Fallout Equestria: Sola Gratia
Chapter 15: Knitting Something Nice for You
“Daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed. Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.”

The dry heave gaped, stretching out into two bleak infinities on either side of us.
This river had been huge, a highway to the former’s humble suburban street, an ocean to its lake.
A shallow pit of dust and rock was all that remained now, archipelagos serving as the only indication that this scar wasn’t the result of some planned construction of the world’s encroachment into Zion.

We were leaving the spacious run, heading for its banks, as if seeking appease from drowning in the dirt. The scout’s map had been detailed and precise, with every jutting landform marked in scrawled simplicity. The paw-print would be directly south of here, it said, citing the reference of a sizable islet nearby.

The pines were spaced wide and comfortable on the shore beyond, breathing easily in the widening valley, not compact around this canal as they had been around the serpent’s. It would not be difficult to find our way back, after the hunt was over. The riverbed would be distinct, bright in its tawny hues under the slowly encroaching darkness of night. For now though, Afternoon gold still lit the world in its haze.

Clambering up a bank of black rocks and shattered driftwood, I wondered if I truly wouldn’t miss Zion.
There was a hatred I harbored for it, a dull contempt. For all its natural beauty, which was both impressive in its age and resilience, the valley still bore a bitter silence. The thought that there were no inhabitants, apart from a progressively aggressive regiment of zebras, was starting to make me feel very alone.

The Stable, both my own and Zion’s, had been a hive brimming with activity and life. I had become used to an omnipresence of ponies, a constant knowing that I was never truly alone. Before I had disliked this biting feeling, but now I pined for it. Without Caliber and Ash, I would have run from the caged paradise, absconded to some distant village or bright city, eager to find some traces of life in the Equestrian Wasteland. Their stories of settlements, congregations and communities, were impossible for me to truly envision. Acheron was the only town I had really seen, and it had been a hostel of ghosts and salvage.

I longed for lights, for fluorescents or flames, and I longed for life, apart from the promise of beasts and abominations tucked away in rock and river. After this final task, I would hurry to escape the valley before another distraction held us in its prison of pine and mountain… But I still wondered if I would miss it.

“We’ll want to get this over with before dark.” Caliber agreed, unconsciously empathizing with my own thoughts. “So we can find a place to settle in for the night.”

I would need time to work, so we needed to find a shelter for ourselves before the evening was over.
Stitching the armor would not be difficult; it was the medical procedure that I was possibly most familiar with. Closing a gaping wound and unifying cuts of fabric required the same routine procedure.
But how to adequately attach the dragon scales? Supposing that I could double-layer the furs, the obsidian shards could probably be slid into the outfits themselves, making them the core of the piece. This was surely the way that most bullet-proof vests were made, most likely with Kevlar instead of scales.

Double-layers would be good for the cold, but we’d need a substantial amassment of fur first.

“What if it’s bears?” I pondered, remembering the reference to ursa in the Border Security Station.

“Then we’re in luck,” Caliber asserted. “Bears are easy to skin, since you can cut around the middle-“

“Hmm!” Ash hummed insistently, cutting Caliber’s step-by-step procedural short.
The mare had already begun miming peels and slices in the air, proud of her obvious expertise.

“Alright, I get it.” She fell back in line beside us. “You two will handle the girly stuff once I get the nitty-gritty out of the way. None of us have to subject the others to the ugly details.” I had tried to explain my seamstress’ plan to Caliber, whereupon her eyes had glazed over in the mind’s retreat to a safer place.

“Thank you.” Ash nodded. I worried that the mare wasn’t completely happy with what we were about to do, and she wasn’t the type to express an especially resistant opinion, no matter how highly she held it. Gore was no stranger to me, be it for my experience in medical or my wasteland over-exposure, but I couldn’t safely say how acclimated Ash had become. After all, ponies weren’t meant for violence.

“Let me know if you want to sit this one out.” I whispered, speculating that she didn’t want to show weakness in front of the eager hunter bounding just ahead of us. Caliber had expressed an accrued knowledge of the questionable practice, offering ranges of advice, from how best to kill an animal with consideration for the value of its corpse, to a few incomprehensible tracking tips.

“Oh no, don’t worry about me.” She soothed, with an empty expression of compliance on her face. “I’m fine… excited even. It is my first time hunting.”

I felt a pang of guilt. “You seemed a little sensitive before, that stuff you said about the soul?”

“Ah, yes.” She seemed to have only vague recollection of her set condition. “Well, you have to be careful in the Northern Plain… I imagine you’ll understand when we are there, on meeting the buffalo.”

“They’re avid hunters?” I guessed, mind slightly eased at the seemingly distant circumstances that had brought about Ash’s hesitance earlier.

“Something like that.”

“Come on you two, put the lead on!” Caliber hollered back to us. Our pace had slowed in the whispered conversation, and the mare had almost disappeared into the dim ahead. “We’re burning sunshine here.”

There was no way that I would get to see the open sky as the sun set, so my desire for haste had ebbed. But I ushered Ash along to rejoin our temporary leader, feeling the crisp chill of nightfall settling over Zion.

Mountains rose, once again, at the helm of our attention. These were humble in comparison to their northern kin, gently tinged in darkening blues and grays, welcoming, unlike the warning black cuts and crags just across the valley. Celestia’s Landing took its hearth in a bed of daggers, overshadowed by the towering vice of Zion’s monolithic name-sake.

A brilliant beam of white gold severed the range, slicing through its angular body in a sudden surge of sunlight. I twisted, almost on the spot, to regard the great celestial body as it blinked briefly in between the crests and clouds. It seemed heaven’s eye was closing, as lids of stone and cloud joined in darkness.

Though the air was dim, deep shadows set behind every stone or pine, the sun burned with an infallible power, exaggerating the horizon with its dominance. Bands of clean light obscured the dark mountains below, ignoring the law of perspective to prevail over all boundaries, beaming beyond constraint.

Though it was white instead of the contemporary crimson, and the day had a few hours yet to claim, I regarded this brief passage between the walls of sky and earth as I would the most magnificent sunset.
My reverent squint, an instinct to avoid the blindness that I was so obliviously tempting, ended as the celestial body disappeared once again, to take its rest in the lands beyond Equestria.

Based on its orientation with Mt. Zion, I could say that my Stable was only slightly off-South from this very spot, as the scene I had just regarded was very similar to the one guiding my first steps into Equestria.

“I’ll give it to you.” Caliber spoke, making her presence at my side suddenly known. “That was worth stopping for.”

“Must have been nice, to grow up with the sun marking your days, rather than a schedule.” A very open schedule, as it had been in my case.

“Never really saw the sun until I came north.” She sighed. “Even in the Middle Passage, you rarely see more than clouds.” I had had the blessing of altitude outside of the Stable door, but she was right, the heart of the valley never did see the raw light show of the sun or moon’s descent.

Ash had joined us, but didn’t seem very interested in the horizon, she picked tenderly at the bark of a fallen branch that was rotting in the sharp grass. “You got to see it every day?” I hypothesized. “Setting over the lake… that must have been beautiful.”

“I’ve seen it enough.” She shrugged, her aloof blasphemy sending a disturbed shiver down my spine. “The Goddesses absence makes it an empty shell… meaningless shrouds of lights and clockwork.”

“That’s odd.” Caliber frowned. “Damascus acts like the Princesses are the Sun and Moon.” Ash responded to his name with a blank look. “Oh… that’s my… boss. Very into the whole ‘Religion’ spiel.”

“I’m guessing there’s a difference in your beliefs.” I offered, trying to use a little more tact than Caliber cared to. I’d seen ponies of the Faith have disagreements like this before… if there ever was a time that they earned the title of ‘zealot’; it was in one of these intense altercations of creed.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find damnations in the Stable’s past that stemmed from one such conflict.

“The Goddesses are far detached from the wasteland.” She agreed. “In a better place.”

“The Kingdom of the Skies.” I nodded, uttering the name of Faith’s ascension.

“Stars.” Ash gave a forlorn look to the empty void where the sun had been. “Kingdom of the Stars.”

“Your Pilgrimage.” Caliber whispered, treading lightly into a minefield. “Seemed to think that the alicorns marked the Goddesses’ death.”

“They were wrong, and I worry that your Damascus is equally misguided.” I remembered the Goddesses voice, seeping into his head, cooing and coercing, manipulative and cold. Would Ash have fallen for her ploy? Was she so sure of the Princesses removal, that she could see the lie inherent in the disguised voice of a false God? “I hope that… for his sake, the abominations do not come to test his Faith.”

“So… if he’s wrong, then no one controls the Sun and Moon anymore?” Caliber drew, an idea that she herself held as truth. It was nice to see her expressing interest in our friend’s belief, despite her obvious skepticism towards the Faith. It was also interesting to see another religious perspective, as I couldn’t honestly say that I hadn’t come to assume one solitary dogma to mean Faith.

“No, how else would they come to share the sky, irrespective of how brief a meeting, how else would day and night ever come to such an unnatural collision.” Wait… what?

“I wouldn’t pay any attention to that old yarn.” Caliber dissuaded, reacting to my wide-eyed gape of disbelief. “It’s an old drunk’s tale. A wasteland legend, if you prefer.”

“It’s no legend.” Ash argued, speaking out softly, deferring the intensity in her eyes. “It happened.”

“Yes, I know, it happened.” Caliber rolled her eyes. “That’s what every buck who’s got more whiskey pumping through his body than blood will tell you. You can’t always believe what you hear, Ash.”

“And what I see?” Caliber balked. “With my own eyes, I saw the sun and moon… together. That is how I know the Goddesses are beyond this plane, and that is why I didn’t follow my pilgrimage into the blackness that they imagined, the reason I did not take my own life at that accursed station!”

It couldn’t have happened, it was impossible. But the mare’s eyes burned with an undeniable fervor, the passion of a battered knowing that was constantly refuted by those it was shared with. Caliber took a pause, but disbelief persisted on her face. “No… no, couldn’t have happened. I’m sorry, but the sun can be late and the moon can sway from its path sometimes, but that… that didn’t happen.”

“They were both there… both held the sky at once! I saw them!” Ash had undoubtedly had this fight before. The severity of the issue didn’t weigh with me; I had never come to count on the consistency of day and night. Caliber, on the other hand, was nearly in a panic at the concept.

“Then you must have been looking at a different sky than I was.” She stomped her hoof.

“Maybe I was just looking at more of it!” The frantic mare countered, her distress was not of anger, but a desperate sadness. “You said so yourselves… the North is forever under an open sky!”

“Then why isn’t the rest of your Pilgrimage here to back you up?”

“…” Something caught in Ash’s throat, not even allowing her the silence that she was being forced into. Black eyes glistened in vivid memory, emotion barely retained behind the deep pools of quaking ink.

“None of it would be right.” Caliber continued, trying to justify her blunt, cutting words. “Time wouldn’t have any bearing, it would fall apart!” she waved her wrist-device violently in the growing space between them. “If that really happened then everything… everything becomes a lie.”

“Ash…” I didn’t rush to her, I didn’t wrap her in my arms and tell her not to cry, I didn’t dare to take a side. “Ash, she didn’t…” I searched in Caliber’s steely eyes, willing her to apologize. “Tell her…”

“I know-“Ash’s voice was weak, words struggling to get out over the chokehold of repressed emotion.
“-that it happened.” She drew in a ragged breath. “Nopony… nopony ever believes-“

“Because it didn’t.” Twist the knife in a little deeper.

“Apologize,” I ordered. Feeble neutrality wasn’t going to make this right; I had to take the risk. “I don’t know which one of you is right. But I do know that you crossed a line, Cal.”

“No… no, I’m alright.” Ash murmured, words torn into a fragmented struggle by her shivering lip.
“It was a valid q-q-qu…”

Caliber’s icy glare melted, as if a blind had been lifted to reveal the pain she had caused. She rushed to her victim, wrapping her trembling body in an unrequited embrace. Ash’s black iris’, liquefied into a tremulous tar by the ebb of tears, were finally joined by the melted chocolate quivering in Caliber’s own.

One mare chirped like a choking bird, pretty sounds of meek restraint to express a violence of emotion. The other whispered and whimpered in doglike repent, warm words of atonement and apology, genuine beyond even a stranger’s doubt. Something had left Caliber for a moment, some empathy or regard for the bleeding wound she had ventured to poke at. She was trying to make up for it, but the worst of it was: we wouldn’t be able to tell if she had. Ash had been on the brink of a feigned concession, almost going so far as to apologize for her own emotions. If she was still upset, it was possible we wouldn’t know it.

I had gone against my loyalties, I felt an odd guilt for that, I owed Caliber far beyond any doubt and yet that hadn’t been enough to make me stand by as she hurt my younger friend. If she hadn’t conceded, if she had continued her barrage of insensitive insistence… I was upsettingly unsure if there was a point at which I would have given in, too afraid to lose our friendship to do anything more in Ash’s defense.

Luckily… Caliber had a softer heart than the monster in my hypothetical. But I should have known that.

Whether by a guarded facade, or a genuine absolution, the mares parted. I promised myself that, though I hadn’t afforded it to Caliber, I would give Ash the benefit of the doubt by assuming that she held no grudge against the desperately apologetic mare at her side.

“I know we’d have a hard time bringing up politics, so let’s make religion our one no-go topic, alright?” I offered, hoping to institute some law that would help in preventing this kind of rift to breach again.

“That won’t be necessary.” Ash smiled, effectively burying the hatchet. “My Pilgrimage and I were openly at odds about many issues- as they too struggled to believe- Yet we walked the wasteland together. And a family will persevere over petty differences for want, for a need, to be together.”

I went to conjoin their embrace, for once not injecting myself into a place of uncertain welcome, but a place where I truly belonged. We held our heads together, no flailing arms of awkward arrangement or uncomfortable over-contact, just a simple touch, an honest, mutual connection. Our eyes were closed, and though our faces were so near, there was no real way to tell that we were sharing the exact same simple smile. But we knew.

The bleached golden light of a setting sun lit up the valley, dousing the rising mountain face in its cool, calming color. The incandescence revealed snow, subtle to the point of near non-existence, falling in a lonely, rhythmic patter of light-catching motes. I didn’t think about the encroaching cold, the rising darkness of night, I didn’t waste a thought for the hunt ahead. For that blissful minute of shared companionship in a somehow foreign homeland, I could only think of how much I would miss Zion.

“It’s going to ruin this, isn’t it?” I asked, to which Caliber simply hummed in complacent asking.
“Killing the wolves.” We parted.

“Yes.” She answered sadly. “But the night will be brutal. We’re stranded at the literal maw of cold, a gateway for the freezing winds of the mountains and Plains, a boreal bleed… a death-trap.”

I sighed. “What if it isn’t a den? What if there isn’t a cave to take shelter in?”

“You can feel it already, can’t you?” she spoke of the bitter crawl of biting cold, the approach of night that I had justified as a vivid imagining. With every passing minute the light of the sun faded, drawing what little heat it had loaned to the valley away with it. Kill or be killed, nature posed a threat, so we would attack it.

“We’d better go.” I pressed on, already huddling deeper into my father’s coat on some instinctual reflex. The coat that nopony would ever accept from me, refusal that was both a blessing and a boon.

If the wolves were ahead, then they lay nestled at the foot of mountains. It had to be a cave, my logical mind assured, it had to be a cave, begged the fear. I had been scared of shadows, afraid of irrationalities throughout my childhood, but never had fear felt as real as it had become in the wasteland. Griffon Ghouls justified the monsters that I had created to chase me down steel hallways, and the cold was the lights-off abandonment of bed-time, death’s omnipresent hand in the night.

Rock rose around marble, again.
The sporadic pines had given up their hold of the land, surrendering to the rocky rise and fall of plates colliding in the underground below. Gray rock, all signs of subtle blues disappearing with the light, now formed a wall ahead of us, barring an otherwise straight path to Hell beyond.

Within it, was a door, framed in faded marble. This was not the majestic, gold-laced designation that Celestia’s Landing maintained in an elegant poise. This was a ruin, wasted stone appropriate for alicorns; the frame was cracked and worn, and there were missing pieces along its tapering body. Deeper black loomed within, but if I could contribute anything to this journey, it was deference for darkness.

We hurried into the alcove, retreating from the dying hinterlands behind us, evading some ominous threat. Wolves, we could handle, but stone was cold, and the numbing wind could make its pursuit into the narrow hallway with ease. My arcane light teased with implications of warmth, faltering with the tangibility of a lantern or torch of billowing flames, but was ultimately ersatz, more a flashlight than a fire.

The walls were not ordained, as no horrific statues or ambiguous effigies broke out of the rock. It was flat, never having met with the exploring chisel of an artist, but only the blunt obedience of a contractor. It was both a comfort and a warning. There were no historical disappointments recounted in this place, but it was definitively unknowable, a tunnel stretching on to anything. We pelted on, our hoofbeats and heartbeats echoing as if in pursuit of their makers. The floor began to slant, taking us into the earth.

I had come to know myself for a number of weaknesses, and strengths, during my time in the wastelands of Equestria. There was no doubt a bevy of still-hidden flaws just waiting to be discovered within me, but one had made itself abundantly clear on several occasions: I have tiny, tiny lungs.

Although I had a counter to the inefficiency of my respiratory system: in that I was unusually fast.
I found that I could outpace Caliber if I was willing to pay for it in the gasping forever that followed.
My agility was surprising, a gift of chance rather than right. I certainly hadn’t earned the ability.

Genetics had been cruel in this instance, sadistic in fate’s saccharine sense of humor.
Sure I could dodge an alicorn-strewn piece of debris, or dance around the grasping claws of a river-serpent. But if I was ever pursued for a period spanning more than an instance, I would collapse in a lightheaded stupor, complacently letting myself be chewed on by whatever beast had been chasing me.

Like I did now and, as expected, the chasing cold began gnawing at my heaving body.
For a moment, I was alone. Caliber and Ash had disappeared into the shadows beyond my auricle aura.
I lay on my back, dying.

“Grace?” their faces poked out of black submergence, only visible as floating masks, like a tourist’s cheap souvenirs. The walls had disappeared around us, leaving me without breath or bearing.

“Aaaa-aaaaa-aaugggghhh…” they watched as I floundered like a fish out of water.
“Aah-ah-aaaaah-aaaaahaha-ah-ah.” I cried, coughing and crying all at once. “noooo…nonono…”
This is it, this is where It all ended.
“I- I’m going… I’m going to die.”

“Wouldn’t be the worst place.” Ash comforted, to which I tried to shoot her an offended look, only sending myself into another dry-weep. “I think this is a tomb.”

“Why- why wou… aahaaa! WHY!?” I rolled from side to side, praying to Goddesses that I now believed in so freaking hard. “Pa—pa-pa… paw!”

“Why would the zebra’s use a paw print to mark a tomb?” Caliber asked for me.
Thank you, but Help me, help me, help me, help me…

“Maybe it’s a den and a tomb.” I would honestly rather die… just shoot me… just put a bullet right through my brain. The wolves… can eat my body… I don’t even care. Even my thoughts sounded winded.

Caliber grabbed my hoof, yes; perhaps she could save me with her typical wasteland-know-how.
My horn flickered, burning out with every heave and leaving each wheeze to suck in the empty darkness.
She was peering at my Pip-buck. “Grace, you need to stop doing that.” The white display highlighted her face in the periodic absences, making it pulse in ivory and gold.

She placed a hoof over my mouth. No! If you’re going to put me out of my misery, don’t use suffocation! Then beckoned Ash over. I gave up the goat… cutting off both my magic and my desperate inhales, maybe I would die if I just stopped trying. Nope… my nose maintained my body’s stubborn will to live.

The white light lit up the mare’s faces, two fillies watching muffled TV in the early hours of forbidden morning. Somehow… my nose was curing me! Without the interference of my own ignorant attempts to fill them, my lungs were starting to recover. Maybe I would survive this after all.

“I still don’t get how it decides something is hostile.” Ash mumbled, mostly to herself as she began, once again, to confound over the potential of Pip-bucks. “Those bars probably haven’t even met us.”

“Really, really not what I wanted you to start worrying about.” The device’s hijacker whispered.
Sweet oxygen was coming at rhythmic intervals now, each breath, a relieving wave of restoration. Incomparable to any healing magic, feelings of genuine cheer for the defeat of an ambiguous death rose.

I lay back, laughing to myself from under Caliber’s silencing hoof, giddy from a span of scarce oxygen and the happiness that ensued surviving it. The air in the tomb was heavy; the crisp chill beyond it was replaced by a thick emptiness. The stretching stone hall could not funnel enough polar air to fill the subterranean depths. This would be a good shelter if not for the lack of light, and the promise of graves.

Caliber peered into the void, her illuminated half-face drawing back into a reprehensive squint, as if sharpening her sight to cut through the darkness.

In a sudden jerk, the proceedings of the next few seconds were drawn to my attention. A deeper shadow had been setting itself upon us, surrounding us in dark implications. One of the shades announced itself in fluid motion, an insurgence into the Pip-buck’s aura. The jerk came as Caliber tugged my imprisoned arm, moving the metal device ordaining it to block the path of hot-breathed jowls.

Gnawing teeth and a salivating tongue wrapped themselves around my dark machine, only partially visible as it swallowed at our white corona of light. The jagged calcium glinted, though yellow and rotted, and the desperate eyes of a hungry wolf were predominant in the swashes of black and gray.

Caliber pressed her hoof against the back of the creature’s skull, reaching into an indiscernible beyond. She encouraged the choke-hold on Stable-Tec’s pride, knowing that the steel would not succumb to an undernourished jaw. The wolf’s face began to split, mercifully vague in its visibility, as its mouth took in more and more of the unwanted apparatus. The drooling aperture grew, tendons undoubtedly breaking apart, as the raw screech of tearing cheek and segregating bone sounded clear.

The hold broke, but I winced away as the beast died, already feeling its final bleed of heat in the drool and sanguine fluid that oozed along my forearm. I shook my arm free of Caliber’s murderous grasp, rising to stand with trepidation, slowly brightening my horn as I went.

Around us were more of the sneering faces, whole and undivided, with bitter starvation clear in both eye and lithe, skeletal face. They took the light as an invitation, diving into it together, to fight over the meal that their forgotten compatriot had died failing to prepare.

They were desperate, both ignoring and adhering to instinct, dancing with death to feed their pack. Territorial and hungry, the wolves had little regard for their survival, no restraint or fear to temper their pounces and snaps. No mutations apparent, they fought from a burning insanity of natural bloodlust.

I drew my knife, barely considering the unfamiliar 9. Ready in my saddlebags. Caliber snapped necks, adjusted frail dives to bring yielding bone crashing into collapse on the stone floor. I gripped the hilt of my blade, sharper than any of the creature’s dulled teeth or claws, which had been rounded by their desperate gnawing on rock and ruin. The process was fluid, as a skeleton of fur and heat set upon me; I angled the cutting edge to oppose their pressing bodies, driving my appendage deep into heart or head.

Ash, unfamiliar with the killing power of hooves and unaided by the fortune of sharpened steel, was dancing. The rifle at her side held an intimidating beat of its own accord, an unwelcome superpower in this organic struggle, but she ignored it, and bore only shallow cuts and subtle wounds for her placidity.

I was sure that they would retreat eventually, once the nominal odds had balanced or our vast advantages were made apparent, but the regiment of dogs fought on to the last panting soldier. The final stouthearted, barren-gutted wolf fell, battered and lacerated, exhausted by its high paced cavort with Ash.

Five in total, but my Pip-buck warned of others, milling deeper beneath the veil. Five would be more than enough, I dissuaded, deciding that we could take our leave, not disturbing the pack in the depths.
I shone my light out, sure that this barren room, at least, was clear of canines. Stone tables lined the reaches of the bleak chamber in a rhythmic pattern, slightly rounded but angular all the same. There, on the wall above, was what I led Caliber too… a torch, a kindling held by steel against the rock.

Caliber propped herself up onto one of the tables, and I replicated her motion to rise onto the adjacent surface, eager to light the way as she worked. The mare of dexterous hooves and deft mouth lifted a splinter to the rough surface of the wall, a miniscule thing, no larger than a bobby pin.
It erupted in a flicker of flame as she struck it against the stone, rising to reach the torch on hind legs.
The pyre caught, blossoming into a welcome partner to my magical light.

We repeated the procedure on the adjacent wall, bringing the room to a tempered glow of careening orange and stable gold. The wolves below would have to stay as an accepted danger; they still posed less of a threat than the night above. This would be our workspace, amidst the creature’s corpses.

“Get down from there.” Ash hissed, sudden urgency breaking the calm of gentle color and dim stone.
“They’re coffins!” I threw myself from the casing, landing on the floor with an inconsiderate tactlessness, which was still a great improvement to the insulting idiocy that I was running from: Dancing on a Grave.

The tables confirmed themselves, lids becoming visible by way of a subtle band of shadow at each helm. Within these were ancient corpses, not of beasts but of ponies, affronted by our blind stumbling.

Guilt for the massacre that we had brought into their place of final resting was occluded by an ebbing anger for the callous pack of wolves, permanent intruders in this haven of remorse and intended peace.

“We need to silence this place.” Ash agreed. “We cannot leave until it sleeps again.”

“What are you two whispering about?” Caliber had descended from the protruding grave at leisure, ensuring that the torch was caught in what would be persisting flame

“These wolves are a desecration.” Ash explained, still restricting her tender voice to a hush. “More so than our own foolhardy presence… with which we can go about liberating this tomb from their hold.”

Caliber didn’t look impassioned in our own fervor of respectful cleansing. “Imagine what they would do to the bodies if they figured out how to open the coffins.” The wolves hadn’t come at the dying yelps of their kin. My whispering was a reverence, not a precaution. “They’re probably surviving on corpses’ bones!”

She nodded, not quite seeing the mere inhabitance of a tomb as an unforgivable affront, but appreciating the threat that the wolves’ posed to its resting graves. “So we need to get them out of here.”
I frowned, did she mean to usher the creatures out, find them a nice house somewhere in the country? “By killing them.” She reassured, smiling at my now debased concern.

“I would like to participate.” Ash chimed, feeling my own dull contempt for the wolves. “There is no reason that we shouldn’t make use of our considerable advantages.” She bounced the borrowed rifle at her side.

“How many wolves in a wolf pack?” I asked, a question that almost seemed philosophical.
At least, to the same extent that: ‘How much wood can a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood’ was. The bars on my E.F.S were ambiguous, fleeting and recurring in a mild chaos.

Caliber shrugged. “I think it was either fifteen or fifty.” Her face scrunched as she tried to remember the numerical average. “Let’s go with fifteen.”
“Unless the wolves we encountered last night were a part of this pack...” Ash calculated. “We probably have ten more to kill.”

I smiled. “By the time we’re done, there aren’t going to be any wolves left in Zion.”

“Or savages…” Caliber reminded. “We’ve really cleaned the place up.”

We began to walk further into the stretching, if uncomfortably narrow, chamber. “Yeah, but I doubt the Zebra are going to sings songs of praise or set up an official: ‘Pony Appreciation’ day.”

“They marked this place with a paw print.” Ash murmured. “They have nothing but animosity for us, not even in respect for our dead… if this was a tomb of Zebra warriors, there would be guards at the door.”

I could imagine their militant culture demanding it, in fact. “You think these are warrior’s graves?”

“They are likely to be.” She nodded. “This crypt is centuries old, and the only ones who were considered worthy of such attention after death, were Kings and casualties of war.”
I waved for a pause, my E.F.S indicating hostiles just ahead.

Three more wolves, limbs as gnarled and sparse as winter branches, appeared in the crest of my feigned lantern-light. Their fur was torn in patches, revealing the dull skin and scars beneath, hinting at the pack’s domestic troubles… or auto-cannibalism. Their eyes began to glisten as they turned to face our own cold regard, shining at the prospect of foreign, fresh meat.

Caliber’s rifle sounded out in an everywhere-echo, breaking the short calm that had fallen in our stead, the meeting of two miniscule armies in an ancestral grave. The resounding kickback sent Ash collapsing out of the illuminated battlefield… tumbling away from the golden slaughter. We dispensed the surviving wolves with ease, Caliber riddling one with automatic pistol rounds, as I slit the other’s arching throat.

Tri-beam sulked at my side, too destructive… no, imperfect in its penchant for absolute destruction.
“How many bodies do you think we’ll need?” I asked, requesting an estimate that only I could make.

“I’ll skin as many as you tell me to.” The hunter shrugged. Ash clambered back to my side, shaking out lightly bruised limbs and dusting the tomb’s omnipresent grit from her coat. “But less is more, I guess.”

“What are your measurements?” I pressed, though five wolf-coats would certainly be more than enough to fully insulate two mares, and I would be happy to make do with a thin lining added to my father’s coat.

“45 and 556.” She beamed.

“Right, wasteland, I forgot.” I was going to risk it. Levitating Tri-beam at my side, I sauntered to the nearest corpse’s side. This wasn’t their tomb; their invasion persisted, even after death.
The wolf flittered away, golden feathers evaporating into the darkness beyond my watchful reach.
The other two bodies followed, fur and flesh disappearing into brilliant, fleeting energy, leaving the chamber bare and pristinely calm. We would take the first five away with us, the rest would burn.

“Good thinking.” Ash shook her mane, batting at the dirty grays embedded within lavender waves. “There will be nothing left of them but paw prints in the dust.”

We continued down the stretching hall of graves, passing an assumed army of fallen warriors.
If there had ever been signs of mourning, flowers or memoirs beside the coffins, they had long eroded to become the dust that rose to blaze, now alive in the arcane light of our passage.
The hall came to conclude at another ominous doorway, an extruding frame that contained the sharp descent beyond. The floor gave out to slanting darkness, never stairs, but instead a cripple’s path of smooth relief. The red bars brightened, the final half-dozen in an otherwise barren scan.

The room below was an angular kind of round, or at least this is what the circular alcove filled with immortal kindling in the crematorium’s heart implied. This tomb was truly ancient, I had never imagined an open-casket burning, a public disintegration on the dais of a blazing bonfire.

They would have carried them down the slanted plane, passing the graves of comrades and brothers in arms during the journey through their expansive chamber of burial. Laying the corpse in suspension over the growing pyre, they would have bowed their likely hornless heads in prayer. The body would burn away, reduced to the air of the tomb and the ash in the bonfire, fading out of being.

The canine survivors growled from beyond a black wall, warning us to abandon our course, to run for the sanctity of the freezing woodlands above. Caliber paced around me, every step a slow caution of suppressed noise and motion, sending a shiver down my spine as she passed behind.

Ash yielded to her tinkering, letting the mare slide a single, augmented bullet into her borrowed rifle’s chamber. “Shoot the tinder.” She urged, standing close enough to share the gun’s inevitable kickback. They birthed a bonfire; Ash released the incendiary round in an easy compliance, but together they resisted the vengeful force of exploding flame from the tightly latched battle-saddle.

The flames burned away at shadow, bringing the room to a honeyed glow of crimson fury. The crematorium had been prepared, some ancient fuel had tempered in waiting, longing for ignition. Wolves, not shadows or skeletons, warned us to abscond, to leave them to the fire and the bodies above. One was an idol amongst the rabble, a statue in both his solid form and resolute snarl, strong despite the miserable depression that filled his den. Whatever food had come, had come to him, leaving him strong to spite his lethargy, to refute the invalidity of his dictatorship. And in this, he was their King… their Alpha.

Two wolves fell, as indicators of the fight’s beginning, shot down in what brief prime their hungry lives would have. One submit to 45 and the other to 556, bringing the terrified wrath of the remaining quartet upon us. The refuse down here was rife, the bones and rags of foolhardy prey or overturned corpses explained the strength behind their charging murderers. These wolves were whole, sinewy muscles lined their fully grown bodies, obscuring the sharp frame of bone beneath. Their shining eyes were hungry, but sought the warmth of blood instead of the sustenance of flesh.

Another fell, but absorbed more than one bullet in the process, charging on despite the first and second burrowing of miniature hot metal drills. Bringing him down had taken the extent of his kin’s approach, and now they set upon us, breaking up in an almost coordinated distribution of attack.

The Alpha held back, allowing his mates or subservient brothers to bear the initial brunt of our retaliation. Caliber wrestled with one, the automatic pistol discarded for a proximate, bloody collision over the stone. Her rifle fired wild, its target within the refuge of a barrel-belaying blind spot, gnawing closer to neck and tender jugular pulsing within, striving to rend pivotal lifeblood from its course.

My partner was a cautious sort, barking back at every sharp, stalled reaction to his biting assaults. The knife always cut through the empty air of his absence, warding and warning rather than cutting and crippling. I had abandoned magic, using the light of flames and the edge of a personable blade to fill my want for sight and safeguard.

He wound, twisting into an upturned strike at my exposed neck. I angled the blade, setting it against his path of fatal aspiration, gauging the course that would have driven primal teeth, draining me to a bloody, choking defeat. The blockade made impact, halting the beast’s helm in mid-snarl, digging deep into his skull, burying itself to the hilt. I abandoned the knife, balking to the taste of bitter iron that leaked over it.

I floated Tri-beam out of its holster, not ready to die for an oddly subconscious mercy that prompted me to keep this fight fair. Ash had repelled her own throat-hungry attacker, and now hurriedly back-pedaled, trying to put enough distance between them for a bullet’s conclusive introduction to the beast’s heart.

The Alpha would die for his cowardice, I decided, as I leveled my sights on the watchful Wolf-King.
Seeing his fallen compatriot at my hooves, the gaudy monarch pounced; abandoning whatever fear or strategy had kept him detached from the conflict insofar.

He scampered, claws scratching the rock-floor to announce his approach, and drew back worn lips to display the obvious threat of sharpened jaws below. The first beams hit stone, the golden-implicated crimson disappearing into a haze of blood-strewn firelight. Alpha had curved, bending his body into an evasive maneuver that barely detracted from the confident pace of his charge.

As he pounced, still oblivious to the absolute hopelessness marring his cause, I drove the rifle into covert ribs, throwing myself down onto the slant behind me. The arching dictator almost floated, his bounding flight extended by the telekinetic obstruction pushing, cold and angular, against his fat, warm body.

Adrenaline and blood coursed through long-idle musculature and nerve, I could feel a pulsing heart behind the disparity of gluttonous lungs. As if using the circulatory organ as a port, a directly applied triplicate of energy boiled the stretching network of blood and tissue into a diffuse of smoky vapor.

The Wolf-King didn’t live long enough to complete his pounce, nor did his body ever meet the sloping stone beyond an abandoned space that I had tempted him to attack. Blinding, the zebra enchantment went to work in its aesthetic distinction, leaving only tinged darkness for my blinking eye’s to behold. Layers of fat and flesh, accrued over a lifetime of privileged supremacy, melted away, reducing the Alpha, debasing him to the depths of his scrounging subservience, cremating him in a dispersion of ash.

Caliber panted, awkwardly straddling her dance partner’s corpse, it was odd to see a pony set on a wolf in such a way. She was sitting on the vixen’s chest in a frozen intensity, hooves bloodied in the pulp of her focus: another unidentifiable face. Ash sat, quietly by her side, waiting patiently for her recovery and my return. I had, to be fair, spent quite some time staring blankly into the void of the Alpha’s abscess above me, contemplating the ease of his complete erase.

“Injuries?” I offered, as if hawking wares at a baseball game. “Injuries, anypony?”
Get them while they’re festering.

“I’m going to start skinning these.” Caliber whipped warm blood in a torrent as she shook herself dry. “How ’bout we bunker down here for the night, next to the fire.” Whose flames now licked at the ceiling.

“Injuries?” I pressed, to which Ash shook her head, answering for the third time. Unfortunately this was not a situation where she could simply be uninjured enough for the both of them.
Caliber shook again, splattering the stone with another light barrage of gore.

“Cal, that’s not wolf’s blood.” Ash whispered, her eyes locked onto the mare’s shivering body.

“Hey, I was the one who decided to put the pistol down.” She waved off. “It was arrogant.”

“Where is the wound?” I hurried to her, and despite her bitter resolve for self-sustenance, she tapped at the very lowest brink of her ribcage, where a deep gash was blooming a dark crimson across her coat.
“That’s not too bad.” I assured, dampening the truth. “Lie on your other side.”

“No, you’re right. It doesn’t feel too bad.” Okay, no more of the usual doctor act for Caliber. Instead of reacting with the usual, I’m-worse-than-I-am attitude inherent in the Stable’s mass state of hypochondria, she wanted very badly to be fine. For pride or for fear.

“I only meant that it won’t kill you very quickly.” I helped her over to the cleanest part of the crematorium, no reason to risk infection from the corpses or scraps. “It’s superficial, but I need to tend to it.”
This, at least, was true. The gash had been made by the meek hind-claws of a vixen; it would be utterly ignorable, if not for how the wolf had pulled it apart after the incision, like you would a frog under dissection. I levitated out some surgical supplies from the Zion Stable.

“Ash, would you move the corpses to the wall over there.” I waved arbitrarily behind me, setting Caliber gently against the dusty floor. “And see if you can’t get the blood cleaned up, if we’re going to be spending the night here, we might as well keep it clean” Ash was to me what I had often been to Dr. Cross, I realized. The hovering mare was an onlooker, peering over my busy shoulders, who had to be distracted away to some meaningless, menial task.

“Do you have something to sanitize the wound?” she asked, forgivably, as she hurried off to do my bidding. I hadn’t usually complied with the same admirable haste, causing much annoyance for Dr. Cross with my stationary, incessant questioning.

Questioning that had once yielded a similar answer to the one I gave Ash. “No, but healing magic makes for an adequate cleanser, and then I can quarantine the wound with stitches and gauze.”

Caliber had given me her supply of potions, after I had expended my own on the reluctant zebras in the monastery. Now, we had none left, as most of it still circulating in the system of the Zebra buck who had hesitantly used it to kidnap Ash... Maybe I should stop encouraging strangers to use up our stuff.

I tapered a few capfuls of water (which the river had provided in abundance) into the gash, after painstakingly picking out a few fragments of debris and dust. “Would you quit poking around in there?”

“Shush, you’re in surgery.” I bit off a line of suture, and dug into Caliber’s yellowy brown coat with a levitated needle, swirling the thread just behind it, with fortunately practiced precision.
“Ow.” She mumbled unconvincingly. Pointing out the sting rather than recoiling from it.

“You want me to anaesthetize you?” I warned, the smile of a mildly sadistic surgeon creeping to my face.

She quieted down. Even I had become wary of the mind-dulling magic, and while the threat was empty, Caliber took the rest of the procedure in stride, not even wincing until I pulled the wound tightly to a close.

“Alright...” I slathered a strip of gauze over the threaded gape, more for aesthetic reasons than medical. “You’ll live.” I didn’t’ consider arcane sanitation infallibly reliable, so I would ask to check the site again. “And you finally have a reason to appreciate that giggle.” I personally couldn’t understand why she seemed to dislike it so much, I had always taken heart in Caliber’s juvenile little laugh.

“Why’s that?” The patient immediately started to pick at the gauze, as all of them just had to do.

“If you had a more boisterous laugh, you might literally split your sides.” I explained, deadpan.

“Was that a joke?” she smiled up at me, orange light faulting her face like the flames that cast it.

“Does it look like I’m trying to kill you?” I concluded, maybe in a slight exaggerating of her condition.
“Just don’t push yourself to hard for a little while, not long, it’ll hold secure after a day or two.”

“Thanks.” She stood easily, the flow of crimson at her side finally plugged. “Doctor Love.” A sly look crossed her face, to which I could only respond with an expression of unknowing confusion.
For a moment, I thought I saw a brief disappointment fleet through her eyes. I had apparently forgotten some experience that we had shared. With a Love Doctor? That didn’t sound right.

“Okay,” Ash suddenly appeared at my side, making me lose my telekinetic hold on the tiny, wet needle
“Blood is gone and the wolves are stowed.” Her stalwart efficiency made it seem like she had had experience with manual chores. Hopefully none that were quite so gory.

“How did you get rid of the blood?” I pried, concerned about our water supplies, despite the excess.
The silver thread-bearer glinted in the bonfire, so I had no trouble retrieving it.

“Well…” She kicked her heels bashfully, eyes downcast. “I used one of the wolves as a mop.”

“That’s alright.” Caliber assured, although in any other context, it really wasn’t. “We still have plenty of relatively clean coats to work off of. And we can always wash up in the snowmelt tomorrow.”
She sauntered over to the corpse-pile, unnaturally at ease with the intimately violent task ahead.
Drawing my knife from the wolf’s limp head with a wet spurt, the mare began laying out her first victim.

It was obvious that we needed a thorough scrubbing. Dirt and smoky residue from the day’s conflicts and caravan-chases were forgettable when compared to the veritable coating of blood and gore developed on our limbs and faces in the last hour alone. But, for now, there was still some dirty work to power through.

Ash and I settled besides the tall, crackling fire, waiting for the first stripped lining of fur and skin so that we could set it to dry against the beating flames. The damp tearing noises of the lead-bellied mare’s raw rending echoed into the hallway above, undoubtedly stirring the warrior’s rest.

“So…” I offered, trying to distract from the eerily placid violence resounding from across the room. “You seemed to know a lot about the era when this tomb was built.”

Ash stared intently at the plumes of heat and cindering timber, presumably driftwood pulled from the then-raging surges of the dry river run. “The Northern Plain is an ancient place.” She shrugged. “Just by brief wanderings or spoken word, you learn a lot about the dark eras of old Equestria.”
“You mean we’re not going to find any modern cities or towns?” I was eager to see a settlement, a collection of ponies living in community, as the Zebras did… if a little less militarily.

She shook her head no. “You’ll want the Southern Plain for that. Aside from a few encroaching developments – the radio towers, antennae, highways, railways and gem mines – it remains timeless.”
I was disappointed. “But, there are places that may help with your longing.
“The Abandoned City of Cabanne, for example.” As I had hoped, a marker appeared on my Pip-buck’s map. Apparently, Cabanne was in the plain’s very heart, which we would be scouring for buffalo tribes.

“Maybe that’s where the buffalo are.” I hypothesized. How ruined could a city be that it didn’t meet the ramshackle standards set by most other wasteland hostels? Although the required living conditions for buffalo and pony probably varied considerably.

She laughed, soft and sweet. “You’ll be disappointed to know that the Buffalo, while not in outright abhorrence towards us as the Zionists are, do not like to associate with anything ‘pony’.”

I sighed; some hospitality would have been a welcome change from the cold unwelcome that we were extended here. Assuming that we even got the opportunity to earn it.
“They must have dealt with some bad apples.” Caliber interjected, slumping a hollow wolf beside us. Its empty face was a mask, sockets boring into me with post-mortem contempt. Its body was a dusty shroud on one side, but was rivaled by a moist alabaster on the other. “Spoiled the bunch.”

“Are you sure you don’t want any help?” I called, as we set the bleeding skin to temper into a manageable aridity under the fire’s crackling influence.

“Are you sure that you want to make that offer?” She countered, sliding a naked cadaver, all pink muscle and teeth, away from her workspace. “Stick to your stitching, ladies.” She wriggled a gauze padded belly.
I floated out the obsidian scales, six shards of unpredictable and varying size. They would be difficult to distribute across the three of us, as one would inevitably end up with more protection than the other two.

“I was glad to see that the serpent wasn’t as big as I imagined it to be.” Ash smiled, having made this false assumption when I had first flashed the fragments earlier this evening.

After a liar’s pause, I corrected her. “These put together… aren’t even half the size of one of its scales.” Could a feeble dreg like this take my tail from me? I should think not!
Only a true colossus could have broken our interminable love!

Her eyes widened, irises shimmering as the remainders of great ebon glass.
“And you killed it… with that?” She gestured dismissively to my tenderly set aside Tri-Beam.

“Yes. I don’t know if there isn’t something to that Zebra enchantment, after all.” I couldn’t imagine it having the same monumentally destructive effect otherwise. “The entire serpent just disintegrated into energy.”

“Leaving its scales as substitute for a corpse.” Ash nodded. Speaking of…
Caliber set layers of banded pink and red at the base of the fire, sliding them as near to the brilliant heat as she dared to before pulling away in seared retreat.

“Oh no… not wolf.” I protested, disgusted by the entirely alien concept.

“Just the good cuts.” She soothed, resolving none of my issues with this. “You have to tenderize it into velvety ribbons first, so it’d take forever to do the whole haul.”

“But-“I argued, to the extent of my ability. I didn’t even know my own reasoning, so how was I supposed to convince somepony else of it? Caliber giggled at my searching expression and then bounced back to her abattoir, eager to begin on the second skinning.

“Looks like that pelt is dry.” Ash mumbled, not moving to collect it; she had been unwilling to approach the dancing bonfire insofar, seeming almost apprehensive. I hurried to gather up the light gray material, levitating my needle and thread at the ready in my stead. I made an empty gesture at the mare.

She responded with a blank stare. “Your vest.” I explained, wanting to use the garment to get some bearing on size, and an insight into the relationship between the seams and hems.

“I’m just a little smaller than you.” She promised, nervous energy flickering in her eyes.
Oh… right, somepony who didn’t share my vagabond’s regard for nudity. I stripped off my father’s coat, taking caution to toss it away from both fire and gore, and then examined my own burnt sienna vest.
The golden-laced scripture made the seams harder to discern, but I made the best evaluation that I could.

“Alright, now we need to decide which of these two scales we use for your coat.” I held the half-dozen in suspension, regarding them as a jewel appraiser would gems… or diamonds, apparently.
“You’re the smallest, but not by much, so I don’t think that justifies you getting the smallest share.”

“I haven’t been shot at this whole time.” she argued.

“Nun of us haff sinpf the toll boof.” Caliber added, from behind a gag of browning, mottled fur. “As far as wasteland combat goes, we’ve been playing on easy for a while now.” She added, after dropping the pelt

“Really? Alicorns, Griffon Ghouls, Savages and Giant River Serpents?” I arched my brow at the undervaluation. “Those sound like the tutorial stages to you?” she grinned no. “Besides, you and I were shot at by that robot in the Border Security Station… and I had to take out that turret at MASEBS.”

“Exactly,” Ash chimed, drawing evidence for some entirely separate point from the one that I was working towards. “I haven’t even had need for bullet-proofing once.”

“Yes, but you’ve been kidnapped tuh-wice.” Caliber pointed out, as she helped me hang the second pelt to face the fire. “And that’s just here in Zion.”

“I doubt that a barding of serpent’s scales would have helped much.” She countered tentatively.

“Fair enough,” Caliber shrugged, stopping in her tracks (both figurative in passage and literal in blood) on the way back to the bodies. “But I think it should be: Biggest to Grace, next biggest to you and the smallest to yours truly, because a few more bullet wounds aren’t going to kill me.”

“Why should I get the biggest ones?”

“I don’t know Miss Knockout, you tell me.” She smiled wryly.

“Ponies would shoot her just because she is good-looking?” Ash misinterpreted, sweetly oblivious.

“That’s not what I meant-” A flicker of panic surged into her eyes. “Not that you aren’t!
“You’re beautiful! Who needs a tail, really? Some ponies, oh sure, but not you.” Caliber stumbled over her words with an Ash-appropriate awkwardness. “Just wonderful… flanks… everything… just, all of…you.”

How nice that she was so desperate not to hurt my feelings, I thought to myself, warming.
“That’s sweet of you to say, but you needn’t worry about me.” I began to channel my mother, who’d been the only other pony whose words left me feeling like this. Others spoke far crueler, and had hurt me for their attraction. “It’s not like we have anypony to impress.” This deferred from the truth of my oft resilient self-consciousness. “Besides, I expect I’ll look pretty frumpy, that is my father’s old coat, after all.”

“Oh no,” Caliber reacted as if I was speaking complete nonsense. “It fits abso-lute-ly perfect; your father must have had an amazing… body.” She had clearly wanted to abandon that sentence. “I mean-“

“Goddesses.” Ash was stirring at the dusty stone below, drawing imprecise shapes and smiling to herself. “I imagine that you’d like very much to go back to your work now, Caliber.” The exasperated mare nodded in a grateful fervor and bounded off to the resumption of her solitary skinning.

“It’s odd having ponies who’ll get flustered just at the thought of upsetting you.” I beamed. “Odd in the very nicest way, of course.” These mares are my friends, I celebrated to myself. I truly have friends!

“Of course.” She agreed, still smiling softly to her dirt scrawl. For a moment, she looked to be very wise.

“Hey, since Caliber’s often the one in the real heat of things.” I suggested, eyeing the drying brown pelt. “Do you mind if we-“she nodded cheerfully, immediately agreeing to go along with my gift of deception. I set aside two of the larger obsidians, promising them to the second coat.

The scales weren’t even that differently sized, I berated, pining for the lost time, though we really didn’t have any other, more practical use for the evening. The tombs would be our sanctuary against the night, or at least, the lesser intrusion of the crematorium below them would be.

We worked into the early hours of the next morning, Caliber darting back and forth in a gradually calming hurry, Ash and I working together to imitate the work of both the seamstress and the stone-mason.
One problem with the scales was that they were too sharp; using them as lining in the coats would be akin to stitching knives into the folds of fur. We dulled the angular edges as you would glass, imitating the course degrade of sandpaper with gentle coercion against the rough stone of the crematorium.

Caliber suggested that I hold the scales to the flame, to soften them for malleability, but even she admitted that this idea drew from the logic of wives-tales and myth. I tried it anyway, to unclear success.

After a few hours, the coats were nearing perfection, each imbued with a strategically placed pair of impermeable scales. A palette of light gray pale for Ash’s garb, and one mottled in a tawny plethora of earth tones for Caliber’s. Both looked thin, not much thicker than a wolf’s pelts would, and only covered as far as the mare’s respectively black and blue vests spanned, but the warmth they imbued was clear when put to a test in the coffin-hall beyond the bonfire’s heat.

I tested the incorporation of layers into my father’s coat, never going so far as to stitch anything on. The added material made me feel fat, not in a superficial way, but more for its sluggish restriction of movement and stuffy over-insulation. I did, however, neatly attach the smallest scales over where, Caliber claimed, I was most likely to get shot. Once across my right ribs and the other reaching down from my clavicle, the latter stuck out of my collared shirt at its crest, masquerading as a black jewel necklace.

For lack of a complete, material wrap-around, the other mares had both of their bullet-proof insertions placed along the length of their sides, new guardians to join the rib-cage in defense of their hearts.
The Gauze extruded from beneath Caliber’s relatively small article, another reminder that most wounds would not be prevented, and that the scales only protected against a set of very specific eventualities.
Not quite “bulletproof’ as I had boldly claimed many hours earlier, but a great improvement nonetheless.

With the scrapped excesses: I stitched two rough, patchy blankets, which we rolled discreetly into our saddlebags. They were crude quilts, not exactly luxury bedding, but I was proud for them nonetheless.
Ash requested that I segregate the larger coverlet that I had been planning on, if only for her self-predicted inability to fall asleep in such intimate conditions. Caliber was happy to share one, however.

The fire was dying out, finally expending whatever simple source of fuel or kindling had been set up under the crematorium. We would still have no need for the blankets, as the heat in the room wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. I made sure to collect everything from the scatter of tools and reagents, though left the sizeable accumulation of wolf-meat for Caliber to pack into her own satchel.

“You seemed to love my jerky at MASEBS.” She queried, still confused at the unspecific basis for my misgivings. “This taste’s almost exactly the same.” Her contented chewing didn’t sway me.

Ash nibbled at the tip of the crispy band, and wasn’t struck down in the vengeful wrath of Mother Nature. Was that my problem? Was I being an environmentalist? No, I was raised to know better than that.
What put me off was the thought of a canine creature, a cousin to Equestria’s favorite pet, as a food.

“Do ponies still keep dogs?” I wondered out loud. The Wolves had been grossly under-irradiated. Had that been by an environmental sanctity or a genetic one? Were there mutant dogs?

“Some do.” Caliber answered, mouth full. “Mostly the Stay-at-Homes, but sometimes even raiders.”

“Stay-at-Homes?” Ash inquired, her mouth full.

“You know, like you used to be.” She tossed the mare another piece of rusty looking meat. “Those unadventurous types who somehow make it by without having to resort to mercenary work or trading.”

“What other jobs are available?” I asked, not looking for openings, just sated curiosity.

“Thief, whore, slaver… raider if you’re really desperate.” I certainly couldn’t imagine Ash as any of those.

“Some ponies just survive for a living, like I said when we were talking about cutie-marks.” She reassured, quelling my farfetched speculation. “My congregation was sustainably independent, for example.”

“That must have been nice.” Caliber kept offering me portions of wolf, but I determinedly waved her away. “No Junkies cluttering the streets or Merc Conglomerates muscling in on the best jobs. Sounds like a Good way to have grown up.”

“Yes.” Ash had barely halved her first serving, and so had a hoarder’s pile of the concurrent courses developing at her side. “Though I imagine that Stable life had its advantages too.” She deflected.

“I’m not going to lie: it was easy.” I nestled down onto my haunches, my eyes heavy from the constant blast furnace of heat and light, which both beat against them in soft plumes. “Maybe not as interesting as it can get out here, or as brutally, unpredictably honest. But survival was never a question, and It would be wasteful not to appreciate that.”

“I remember what you told me.” Caliber wrapped the rest of the hunt’s yield safely away, leaving us completely prepared for a morning departure. “That you wouldn’t go back.”

I shook my head, but then set it to rest against the floor of warmed stone, still looking into the firewood of her brown, glistening eyes from across the low embers. “Not ever.”
Not even if the wasteland became an infinite Zion, I added to myself. Not even if these mares and I were the last three ponies in a place devoid of all life besides spiteful Zebras and an undead wilderness. They could open my Stable door, letting out the last light in Equestria that came from something other than an abandoned monument or morbid ruin, calling me in to take refuge from the bitter, empty hinterlands abounding around me, but I would stand firm. Even if beckoned back by Shady Sands herself.

How many days had it been? I felt no obligation to keep count, and even that was an indication of an acceptance, a happiness here. Prisoners marked their walls with shallow dashes, tracking every miniscule dent in their appointed sentence, while always praying for some great escape. I had been that convict, with him I shared the commonalities of a steel cell and a bitter warden, warring cliques and petty squabbles, escalating to the occasional shanking in a moment of disregard.

My damnation, my criminal banishment, had done just the opposite of what the reprimand of law was designed to do. It had freed me from an incarceration, from the prison of a nearly utopian, century-old cycle. An impossibly lonely, restricted, and ultimately dwindling existence.

“Ash is asleep.” Caliber whispered, smiling warmly at the softly cooing pilgrim. She snuggled up beside me, her tawny coat waiting beside our saddlebags, not to be worn until thoroughly cleansed of the wolf’s part in it, the creature’s scent, its gore. “I… I think I regret bringing up her pilgrimage earlier.”

“Emotions can make us do things that we usually wouldn’t.” I sought the pillowing of her soft white scarf, its tear-dabbled history evidence to my own words. I didn’t regret having sought refuge here, but felt an unshakable pang of shame whenever I thought in retrospect of how enfeebled I had been.

She nodded forlornly, her guilt intensified by the sight of Ash, curled up, small and round, at the foot of a dying fireplace. “You know, I don’t think I’m going to be able to go back either.”

“To the farm?” I nuzzled into her, a dulling drowse taking control as I found a spot to settle in.

“No.” she giggled, bouncing me on her chest, rocking me near and away. “I’ve been doing this since I was a filly, and… I wasn’t always given much choice in who I worked for, or how much control they had over me… There’s been some real scum along the way… some difficult contracts.”

“I’m sorry.” I comforted, not fully understanding the severity of what she was admitting. Perhaps for my sleepy haze or simply my rampant naivety, I couldn’t imagine the sometimes raw brutality of her work.

“I know. But Damascus saved me, maybe before I had lost too much of myself.” She rocked me. “And Charon’s definitely the most professional buck I’ve ever worked with, though that’s probably because Damascus found him after it was too late, after he had lost it all to whatever fucked-up life he lived.”

“…”

“It’s just that, after this, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to work with anybody else.”

But the lapping tides of sleep had come, and the mare’s words had faded into silence over the ocean, reaching out from that empty beach, but kept at bay by the abstraction of black waters under moonlit rest. Though she would have enjoyed hearing this testimony to their group’s amorous bond, Grace was Gone.

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

I scrawled lethargically at my naked arm, marking off another day with a tapering black scar.
My Pip-Buck had been taken, replaced with these manacles of choking and binding.
Caliber kicked at the cell bars, urging me to silence my own arduous panting, the whispers of pain.
She wore a police hat, set back to taper on the back of her head, short red mane ruffled under it.
I quickly finished the cut, and it sealed immediately into a dark crimson scab. Number Nine.
The walls had been where I started, but the wounds held no bearing when enacted on a lifeless plane. Bleeding was forbidden, but I could mark the passing of each day… or year… with a deep pain.
I remembered the feeling of each mark, how it had felt to add the first five all at once, the transfer.

Fern hated to see me do it. She hadn’t yet found the sanctity of pain; she still believed that she could survive without it. How did she remind herself that she was alive? How could she know that she still felt anything at all? The mare would either succumb to my self-mutilation, or lose herself, I predicted.
She was a pretty pink, with a model’s beauty; the kind that you always assured was a brushed-up fabrication to make yourself feel better. Even here, in this filthy cell, she looked like she was in a picture.

Ash had hung herself: that had been the murmur passing through the gray halls this week; the pilgrim had finally finished her journey. I didn’t blame her, as each cut seemed to be less freeing than the last. Who was I to judge, when did self-mutilation become suicide? When you weren’t too much of a coward.
They never let us out, Caliber was the only one they allowed into the halls, but where she had found the hat, I did not know. She was to keep us quiet, to be their instrument of gagging suppression, but in exchange we were spared the brutality of the guards who had come before.

The Savages had been barbarous, beatings and rapes had run rife throughout the cells.
So we didn’t disobey Caliber, not ever. And when the night came, and she hurried back into her cell to share our terrified shivering in anticipation of the Zebra’s shift, we did not hold her daylight demands against her. She was the only one giving us any mercy, after all. Fern hated the Zebras; it was as if the entirety of her passion, her life-force, was devoted to abhorring them.
This didn’t make the night easy for us… as we were always an us… It was never just me.
It didn’t matter what I did, my compliance and respectful obedience meant nothing during the beatings that ensued her vulgarities and spiteful threats. This pain wasn’t freeing, this pain hurt.

Now Caliber cowered in the corner of her cell, shying away from the rotting body dangling from the ceiling. The corpses would never sway, it was as still as anything in this forgotten place.
She had taken to talking to it, the fleshy ornament, telling it immersive stories of her troubled youth.
What about you, Ash? How did you get your cutie-mark? There was never an answer.
They had a loud argument about Celestia and Luna one night, but Caliber won by default.
She would put the police-hat on the body sometimes, leaning over from the top-bunk to nestle it over her frozen lavender mane. Ash liked to play pretend, that was one of her favorite games.

The Zebras were coming. I begged for Fern to make amends, if only as a mercy to me.
She said she was sorry, that sacrifices had to be made, if she could bear both our beatings, she would. She couldn’t, that wasn’t how it worked, if they beat her half-way to death then I would get the remainder. This time was different, though, the monochrome soldiers had come for me, not their militant enemy.
This time I had insulted them, I was an affront to the prison, they said. They were to take me from Zion.

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“This is typical, typical!” a voice screamed, overt passion, which only served to accentuate his accent. “What did I say, Zalika? What did I tell you? Are you not glad that we didn’t consult the Decurion?”

For a time I thought that I was still dreaming, the crayon-scrawled stripy wardens continuing the assailment that had begun in retaliation to my crimes against Zion. They were to execute me.

“He assaulted us in ambush, he let us save him from your river-serpent, and then he kidnapped me as thanks.” Ash soothed calmly. “This buck seems to have developed a grudge against us.”

“They all have a grudge against us.” Caliber fumed. “We’re not anything but invaders to them.”

“Exactly, invaders!” The buck cried triumphantly to some unknown authority. “And thieves.”

I blinked my eyes open, to find that my pillow had left me, face set against the now cool stone, to gather dust and ash from a dead fire. I had a good instinct for time, as that’s all time had been for most of my life. A superficial, an idea, a pattern, and that meant it was morning. Despite the constant dark of the tomb.

“I’m sorry.” Zalika apologized. “But it seems that all of Dakarai’s claims have basis.”

“Yeah, but his claims are ridiculous!” Caliber spat. I twisted my neck, looking towards the dim source of light emanating from the doorway out of the crematorium. Torch-light burned, strapped onto the battle-saddles at a pair of zebra soldier’s sides. There was Dakarai, the now nominal ambusher and kidnaper, apparently fully recovered from Ash’s knock-out. Zalika stood ahead of the regiment, our belongings spread out below here like an evidence display in a spontaneous court-case. Half a dozen nondescript, ghost-faced military elite stood behind her. Dakarai looked even slighter in comparison, still just a Scout.

“How many of our wolves have you killed?” she countered, nudging the fur articles. “Is his testimony to your slaughter of the river-serpent not true? Are these garments not products of Zion’s harvest?”

I rolled onto my hooves, drawing the attention of all: defendants, judge, jury and executioner.

“Shepard.” Zalika nodded in recognition, her soldier’s respect for my brief allegiance still maintained. “We are in dispute as to whether you have over-stayed your welcome in our valley.”

“What’s the issue?” I asked the ponies besides the fireplace, dusting myself off. “We’re happy to leave.”

“Your emotional state and opinion have no relevance, it is not doubted that you will leave.” Dakarai grinned. “But your allies wish to take more than they deserve. And besides, you are all guilty of genocide.”

“Yeah, genocide, I know.” I said, still confused as to why this was suddenly a problem.
“Not the savages.” Caliber explained. “Their upset about our little hunting expedition.”

“At our count, you have killed over twenty of Zion’s wolves.” She recited. “Meaning you may easily have erased their presence entirely from this valley.”

“Like we did the Savages?” I asked, a defensive arrogance seeping into my tone. Humility could go hang, I wasn’t about to take a lecture on genocide from the mare who had threatened my friends to get me to perform one. Our allegiance had been brief, and conditional, but I’d be damned if it didn’t mean anything.

“You took part in a military operation.” She euphemized. “A service to Zion that we have agreed to repay by contributing to your fight against the Slavers and their Railway.”

“So it all balances out, huh?” Caliber drawled. “We get no higher appreciation than common intruders, because you already paid off your debt to us?”

“Yes, we have sent the courier to your Damascus; we kept our end of the deal just as you kept yours.” The Zebra mare had Tri-Beam stacked with the lovingly worked over wolf pelts. “That issue is settled.”

“You have committed crimes against Zion.” Dakarai relished. “So we will enact punishment.”

“What does your Decurion have to say about this?” Ash asked, she sat near to Caliber, as if she was expecting to share the kick-back of the black rifle once again. The Zebra commander had spoken to us in high regard, he had shared his people’s history, offered a genuine thanks. He had acted above and beyond the stipulations of a cold, military exchange. Surely he wouldn’t abide this nonsense.

“We are not required to consult him in this.” The buck explained, his revenge going perfectly. “We are acting on the standing orders of the valley, rules that have existed for generations.”

“No,” Zalika dissuaded, causing his cruel smile to falter. “They deserve some mercy. Exile not Execution.”
Dakarai was visibly enraged, but for once he yielded to a military cool rather than an emotional irrationality. A Scout did not have any standing against the word of his first legionnaire.
“But you cannot leave with any of your gains from our valley. We must claim these reagents by Zion’s oldest laws, as we would after the customary firing-squad end to any other intruders or thieves.”

“That’s Equestrian technology.” I argued, ignoring the coats in defense of my enchanted Tri-Beam. I had found it beside a Zebra corpse, granted, but had that Zebra not discovered it in the place of his undoing? “I got it from the Stable, as I was emptying It.”

“Yes, I do regret taking it from you.” She replied, not giving any indication that it would be enough to change her mind. “But your application of the enchantment was callous; it has imbued the weapon with Zebra alchemy. And, above and besides that: Zion keeps what it yields, nothing ever leaves this valley. Please, see that I am already doing enough wrong by letting you live. I am giving you a mercy.”

What would Caliber have done if the fight with the serpent had not expended her rifle’s enchantment? The Zebras, or us more likely, would probably be very dead. I, however, was not prepared to die fighting for a weapon, no matter how familiar I had become with it. Although, that didn’t mean I wasn’t angry.

“That’s complete bull, and you know it!” I seethed. “If anything you’re robbing us.”

“Maybe,” Dakarai shrugged. His sickly smile returning as he came to terms with our abandoned execution. “But we are only adhering to our people’s law. If you wish to refute our law, then go ahead.” One inept scout, one deadly legionnaire, and six elite soldiers, now all armed with glowing black rifles. Ash was using a gun that was almost amusingly too big for her, and Caliber was unarmed, the 45 discarded into saddlebags, its presence from her leg-holster not necessary in working on the wolf pelts. My Tri-beam was within telekinetic reach, but just above it, eight enchanted guns stood ready to fire.

“So you’re leaving us with nothing?” I asked, accepting their control of the situation.

“Far from it,” Zalika seemed offended, as if it was insulting to assume her of such protocol cruelty. “We are only obliged to take what Zion has given. The wolf-coats and rifle will do. You expended all the medicine in the cathedral, correct?” Healing you and your people, I wanted to yell.

I saw Caliber shake her head at Ash, either in dissuasion or disgust. “I did.”

She turned to Caliber. “Is there anything else in your bags that you have taken from Zion?”

The mare grumbled for a moment then, in my opinion, gave more information than she needed to. “There are two blankets made from the wolf pelt scraps, and a few canteens of water from the river.” They would take my father’s coat is she told them about the scale nestled inside it. I willed her to stop there.
“Oh, and a whole lot of wolf jerky.” No complaints about that confession.

Zalika’s underlings began picking through the bags, as if the asking had only been a test of honesty.
“The recipe for the gold enchantment is in there.” I added. It’s also on my Pip-buck, I didn’t.

“As is my map, undoubtedly.” Dakarai hissed, though smiled at a resultant realization. “It’s likely I wouldn’t have come after you, had you not taken it. It took me years to put that information together.”

“You knew there were wolves in this tomb.” Ash chastised, our group’s shared disgust finally ebbing to the surface. “You knew that their presence here was an insult to the dead, and you did nothing.”

“You’re surprised that I didn’t act out of concern for your dead?” He laughed, confirming our assumptions of zebra disregard. “This place has been irrelevant for centuries, and so have the warriors buried here. It mattered more as a den, a place to be marked for protection, so as to maintain the wolves of Zion.”

“So you care more for the comfort of beasts than of ponies.” She concluded.

“No, I simply do not see a difference.” Even Zalika shot him an angered look, silently ordering him to back off. “You have only reaffirmed my belief that you are all the same. Brutes, with no regard for any but yourselves, selfish, ignorant…” The legionnaire rounded on him, shutting him up.

She threw our packs over, but kept hold of coats, recipe and Tri-beam. “We will leave you with the quilts and water in appreciation for your honesty. Otherwise we may as well be executing you.” Dakarai balked in repressed protest, as he did at every small mercy Zalika offered. “It has been a cold winter.”

“Thank You.” I muttered, putting on my scale-smuggling coat and strapping the saddlebags over it. The other mares picked up their own, putting them on over disappointingly thin vests. “We can leave now?”

“We will escort you out, yes.” She amended. “Please do not make us kill you, Shepard.”

I nodded, still fuming at the sight of the glowing Tri-beam strapped to her side. We had three pistols and only one rifle left. Thankfully one of the weapons was Hell’s Laser Pistol, so I still had some semblance of familiarity to take solace in. Though it would be like having to eat nutrient paste again, after being banned from ever partaking in the heaven that was Pork and Beans.

We trudged amidst the Zebras, surrounded on each side by torch-bearing guards, at least getting to take one last look at the now peaceful graves. All in all, we hadn’t lost much. I could imbue any weapon with the golden enchantment, once reading up on how to recreate it. The quilts would allow us to survive the coming winter nights, and I wasn’t going to shed a tear for the confiscated wolf jerky. It was the insult that made us fume in cold disdain. The gall of these authoritative demands. The loving labor that had gone into creating the coats, disregarded, the integral part we had played in Zion’s liberation, forgotten. This was treatment deserved by criminals, as that is how they now saw us. That is what had become of their heroes; this is what they had made of them. Even Dakarai would be more celebrated than us.

The dark chamber fell away, and we began a long march along the narrow hallway to the surface. They always kept a formation around us, flanking us or corralling us, as if they were escorting wild beasts. The Scout’s disregard for us had at least been honest, expressed rather than sub-conscious and ritualistic.

In the hallway, we were boxed in, locked tightly in a border of heavily armed escorts. But this would have been our only chance to try anything. However we, being of sound mind and repressed emotion, didn’t.

The open air of morning was a welcome relief, a great improvement to the deathly and sanguine aromas persisting below. It was early, pale light indicating that the sun had only just risen, to grace us with its thoroughly filtered light. The clouds were light, in color but not in presence, and visible beyond thin mist.

The Zebras formed a pen around us, imitating the incarceration of livestock, and lead us back to the dry heave. Always quiet, always alert, always cold. Even our nemesis Scout was silent, though he occasionally afforded us a glance at his persistent grin of triumph. The lengths pride could go to…

The riverbed became a highway at our intrusion into Zion’s barren scar. The empty silence was replaced by a regulated one, broken only by the eastward march of hooves over silt and snowmelt. They let us pause only to wash the quilts - Zalika’s trivial mercy - Watched as we desperately scrubbed, cleansing the pelts so that we would not be plagued in sleep by the vile scent of death, reminding us of Zion.

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Equestrian Imperialist:
You don’t take kindly to any group that holds animosity against Equestria.
This currently applies to raiders, slavers, junkies and tribals with +15% damage and better S.A.T.S accuracy.
Some may call it elitism, or even racism… but they’re the kind of hippies that should tremble at your mighty Old-World justice!

Next Chapter: Chapter 16: Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend Estimated time remaining: 5 Hours, 11 Minutes