby canopy. Though her resting place could just as easily become another torn excavation under the monster’s searching hands. I would have to hold its attention.
Two invalids, two courses, to distract from now. The blissful haze of sundered earth was settling, and I needed a plan. I swerved in my pelting sprint and approached the river once again; seeking refuge in the only sanctity that I could see. Not beyond arm’s reach, but inaccessible within it.

As I ran the tower swayed, bending at the impact of arcane fire. Dark blue concussions billowed out of the creature’s sides, sending knife-edged scales flying loose and wild. Some dug themselves into the earth around me, while one took purchase into the soil just behind me, the shard missing my flank by a hair.

The mirror was breaking, fracturing under the compression of zebra enchantments rhythmically delivered by rifle round. I stood at the banks of the teeming black river; squinting as churning water splashed against the rock and itself as the serpent’s infinite, timeless form writhed beneath it.

The wholly, rounded thuds of Caliber’s assault eventually devolved into a series of meek clinks, as simple bullets lost their magical enhancements and came to meet metallic scale with no greater effect than the denial of deflection. The serpent arched again, this time bending high over me to burrow against the earth behind, where my only functional ally assumedly stood.

Entire hallway-lengths of glassy scale had been torn away, wrenched from their hold and scattered to drown in the river or bury themselves into the earth. Porous, raw flesh burned, exposed to cold air and biting winds. Strangely enough, and by way of lost memories: I knew what that felt like. Though there was no reason or responsibility for empathy. This was my opportunity. I saw it in the gaping wounds, those bleeding portals left behind by the peeling and tearing of skin and scale, raw exposed meat: to be cooked.

I unleashed an array of light and energy into the serpent’s exposed body. Triplicate after triplicate hit home in the almost unavoidable expanses of pulsing flesh, and each began to glow in my own arcane magic. Gold instead of blue, those now familiar feathers danced away into the wind, lonely at first, but soon becoming a massive movement of flaking energy. They almost looked like birds, in how the fleeted and flickered into the mist beyond, making up a migration of brilliant gold.

The creature bristled within its shell, panic pulsing through its body, realization coming with the pain. Gaps in between its scales lit up like the canyons of an imploding planet, searing in the flames of their supernova core. Thrashing and winding, the serpent’s body desperately retreated, section by scalding section receding into the steaming river. It sought refuge in the cold water, but the dissolve was faster.

The horse head hovered above me like a teetering idol, frozen in place as insurmountable agony coiled throughout its entire body. Claws frantically grasped at the scale prison holding the serpent, it pulled at its own casing, stripping itself even further in a pained attempt to escape the anguish coursing through it.
I didn’t move, not even as the draconic daggers fractured around me. I stood hypnotized once again, this time held captive by the beauty of the monster’s death, rather than its own façade of majesty.

The liar fell, an empty shell, hollow and smoking as it sank, like a ship engorged by water flooding in from a solitary breach. Ancient eyes long burned away left sockets fading into an empty gold, but they too drowned in the calming water. The serpent had been silent until its dying breath, and now hisses of scald and fire replaced the hissing of its hungry tongue. The tower was abandoned; lifeless it was left to sink into a dark, watery grave.

Scales bobbed away like newspaper boats, disappearing down the black charge, pulled away by the rejuvenating torrent. The blockade had fallen and the pulsing rhythm lay dead, leaving only a common babble to fill the silence. The air smelt of cooked flesh, sweet and rank all at once, laced with smoky ash.
The tremors of digging claws and a crashing helm had passed from the earth and into my limbs, rattling their bones and turning every muscle into a curdled gel. The dives and sprints had forced my body into an overblown, piston-pumped state of adrenaline that had now fallen apart, leaving me to pay my dues in a built-up mass of previously ignored pain and fatigue.

Caliber wrapped a hoof around me, allowing me to collapse against her warm body.
My breath plumed out in masses of steam, the heat of exertion fading away in the air of eternal winter.
I wanted to rest, to tumble into the river and replicate the gentle departure of the scales, products of a magnificently violent death. But Ash and the Zebra could too easily be dead; it was very likely, in fact.

“Let’s get Ash…” She had to be alive, the Zebra could be dead, but Ash had to be alive, I bargained.

“Alright.” She supported me as I straightened out, technically uninjured, but somehow crippled. My legs wobbled beneath me, almost giving out and surrendering my body to the river’s summons, but I recovered. Weak-kneed and soft-boned, I limped- with all my legs at once- back into the clearing.

It looked like an archaeological dig site, if precision tools and excited concern for the fossils below had been replaced with frenzied disregard and high explosives. Overturned soil lay in masses, seasoned with the remains of already dead grass. The standing corpses that had been trees now lay in collapse, stricken and charred. They looked more appropriate than their rooted, rotted kin, who still made up the clearing’s brink. Scales stuck out of the earth, fragmented monoliths, like great black teardrops.

Ash lay sprawled, to the very extent of the word. Her limbs had flailed to the very tipping point of displacement, twisted and bent in an ambiguous state of shattered solidity.
Her battle saddle had been tossed aside, it bristled with flickering white runes, which blinked and stalled like a dying fluorescent. Electricity… that had been Zalika’s promise for the collapsed mare’s vial.

“Don’t touch her.” I held Caliber back before she could offset one of the young mare’s precariously jerked limbs. “Ash…” she twisted her neck, eyes blinking open to the sound of my voice. “Is anything broken?”

“…” she moaned, not as somepony in great pain would, but as one being woken from a deep sleep.

“Here, I’m going to use a little anesthetic magic on you, okay?” My horn glowed as Ash’s body was wrapped in the extent of my horn’s soothing hold. “Now, if nothing is broken, you can try to stand.”

She did, each coiling extremity wound back into its original orientation as the mare set herself straight, the curling was unpleasant to watch, but surprisingly fluid and natural. Nothing had been broken.
Fumbling onto her hooves, Ash struggled against her tilting opinion of gravity, clumsily dancing like somepony who had just spun in a series of circles to reach that first juvenile high.
Caliber caught her before she could cause too much damage, letting the traipsing drunk find a hold against her sure solidity. My own bones, behaving like rubber as they had no right to do, cried out for the same foundation, which I found in a nearby tree trunk. Not as warm… but it would have to do.

“What happened?” I choked out, surprised by my own inability to speak. The smoke had sullied my lungs.

Ash gestured weakly towards her battle-saddle.”Throw it into the river.” She pleaded. “With your magic.”

“Wh-“I stopped myself, yielding to the pitifully desperate eye-contact we shared, two temporary cripples. The combat shotgun crackled and sparked, white bolts of mock electricity dancing around its otherwise Equestrian form. I hoisted it, finding that even the use of my telekinesis felt like an exertion, and quickly sent it rolling into the river. It disappeared into the depths with one final, ultimate spark, triggered on its contact with the water. The electric energy seemed to expend in that last corona, as one parting gesture to the mare that it had maliciously tortured.

“Foolish…” The Zebra buck limped over to us, wounds beyond those of shock or trauma clearly visible across his entire body. “How did you apply the enchantments… and where did you steal them from?” From the look of his injuries, the pine suspending him had been cast aside in one of the Serpent’s brash assaults against the land, sending him to bruise and bleed in a sequence of distant collisions.

I thought better than to surprise him with my healing magic, his rifle had not reappeared in its holster, but I wasn’t feeling up to the strain anyway. “We did not steal them, and I applied the enchantment just as she did.” Ash lifted her hoof in a limp, drowsy gesture, barely recognizable in direction or intention.

The buck turned to me; he kept one of his hooves bunched against his chest, not daring to let it meet the hard, rooted soil below. “I smashed a vial against this weapon, and my enchantment is working fine.” I bounced Tri-Beam against my side, too lethargic to lift its embellished black form in my magic.

“You smashed the-“He cut himself off, in too much physical pain to make his disgust as clear as he would’ve liked. “Only an Equestrian…”

“Yeah, well it’s not like she had time for proper procedure… there was a pretty big serpent just there.” Caliber drawled, firmly rooted as Ash’s prop. “And your little poem didn’t give us much warning.”

“Little Poem?” He bristled, much to his own discomfort. “That poem- urgh- has served and survived over generations!” Sitting back against an adjacent trunk he clutched at his unnaturally compact leg.
“It’s probably older than any single one of your Equestrian ditties.”

“We prefer not to write odes to things that’re only out to kill us.” Caliber retorted, the healthiest of this odd quartet arguing with the most decrepit, their stubbornness driving them on.
I floated out my stimpack, dispensing a dose of healing potion into it at a leisurely pace.

“That ode has always acted as warning to those smart enough to listen; unfortunately it falls short when recited to the likes of you loud-mouthed, hard-headed, close-minded-“

“You’d better rein it in, pal! None of us are in the best shape here, but I’d be happy to use this hard head of mine to make your claim to be so open minded a reality!” She barked, genuine anger lighting up the dark chestnuts of her eyes, roasting them in an open fire of defensive offense.
“You shot at us, and we saved your ass. So how about you try to remember who owes who!”

“You have no stake in Zion, I had every right to shoot you. Besides, it was your juvenile play-fare with the river that called the serpent; you saved me only due to the fact that you doomed me first!”

“Wha-?” I had to admit, that was a stretch. “It was your attempted murder that rang Smokey’s dinner bell!” Ash teetered, eyes half-closed, almost tipping away from her impassioned lean-to and slumping to the ground, before Caliber caught on. “And now it’s got most of us shaken down to the bone.”

“You ponies have no regard for anything but yourselves. Smokey,” he spat Caliber’s nickname for the charred beast. “Was magnificent, a creature of legend and age-old stories passed from soldier to soldier!”
“Now you’re defending the thing?” Caliber snorted. “What’s your problem with us?”
I gingerly set the stimpack down, only a slight reach away from the Zebra, hoping that he would take the hint without making as much of a fuss out of it as his kinsman had in the cathedral.

“You have no place in Zion! Savages or not!” He kicked the potion injector, wincing as he flailed, back over to my tree. I passed it over towards Ash, who was far too out of it to care.

“Yeah? Well we were just on our way out!” Caliber huffed, stomping a hoof and jolting Ash into focus. The frazzled mare reached down into the grass, nearly toppling again, and carefully began to inject herself with the restorative salve. She sighed in relief as her overcharged, organic circuitry repaired itself.

“Really!? You were just on your way out!?”

“Yeah! And you’re going to be in for a big surprise once you’ve limped back to your Decurion and he tells you who we are.” She assured, effectively ensuring that the zebra would ask about us.

“Oh, I’m sure.” Sarcasm wasn’t obvious through his accent, which seemed to be thickening patriotically, but I could tell that he wasn’t really sure, not really sure at all. “Now, I thought that you were leaving…”

“We are!” Caliber waved dismissively, though did little else.

“Okay, then go ahead, pony!” The equally immobile zebra taunted from his cripple’s post under the pine.

“We will!” From the looks of things (specifically: Ash standing limply in a droopy-eyed coma of comfortable healing, just stable against Caliber’s support, and me barely able to lift the drained stimpack, so much as myself, from the ground.) we weren’t.

“This is you leaving?” he arched a brow, as some semblance of a smile crept to his battered face.

“You bet!” Caliber could barely move, Ash anchored her to the spot in her own mission to fight gravity.
“…” They fumbled over each other for a few seconds, though the drugged mare was as unresponsive as a cadaver, spiting the duress of Caliber’s prideful prompts. After a clumsy wrestle: sobriety lost.
“…Why don’t you leave first?”

“My valley.” I didn’t think the Zebra would be able to get up and leave if he was in the heart of Canterlot. “I’m staying right here until you go.” He would end up going first, if he continued to refuse healing.

Finally Ash -Heavy as a sack of wet Sand- Ascella of Caeli’ Velum got the better of Caliber, and together they collapsed. The mares lay trapped, one on top of the other. My own anesthetic magic coupled with the bliss of healing potion left the red-head trapped under a very healthy, happy corpse.
“Little help here, Grace?”

“OoooOOOoooO!” I waved both hooves at the stacked mares, feigning magical assistance.
Seeing as that failed, I shrugged and settled back deeper against the trunk of my own pine. “I tried.”
My bones begged me not to move, already chastising me for my arduous mime, so I indulged them, giving in to the sweet, guiltless tides of lethargy. We had just killed a very big snake, after all.

Caliber grumbled meekly, accepting her destiny to serve as Ash’s cushion without consent.
“You win, Zebra… We’ll leave as soon as these two recover.”
Caliber waited for the third, solely legitimate cripple’s response. His gaze just fleeted away ashamedly.
“You can’t move either?” He didn’t respond, which was enough of an answer in itself.
“Fucking Awesome.”

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

Though now a little less than comforting, the river burbled on behind us, the shuffling and reshuffling of the canopy of branches joined in the babble of wind and water to fill the silence of our fading animosity. The Zebra would have to yield to healing eventually, if only to alleviate my annoying insistence.
We had been kicking the, now replenished, stimpack back and forth in an exchange of feeble flails.
Having taking a hit of it myself, chasing it down with anesthetic magic: this game entertained me greatly.

I giggled. Silly zebra, you’ll die if you don’t inject yourself with that damned thing soon.
This time he didn’t kick it back, though didn’t pick up the restorer either, leaving it to lie just out of my reach, and out of the game. Cheater.

Ash was staring unintentionally up at the dispersing mist, rolled over onto her back, trapped like a turtle turned over on its shell. Anesthesia had taken her further still from coherent thought or action, degenerating her into more of a numb husk than even I was. I had probably given her more arcane befuddlement that was necessary, knocking her cathartic with the full extent of my magical calm.
It’s effect was decidedly pronounced, though she was still very conscious; I knew that my anesthetic ability had never been so effective before, barely causing anything more than a mild mist of defocus.

Though it brought on a marching headache, I coursed the dulling ebb into myself, exploring my own pained frame by torpid radar pulses of internal magics. Caliber may have been attuned to this kind of physical disarray, but the sear of muscular burnout was entirely new to me.

A brilliantly band of corn silk danced through the east-faring breeze, pirouetting and pivoting on every gust and swell, meandering on to some unimportant appointment. In the shadows of the verdure pines it honeyed, tawny at the loss of gray, late-morning light, only to shine out again beneath its returned effect.

A sister wyrm gracefully followed, twining and wreathing itself through our mock circle of friends.
The same colors, familiar colors, laced these next ripples. There were a surprising number of them, like the feathers of energy that had flaked from the river-serpent not an hour ago. These were dull in comparison, but not without their own humble charm. A hallucination perhaps? I had never known anesthetic to go to that extent, but did I look like a doctor?

By wasteland standards, sorta, yeah.

“Oh, Grace…” Caliber held her hoof over her mouth, as if she were in some kind of shocked remorse.

“Yeah baby?” I rolled my head limply to comply. Celestia, not this again, I berated my lightheaded disregard for retaining the inappropriate. Just don’t say anything about heaving bosoms this time, okay? “What can Doctor Love do for you?” My sober consciousness held her head in shame.

“Your beautiful tail…” she whispered. Hello! See, sobriety, sometimes you have to let loose.

“And yours…” I replied, sleazily trying to raise an eyebrow, which quickly degenerated into a facial spasm. “I bet it tastes like spiced wine and cinnamon.” I squinted, giving her my most intense, passionate look, matching the soulful smolder of somepony short-sighted.
The Zebra stared on in disquieted horror.

“I would be flattered…” She would be, wouldn’t she? You Casanova you. “But you’re drooling a little.”

“It only adds to the compliment.” Not a bad point, for a borderline vegetable. “Tall and tan and thin and lovely…” I hummed to myself, despite Caliber being almost none of those things. Medium height and beige and toned and lovely, didn’t have the same ring to it. “Lovely at least.” I amended.

She gave me a sly smile and concluded curtly. “Your tail.”
I peered back at the short arch, shorter even than Caliber’s own medium trimmed wave.
Jumping up in fright, I languished over the terrain, perspective spinning in each and every direction that I wasn’t heading towards. The anesthesia couldn’t dull the pained emotions of loss and inexplicable fear that drove me stumbling back into the clearing.

The corn silk! I realized with a start, was the remnant of my pride drifting away, lost to the impossibly expansive empty of the outside world. Toppling over to the only place I could hope to find some salvation, I found myself sprawled near the river bank, at the point from which I had all but combusted the serpent.

There, trapped under the nearest of the teardrop scales, pinned by the ebony dagger, was the corpse of my tail. Thin streamers flailed meekly from beneath the knife’s edge, crying out for their lost compatriots and their home, their purpose, their career adorning my flanks.

“Merciful Heavens!” I cried, pushing up as close as I could to the pane of obsidian glass.
It was gone, my drowsy eyes confirmed, but for a few holdouts, which were made strangers to me now.
“A castration! A desecration! Calamity?! Calamity! Why must you always befall me?!”
I flounced weakly, a fish out of water. Not so much beating the earth, but rather using it to beat myself.

I had never been glad for my appearance, never left my room with the knowledge that I would draw anything but cruel, physical interest or skepticism of my critical unemployment or sordid family history.
But I still cut my hair with care whenever it grew too long, when the bangs refused to sweep up and to the side; I always tried to look passably professional, despite my lack of profession. Mother left me this.
My tail had been an anchor; I had held it on occasion, like a teddy bear, as I lay untiring in an empty room devoid of any other companionship. Now I had lost it, leaving me to die alone in this steel prison.

The warmth of Caliber pulled me out of my throwback, drawing me away from home and, still divinely drugged, to the wasteland. She held me as she had, on already too many occasions before.

“Why does it have to be this way?” I wasn’t sobbing, not weeping this time, affording at least that one variance in my remorse for a severed tail, compared to my remorse for the ended world.
Get a hold of yourself, sobriety begged, reminding me that as far as casualties went: this had not been as great a tragedy as I was making it out to be. Ignoring her, I shivered, nuzzling against my cinnamon rock.

“Well…” This wasn’t the easiest breakdown I had faced Caliber with; as mine was not the most relatable dilemma. “You still have your mane, right?” She began stroking the golden loner.

““Woe!” I cried out in an almost sobering self-parody. “What is a mane? If not lesser partner to a tail?!”
“I… I really like your mane, if that helps…?” A puzzled look crossed her face as she struggled to solve the riddle of my ridiculous affliction. “In fact, I’ve never seen one so healthy and beautiful in all the wasteland.”

I wiped my dry eyes, as for some reason I expected myself to be crying, but my body was not as exaggeratedly upset as my giddied mind was. “You really mean that?”

“Sure do, Sugar.” She smiled, seeing the blossoming fruits of her successful therapy.

“Then we must go on!” I rose shakily to unnaturally malleable limbs. “As our lost countrymen, and as Damascus has done before us, we must persevere!” Damascus had a healthy mane too.

“I’m feeling alright, actually.” She admitted, denying my need to include her in this great struggle.

“Yes, this must be my fight; I would not want to burden you with it. I must overcome this obstacle by my own strength, by my own resolve! By any means necessary!” Yes! Go tell it on the mountain, baby!

“We haven’t lost ourselves yet..?” She remembered, halfheartedly raising a hoof in exaltation.

“And War never Changes, also!” A final cry of glorious resolve as I posed, chest out and rejuvenated but for the instability of my inebriated stance. “That’s important too… I think.”

This was it, the turning point.
I had survived, despite it all, I had survived.
Because that’s what we did, wasn’t it? Through war and fire, radiation and castration, we marched on.
Equestria had burned, but unlike the serpent of the river, it was more than a wasted, empty shell.
Reclaiming its former glory would not be easy, but neither had establishing it been. Nothing truly was.

So, bring forth you devils, bring on your peril.
Every barrage, each attack, only served to harden our coats and steel our nerves, making us stronger.
Preparing us for whatever final conflict would decide our nation’s rebirth, it would be our judgment.
This fight was not mine to win, and would likely fall to another, as this war would undoubtedly be long and I am only mortal. Where it all began, perhaps synonymous with time’s beginning, would remain a mystery.
Marred by timeless conflict, the good limped on, crippled. But this had been one fight… that it won.

…

You are a magnificent idiot.

…

Prude.

“That’s one for the archives.” Caliber giggled, snapping me back into my clouded reality. I made that speech out loud, right? I needed to, if I hadn’t already. But, I didn’t want to make them listen to it twice, there’s only ever one first, remember? Sobriety was begging to take the reins, her frustration fuelling a rapid reseizure of control, but the reliability of my physical body still lay in chaotic disarray.

“Thank You, Caliber.” I relaxed out of my heroic stance, gradually submerging back into sanity.

“You really need to build up a higher tolerance.” She smiled, propping me up as I continued to sway from side to unreliable side. “I can only imagine what alcohol would do to you.”

“Probably… a similar… effect.” I said, slowly swaying into some semblance of balance. “What you’re seeing right now is pretty much receptor-death, and the trade-off of mild confusion.” She waited.
“Maybe mild isn’t a strong enough word.” Damn straight, her smiling eyes agreed.

“Let’s get back to Ash.” She cooed, leading me along with her constantly supportive body.

“Would you put a couple of those scale fragments into my saddlebags?” I drawled, eyeing the obsidian shards with pulsing interest. The glassy structures had held their own against bullet and beam; it would be wasteful to leave them here. See? Inebriation, sometimes you have to be logical.
The mare obliged, sliding a few of the sizeable, but surprisingly light, ebony plates into my bag.

With that, most of the haze lifted from my mind, replaced in part by the refreshing chill of reality.
Caliber pulled off the cropped-tail look with ease, and though I would look unsettlingly amputated for a while, my tail would grow back. Besides, apart from the mostly unnamed zebra tribe, I had encountered a sum total of five ponies across my wasteland experience. Five ponies that were still alive, anyway.
Charon, Damascus, Woodstock, DJ Pon3, and Bookstack.
I doubted that any of them would shed a tear for my halved little hay-stack.

I leaned obnoxiously, almost inadvertently, against Caliber as she walked us out of the clearing, resting on her as if she were a moving countertop. At the mercenary’s jolting halt, I tumbled, falling forward. The hard-packed soil avenged its churned neighbor, taking out its empathetic anger against my face. Another bruise would rise up, blood bubbling to the surface of skin, once I pulled away from this humbling face-plant. If we’d learned anything today, it was that I had a very poor instinct for magical dosage.

“Of course.” Caliber sighed.

“Sorry,” I said through the taste of ashy grass, falsely assuming that she referred to my unavoidable collapse. I reached for the stimpack, discarded besides the evacuated pine, finally seeing that it was empty. I hurriedly stumbled to my submissive hooves, to confirm the empty needle’s dire implications.

“He couldn’t have carried her, even after the potion.” Caliber pawed at the earth, searching for a trail, which would forever remain invisible to me. “Must have roped her in, and if she’s anywhere near your level of indifference, he’ll just lead her along like livestock.”

As if to prove her point, I sat down, possibly the least initiative ever taken at the news of a kidnapped friend. Even my neck was starting to whine against the simple task of keeping my head aloft. This was not the best time for a high-speed pursuit, my bones chimed; this was the best time for rest.

“We’d better go after them.” She peered into the stretching forest, southwest, back the way we had come.

After a minute or two of crooked regard, I perked myself up, realizing that she was expecting a response. “Yes.” Was all that I bothered contributing. “That would be the right thing to do.” But not the easy thing.

“If we leave now, we can get to him before he backtracks us too much.” She prompted.

“Ah, excellent.” I agreed, nodding dumbly, suddenly becoming a sloth in the brief break from activity.
“Here’s the trail, clear as day. Looks like they’re both limping, and Ash may as well have been bushwhacking her way through this grass, it won’t be difficult to follow their path.”

“Boy, this is just getting easier by the second, isn’t it?” I mused, without even a fraction of sarcasm.

“Yep.”

I toppled, falling like a stack of books, pages sprawled and spines creased as they fanned across the floor. My body knew this place as a hospital bed, a restful refuge, and it forcibly embraced it.
“Just a second.” I wriggled a little, moving less than the grass blowing in the gentle breeze around me. “Just… one… second.” My flanks rose on shaking legs, leaving my face buried in the soil once again.

Finally I stood, triumph! Though I could still not find the motivation to walk.
Caliber watched the sad display, a little flicker of despair in her pitying eyes, as she realized how obnoxious this entire process was going to be. Ash wasn’t in danger, worst case scenario: The buck makes it to the tribe, who proceed to chastise him for kidnapping one of Zion’s forever unsung heroes. There was nothing at stake, but we had to go get her, if only to save ourselves time lost to this detour.
This was not going to be a daring rescue, but a menial chore. Caliber’s menial chore.

She fed a length of rope from her satchel, a tawny thread of solid girth but an omnipresent, weary fray. Thinking better than to lasso it around my neck, she hitched it close between our two gun-straps, her battle-saddle to Tri-beam’s holster. I stood within bucking distance behind her now, knit into the networked pair of a solitary leash. She would drag me if she had to, as splitting up was not an option while I drowned in this childish, near paralytic state of calm.

Caliber checked the rope, preparing for our pursuit of the other, similarly infantile mare.
She sighed a placid sigh, like a single mother incarcerated to a brimming shopping cart, steeling herself to collect the children who ran wild and wide in the supermarket. “Well, this about does It.”

“Does what?” I burbled, blowing bubbles out of my nose in an exercise of ladylike grace.

“I’m a babysitter.”

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

The trip was an arduous jaunt; as my body struggled to keep up, Caliber struggled to counteract the rhythmically stalling weight. She was a tow-truck and I a decrepit car, sputtering in and out of life, but fortunately still staying upright, rolling along fairly smoothly on my wheels. If I collapsed, she would be hauling dead weight, so I made it my imperative goal to remain upright, the only contribution I could make to our ambling pursuit. I could only hope that the frail attempts that I made to help my operator, would put us at advantage over the less coordinate relationship of captor to captive held by Ash and the Zebra.

Though based on what little regard I had had for the anesthetic dosing, I was sure that I had doped myself up farther by now than I had Ash, making her a better competitor in this eight-legged race.
The Zebra, however, would still be in pain, despite the emptied stimpack.
Caliber over the Buck, Ash over me, it couldn’t have been fairer if it were an Olympic event.
Which it should be, I noted, as the odd aspects of strategy and strength played together to move us stumbling along. Or, even better: for the Sisterhooves Social, if the slight Zebra could pass as a mare.

The worst parts of the charge were when Caliber came to a skidding halt, gauging a sudden change in the trail ahead, and sending me tapering off to tempt the strength of both the rope and my own limbs.
In the most sudden of which, she shushed my bumbling yelps and perked her ears to the thinning forest ahead. We were approaching the same kind of sporadic pine spread that we had first seen in Zion, finally escaping from the clustered pillars of the abandoned river’s stretch.

Snow packed tight in clusters, leaving spans of empty dust and grass along the imaginary road ahead. This opening out came to my great relief, avoiding bruising brushes with the ice-cold, rock-hard tree trunks had been both a traumatizing and taxing task.

After a moment of silence, both around my head and within it, I picked up on the cause of Caliber’s pause. In the distance, a subtle mewling sounded out, bobbing and sporadic just as my own yelps of dragged compliance had been. It could only be Ash, which meant that we were gaining on them.

The caravan race kicked off, as the Zebra undoubtedly heard our considerably louder progression out into the clearer terrain. Caliber might’ve been able to see them, but I only had eyes for the twisting and dwindling landscape that I was subject to. I remembered reading somewhere that the best way to keep your balance was to stare at a solitary point, but those didn’t seem to exist for longer than a cantering second amidst our gallop. Dust and grass and snow flashed by, racing away as I fought to keep purchase on them, what trees surrounded us occasionally swung across my sight, often mercilessly close by.

“Zebra!” Caliber made our close pursuit definitively known. “Stop right there!”
He didn’t, and I felt the rope pull tighter still at my side. I would have to do more than stumble now. Over the course of the chase, I had started to regain full control of my limbs, in that I had avoided collapse for almost the entire thing. For this I felt content, but pushed myself into the semblance of a trot, legs crossing frantically over each other, to aid us on our way to the finish line.

With the closest trees a comfortable distance away, I finally regained my ability to look where I wanted to. A skill that would have been useful against the bark-battering I had endured in this junket’s dawn.

Ash followed the zebra with a cattle-like compliance, attached in convoy by torn leather and hard knots. It seemed as if her recovery had taken its course at polar opposites to mine. Physically she was fully functional, and almost frolicked in tow, gracefully recovering from every tug and trip. But her eyes stared blank and unblinking, as if she were walking in her sleep, mewling in a subconscious strain.

Her lavender hair turned her into a flurry of purple as her captor, who once again became a blurring drill picked up speed. The Zebra has recovered marvelously, Dr. Cross’ voice announced; the stimpack-delivery system seems to further exemplify the restorative effects of healing potion. I was glad that I had had the presence of mind to recollect the drained device.

“Grace!” Caliber called back, bridging the short, volatile distance between us as we tumbled out into a vast clearing of barren dirt. The tree-brink was far abounding, and the grass disappeared to dry, lowland. “Can you cut yourself loose? I think I can take him down before he gets out of this ditch.”

My magic was not complying, the jolts riddling my body distracting beyond focus. I jimmied the knife successfully out of its burrow beneath my coat, gripping it tightly in my mouth. The blade teased against my lips, the very brink of its sharp edge less than an inch away from dissecting my cheek.
I had done it on the alicorn; I could do it now, though murderous abandon was a different skill to a precision cut like this. I jerked my neck, blade cutting to the sky, sending the knife slicing upwards.
It cut through rope and skin, breaking my bonds and leaving a shallow cut over the arch of caliber’s flank, just above her cutie-mark. I tumbled into the wide riverbed, a stretch of light, once hydrated soil, meeting me in recurrent impacts. I settled, splashing into a softening slush of murky snow, finally reaching a gentle, if biting, end to the strained chase.

The riverbed was a stretching band of this low, soft silt, wider even, than the actual river just a caravan’s-race away. Caliber crossed it at an alarming pace, more than doubling her speed, free from her drowsy ballast. Dust rose at her hooves, plumes of the sandy beige left behind to slowly recollect itself.

An island, what would have been a miniscule islet without the great absence of water, rose out of the bed’s middle. A pair of tall pines and bunches of gray shrubbery occluded its small interior, and the Zebra rushed for its mock sanctity. The towhead was far too small to serve as a realistic hiding place, but with the bullet formerly known as Caliber biting at his heels, any refuge was better than an open chase.

He wouldn’t have made it had he too been freed of his passenger; Caliber had him before he even started up the rocky border of the archipelago. She tackled him, her light bound cutting off his own anchored one.
Ash jackknifed against the unified drivers, piling up with them in a dust-strewn, rolling conclusion.

The chill of the water, and perhaps the thrill of the chase, had fully awoken both my body and mind, restoring me to the semblance of civility and ability that I had once maintained. I vigorously shook off the snow-melt, loosening its hold on my coats and mane.

The dust settled ahead, and I hurried over to the compact of limbs and victory. The Zion Mountain rose, clear in the recession of mist and morning, in the distance to my right, imposing over the blue-tinged mountains opposite to it, and ahead. The two formed the opposing faces of the valley. This scar of drought, lined on each side by tall pines and dark rocks, ran wide through the middle of Zion.

Caliber recovered first, teetering onto her hooves, hardly allowing herself to be vulnerable for more than a flickering instant. Ash and the Zebra were still bound together, and lay wrapped in each other’s inadvertent, uncomfortable embrace, one muttering curses as the other mewled.

I cut their bonds with the knife, glancing at the scar on Caliber’s flank as I did it. It was a vivid red, but thin and shallow, a trivial dime-a-dozen wound against her experienced hide. Nothing to feel guilty about, she would assure me.

The pair fell apart, winding out into separate fetal positions, Ash out of instinct, her captor out of the necessity of a bruised body and ego. He had broken his code to administer the Equestrian healing, only to be hunted down and accosted by its original owners. Whatever his intentions had been, they would not be realized. I helped the disorientated mare up.

She blinked against the brightening day, finding herself free of both canopy and drugged cloud for the first time in hours. The icy waters of the snowmelt dribbled similarly from her shivering body. I thrashed my father’s coat out in the dry air, whipping it off, then up and down, with my telekinesis. After it was suitably dry, I set it across the pilgrim’s buckling shoulders, bracing her against the open air of this old river.

“Did you and Caliber….” Her eyes widened as she pieced together what little information she had. “Nevermind!” I peered at the suddenly frantic mare with amused confusion. “I’m totally fine with it!”

“What?” I laughed, watching as the mare in question roughly pulled the Zebra up and out of the dust.
“Last I remember…” she continued cautiously, whispering so as not to draw attention. “You two were talking about smelling each other’s tails… then you left…and now yours is gone!”

“Oh god, Ash!” I winced. “What do you think we’d do to each other?” Tail eating? I hoped to Celestia that that wasn’t someone’s thing. And yet the graying cotton candy tail of Pinkie Pie wiggled in my mind’s eye.

“I’m sorry… I just assumed.” She laughed nervously.

“No!” I paced away. “No, we didn’t do anything of the sort!” Would it really have been much worse a way to spend time than that implausibly real meltdown at my tail’s obsidian gravestone?
How would you have preferred to lose it? Pinkie Pie asked, nibbling at the pink cloud of her own puff.
“One of the serpent’s scales cut it off.”

“Serpent?” her ebon eyes glinted in remembrance of the similarly dark tower. “Goddesses…”

Caliber was rattling the Zebra, who took it with weak exhaustion. He wasn’t in a much better physical condition than I had been, and he had been the one leading his caravan.

“Cal.” The buck’s neck whipped at angles that were uncomfortable to behold. “Cal!” She broke off her intense stare with the space where her victim’s head would have been were it not so limply supported.
“Let’s just leave.” Zion, despite its beauty, which was apparent here in its heart more than it had been anywhere else, was starting to feel like an endless, inescapable prison of rock and pine. We had been on a course to leave for almost an entire day now, and had made little progress.

She dropped the buck, letting him collapse to the dust below in a billowing cloud of the eroded material.
“Fine, I suppose kidnapping Ash, and somehow figuring that it’s a good strategy, is a common enough mistake.” She climbed out of her straddle, and walked over to us, shaking off what looked like a limp.

“What happened?” Ash leapt between us with an uncharacteristic urgency. “To the serpent, I mean.” And immediately shriveled, eyes cast down to focus on rubbing her hooves together. “I don’t remember much after the electrocution.” I tallied how much Ash’s body had been through in the hours that preceded this one. Attempted murder, hypnosis, electrocution, an overdose cocktail of stimpack and arcane anesthetic, topped off with a drag race marked by bruising trees, cutting rock and the conclusion of a great collide.

“We killed the serpent, Grace overhealed everyone, then she gave her tail a moving eulogy and we chased down Captain Opportunity over there.” The Zebra winced as he dusted himself off.

“You are all clearly insane.” He countered. “And I knew that I could deal with the consequence of ingesting your Equestrian filth, after ensuring my escape from the clutches of a madmare…” He glared at me indicatively. “If you wish to call common survival instinct: ‘opportunistic’, then go ahead.”

“That’s fair enough.” I nodded, to which Ash looked a little hurt. “But why take her?” I added, smiling guiltily at the liberated captive. “That was just tempting fate.”

“I do not tempt fate, I track it. And I take great pride in my work”

“You’re a scout.” Caliber simplified. “Who got greedy, and couldn’t resist claiming a prize to take home to daddy Decurion. If you had been listening, you’d have known that we already met your boss.”

“The best liars are those who are truly mad, but manage to maintain a guise of sanity.” He eyed the composed mare skeptically. “One of your companions is a compliant husk, while the other has obviously given up on her sanctity of mind act. I think that you are just much better at upholding It.”

“I’m not crazy, and I’m not interested in your opinion.” I could hear her grinding her teeth under the buck’s haughty judgment. “I’d think that you’d want to scurry along now, considering your great failures so far.”

“They are the only reason that I am still here.” The two were almost circling each other, one fuming and the other looking on in cold knowing. “I’ve already broken my creed once today, for your pony medicine.”

“You’ll be begging to do it again if you don’t get out of here.” Ash and I looked on as the bristling fire and monochrome rock spun, at a crossroads of escalating threats and insults.

“Am I not afforded a chance to restore my honor from the one who took it from me?” He sneered, chiding.

“We don’t follow any of your codes or customs, so right now, you’re lucky enough to be afforded mercy.”

“I cannot accept that.” He set himself back into a pounce’s preparation. “This is Zion.” He dove at Caliber, driving his bruised body towards the mare with the meager force born of exerted muscles.
She side-stepped easily, letting her slight attacker pass without resistance.

“Please sir,” Ash mitigated, making me beam at her politeness. “Your valley is very beautiful, and your culture is both esteemed and rich, but we really need to be on our way.” The Zebra shot her a quizzical look as he rounded on Caliber again. “Sir!” she chirped. “It’s been very nice meeting you, but-“

“We’ve got a country to save!” Look at us, finishing each other’s sentences. Ash returned my grin with an agreeable look, indicating that that was not exactly what she was planning to say, but it’d do.

“I’m honestly going to shoot you.” Caliber assured, calmly reaching for the 45. “In de knee-capf.” She managed over the hilt of the automatic pistol. Her rifle would blow his leg apart, even without the now faded concussive enchantment; her threat was real, but still merciful.

The Zebra didn’t falter. “You’ll take our bullets, but not our medicine?” I gave him a sad smile as I hovered Tri-beam out of its holster. It would kill him, and while I knew that I didn’t have the will to do it, the zebra truly believe that I was a psychopathic maniac, more interested in comforting my own tail than my friend.

“Fight me!” he spat at Caliber. “You’re only proving the cowardice of your kind… hiding behind your technology, using it to cheat your way into an illusion of honor.”

“She knows that she’ll win.” Ash pointed out. “What honor is there in beating a broken foe?”

“More than there is in shooting an opponent offering a challenge, husk.” I holstered my rifle, worried that my growing annoyance at his stubbornness would translate into a telekinetic ‘slip’ over the trigger.

Ash stepped forward, breaking the lock that had fallen over our positions. The zebra watched as she brought her face in towards Caliber’s, nuzzling down onto the side of the pistol’s barrel, careful to avoid the chamber’s path. The mares’ cheeks rubbed up close as they briefly shared the weapon, like models in an overtly suggestive gun poster. Caliber released the pistol, and I couldn’t help but to cringe at the inevitable sheen of saliva transferred with it. Things could get nasty, without magic’s surgical detachment.
Her every movement gentle and slow, the lavender mare set the pistol down. It rested between hooves almost indiscernible as the extremities of two different races, due to the gray and dusty coating shrouding each. Both zebra and pony peered inquisitively at the gun, as if they were about to begin a deadly game of spin the bottle. Ash reared above them, rising onto hind hooves with a sudden push against the earth.

A hollow crack sounded out as she brought a hoof sailing down with every impulse of force that she could muster. For a terrifyingly lucid moment, I was sure that Caliber would collapse, skull fractured, to finally take her turn as the vulnerable invalid, and that Ash would laugh, pulling off a fleshy mask of ecru swatches to reveal the stripy truth beneath.

Instead, the more plausible, if comparatively mundane, eventuality played out. Though I couldn’t say that I was not surprised, or that I had been expecting the sneak attack.

The zebra collapsed onto his already quaking limbs, finally giving in to the exhaust that we had all been riddled with throughout this virulent day. He was out cold, lying limply in the dirt of the riverbed. The resonating crack had sounded out from either the breaking of bone or of keratin, perhaps both. Ash stood level again, eyes cast down onto the unconscious buck, rubbing her hoof.

Caliber and I gaped at the mare, taking in the sudden and practical end to the conflict.

“I just remembered that he kidnapped me.”

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

The dry river run stretched on into the east, encroaching and expanding at random intervals of banked erosion. The pines around us ranged from the familiar spread of skeletal emptiness, to the canopied brushes of gray, white and green: bark, snow and foliage.

The mountains no longer stood as a narrow wall. The valley was now gaping, fading into the freedom of the Northern Plain, though we had not escaped it just yet. The distance to the mountain’s tapering conclusion, while miniscule against the stretch of lightening gray clouds above it, was enormous against our slow and steady hoofsteps. Its quantity eroded away as slowly as the softened soil beneath us had, and the promisingly empty horizon loomed an age away, over thinning pines and a winding dry heave.

Afternoon was peaking through the clouds in dull white rays, and I tried to keep a hastened pace in hopes of meeting the setting sun outside of the obstruction of rocks crying Zion.

Occasionally, implied islands rose as tumors in the heart of our passage, sometimes adorned with conifers or fallen timber, but often barren, long swept clean in this river’s final surge. I had to imagine that the water still tore on, now through sky instead of earth, constituting the darker, immortal clouds that raged above. It looked like rain was coming... though it never would, not in the North.

“We need to get you two coats.” I led our quaint progression, the middle and point of the tiny triangle that we formed against this dead canal. They still refused the comfort of my own, to my chagrin, but also, on some deeper, indulgent level, to my relief. This cold was raw, every drop in temperature pushing my virgin experience down another notch. The night would be unbearable, even from under my three layers of pseudo-protective material. The clothes were, after all, only ever used in the confines of a Stable.

“We should have skinned the zebra.” Caliber murmured, inciting a guarded laugh from his last assailant.

“He wasn’t dead.” I proclaimed my self-denying autopsy. The buck would probably die eventually, assuming he didn’t lap up the restorative gift that I had discreetly left at his side.

“Maybe if we had skinned him…” Ash seemed to like the idea very much, as the fabric of her shattered timeline had all but been pieced together. Neither of them opted to continue the coat discussion.

“I mean it; assuming it’s only going to get colder from here.” This got a confirming nod from the northerner. “We ought to look around.”

“For what, an outlet mall?” Caliber smirked, defaming her own sarcasm with a juvenile laugh. “Ash has lived in the north her entire life, and my cutie-mark story was set smack-dab in the middle of the Great Storm. You may recall that I wasn’t wearing a coat for the entire flashback.”

“What flashback? You told us the story.” We argued.

To which the mare regaled “Ah, but it was vivid wasn’t it?” her hoofsteps beat in rhythmic union with our own. “Besides, it looked like a flashback to me.”

“Of course it did, you lived it.” It seemed all our ‘you’s would be inclined from now on.

“Without a coat!” she concluded, somehow winning the argument. “I’ve never needed one before and I don’t need one now!”

“You’ve never been to the Northern Plain either.” Ash warned, giving me an ally in my quest for layers. “The buffalo are the only sentient things that can bear the brunt of a night’s chill. And they’re essentially walking tanks of insulation. Most anything else stands to lose much more important things than pride.”

“Frostbite can take an entire limb in some conditions!” I elaborated, finally drawing from accrued knowledge that I never dreamed I would have cause to call on. “And there have been some cases where entire ponies are encased in the permafrost, their blood, their breath, their very hearts frozen for all time.”

“I’m sure none of them were wearing coats… the suicidal fools!”

“Fair enough, but you get my point.” You don’t mess around with Mother Nature, Colt’s Life had made that very clear, drawing from the same pool of medical fact that I had already studied before reading it. Thinking back, I had a fairly good idea of how to construct and set a rabbit-snare, though we would need to catch a whole lot of them if we were going to put a pair of coats together.

“I’ll be fine.” She brushed us off again, hoping that we would surrender back into the rhythmic silence, broken apart only by our hooves scuffing against the crinkled earth.

“Once, it was so cold that the entire lake froze over.” Ash pressed. “I mean… I didn’t see it, but somepony told me about it. And you know what? I believed him.” Her eyes were wide and sparkled vividly beyond the black, as if she was telling a terrifying ghost story.

“Oh, oh! Hypothermia!” I said, as if answering a teacher’s question in class. “That’s a big one: very dangerous. Blue, puffy skin, immobility, amnesia, brain death… really, really awful stuff.”
“…” That last part seemed to sway her. “B-Brain death?”

“Oh yeah, right in the brain.” I nodded. “Any one minute a stallion could be walking along, maybe his wife is by his side. She says: ‘Nice night isn’t it?’ And then… then he goes: ‘Yeah, but it’s a little cold out.’ Then: Boom!” Ash and I threw our hooves into the air and collapsed, overdramatizing the condition.

“Boom?” The now trepidatious skeptic was getting reeled in by our gross medical inaccuracy.

“Brain death.” I whispered, eyes darting into the shadows cast by the distant, setting sun, as if Brain death itself lurked beyond every dark occlusion and corner, waiting to pounce!

She looked over at Ash. “So… about that outlet mall.”

We found the flattest rock that we could; our options open in and amidst a plethora of stones and pebbles stretching out for as long as the riverbed’s banks were defined. The Zebra had had an abundance of gear in the sum total of his satchel’s and pocket’s contents. I dissuaded the other mares from picking him clean, not wanting to leave the buck shivering, naked and bony, only to awake in a likely fallen night.

Most valuable, was the scrawled parchment map he had of Zion’s eastern mouth.
The diagram was military, arbitrary details like scale and bearing were jotted along with the loosely translated topography. While simpler in its display, it showed much more detail than the seemingly satellite map on my Pip-buck did. Celestia’s Landing was marked off near the top-left corner, as was the Stable, a ways below. No sign of a camp or settlement, meaning their home was either further west or omitted, to always be kept unrecorded. Caliber held the map spread out across the smooth stone.

“The furthest I ever strayed from home was on my Pilgrimage, but I hadn’t wandered far before that.” Ash excused, the northerner knew remarkably little of the Plain that we would soon come to enter. Her vague references didn’t trigger the birth of a single marker on my usually hot-to-plot Pip-buck.
“I’m afraid that the nearest reference I could guide us to is a fair ways out of this valley.”

“Well there isn’t going to be a fashion district in Zion.” I peered over the nearly indiscernible scrawling of foreign symbols. Two arrows pointed out into where the Plain would assumedly be on a bigger map.
One was marked with a swirl, onward along the river (and the to-be veering dry channel); this had to be an indication of the lake beyond. We would have to abandon the dusty, make-shift, road when it turned.

“What do you think this means?” I prodded the diamond shape ordaining the end of the southern mountain range. Everything in between the two symbols was blank, a non-descript bleed of valley into plain, possibly the frontier of Zebra exploration, or in their eyes: Zebra territory.

“Probably a gem mine.” Caliber drowsed, much more interested in the twisting topography on display.

“How do you figure?” Was that a commonly known correlation now?

“Diamonds a gem.” She surmised, eyes still dancing over the curving lines and diagonal mountains.

“What?”

“Diamond. It’s a type of gemstone.” I had always assumed that it was just a shape.

“Are they worth anything?” I asked, trying to evaluate if the mine was worth a look over. I was curious to see one of the war-time, political trouble makers, but didn’t think that I should plot a course for it just to appease my own wonderings. Besides, it wasn’t likely that we would find any articles of clothing there.

“Not anymore.” Her answer didn’t quell my urge to visit the excavation, and I made a note to pass by it on our way towards the obscurely defined buffalo heartlands.

“There’s a paw print, down here.” Ash discerned, causing me to bristle in alarm before I realized that she was looking at the map. She had recognized a simplistic rune, a pattern of scaled dots smeared as the trudging impression of some wild creature or beast.

“What’s our stance on animal rights?” I smiled, already estimating our own relative position within the winding scar. The print was nestled at the base of the range, just south of the riverbed.

“It can boil down to ‘Kill or be killed’.” Caliber shrugged. “So hunting to survive’s fair enough.”

“Know what you have the right to call an animal, and always be sure that you aren’t dealing with even the slivers of a soul.” She seemed lost in her own recital. “Hunt to fulfill a need, and not to satisfy your greed.”

“It’s probably just a wolf-den.” Caliber assured. “It’s a shame we didn’t think to skin the wolves last night.”

That made me realize that I wouldn’t be able to use Tri-Beam if we did end up resorting to a hunt. Our last zebra enchantment still glowed with arcane ferocity, signaling the disintegrating energies teeming within the weapon. It had burned apart a river serpent, reducing tons of flesh and bone to a blossom of golden light, so I wasn’t going to complain. And I always had Caliber’s nine millimeter.
Whereas Ash still had nothing, I realized, remembering that I had cast her entire saddle-rig to neutralize in the consuming depths of Zion’s black river.

“Caliber, would you mind if Ash used the 45. For a while?” With the exemption of Tri-beam, we were left with only three viable guns. Maybe I could justify a trip to the mine for armaments scavenging.

“Better idea.” She began unstrapping her own battle-saddle, undoing the snug bonds that had kept it at her side for an alarmingly large fraction of her life.

“Oh no, I couldn’t.” Ash protested, as black bands drew comfortably taught over her bandages.

“No offense,” our mercenary tugged one final seal closed and stepped back to admire her own weapon of choice. “But you’re an unnaturally… let’s say uniquely… bad shot. From a mouth grip, at least.”

“Hey!” I jumped to Ash’s defense, though I wasn’t sure if she wanted it or not. “… Don’t say that.”

“No, she’s right. We’re stronger if we work off of our weaknesses.” Ash dissuaded. “Besides, firing from a muzzle-grip isn’t a skill that comes easily to everypony.” She added with a wry smile.
“Or at all, in a Unicorn’s case.”

Caliber giggled, both in surprise and appreciation of the burn.
“That rescue certainly blew up in your face…”
As would a pistol if I ever tried to get by without my magic, apparently.

Ash offered an apology, which I cheerfully waved away. Turning my attention instead to the map and marking the location of the paw print symbol as a waypoint on my Pip-buck.

“So we’re really doing this?” Caliber seemed a little surprised by my sudden, certain initiative to attack.
I nodded, anticipating getting to work on my imagined invention, which hinged on this hunt’s yield.
“Just for a little extra warmth?”

“Oh no, much more than that…” I levitated the obsidian scales out of my saddlebags, making them dance in the dimming day, flickering in a golden aura. “By the time I’m done… we’re going to be bulletproof.”

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Wasteland Surgeon:
Congratulations! Despite your constant attempts at malpractice, you’re body count is still zero.
You are now a fully qualified medical practitioner!
… Although there are licensed doctors out there with a trail of corpses behind them that would make a serial killer blush.
So don’t get too cocky.
Healing is now as effective as potions for external wounds.
You can also cast Anesthesia II, bringing borderline unconsciousness to everyone except your enemies… apparently.

Next Chapter: Chapter 15: Knitting Something Nice for You Estimated time remaining: 6 Hours, 8 Minutes