Fallout Equestria: Sola Gratia
Chapter 17: Jack and Diane
“We’ve been looking out for each other ever since our folks died.”

“Do you know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man,” I sang cheerily, managing to stay on key throughout the childish rhyme. I might not be able to pull off gospel, but nursery rhymes? Please…
“Do you know the muffin man, who lives on the middle floor?”

We had found the highway, after only a brief slough over rails and plains, all the while bearing south-east. The tickling grass, golden in the morning cloud-light, bristled on either side of cracked asphalt. Crossing it had been an odd experience, like walking through a river of hay, constantly misinterpreting rising stone formations as serpents from the deep. There were no ruins between here and the mine, as even now we were experiencing the gross underdevelopment of the Middle Passage, which opened out behind us.

“Yes we know the muffin mare, the muffin mare, the muffin mare,” responded my friends. Caliber was reluctant to sing, in the strictest definition of the word, without binding orders, but her rhythmic habit of over-articulating still served to make her sound musical. Ash slipped into the song stealthily, after the bold, if unenthusiastic, redhead set a louder charge for her to hide under. Her voice was faltering, but had the sweet whimsy of a bird’s chirp. “Yes we know the muffin mare who lives in Ponyville!“

A mutiny!? Not on my ship! “The Middle Floor.” I corrected, still sing-song smiling. Their version sounded better, but had no regard for technical accuracy. Cinnamon Chips was, clearly, the current Muffin man.

The revolution was quelled, and the upstarts hung their heads in defeat.
We were looking for a target, however, so they quickly perked up again to scan the surrounding plains. I needed to practice my marksmanship, not for a gross lack of accuracy, but just to develop – as Caliber had put it- a bond with my new weapon. Cabanne rose, vague but majestic, from deep within the Plain’s heart, and, for now, we had no way to bridge the great odyssey except by looking for things to shoot.

The old city complied with several goals: It would serve as an overlook, to locate the buffalo’s undoubtedly celebrating tribe. It was also an indicator of the east, a direction we would head in order to reach the DJ’s radio tower. Last, and least, it could satisfy my wonderings over an ancient world.

“Windmill!” Caliber announced and bounded off the road, fading into the pale haze that seeped from the silvers above. She was disappearing off into the north, so Ash and I quickly followed.

There, rising like the crest of a morbid novelty hat breaching prairie and stone, was a rustic windmill. Its blades were wooden; a sure indication that this had been a ruin even before the bombs, and its body was a mottled brown. A fence ran, broken and tapering, in proximity to the structure, but quickly collapsed back into the shifting sea. It was lonely, as every other aspect of whatever farm or settlement this once was had already been rotted away, leaving it alone, to stand guard of the Plains beyond.

“We might as well have used the Foreman’s office.” Ash murmured. We had been at the mine for quite some time, as the self-proclaimed mechanical genius had been building herself a shotgun from trampled scraps. It wouldn’t have hurt for me to ‘get to know’ the rifle there. Caliber, however, had argued, citing the defence that that mine had too many memories, and so was a wasteful place to build new ones.

I agreed with Ash. What difference was there in aiming for a tall decrepit building rather than a squat one?
There wasn’t much to see, as ruins went, and it only took me a few seconds to examine the windmill’s interior. An apparatus, ancient in design, connected a round grindstone to the blade-mechanism above. The body was hollow, broken out to the open world in splintered gaps, and there was little else to see.

“Now I wish we had saved those tins.” Caliber yielded, as I joined her beside the structure’s capricious perimeter. “I guess shooting at the fence itself will have to do.”

“Do I need to get to know my gun too?” Ash asked, in a tone of subtly mocking inquiry. She seemed almost offended by Caliber’s personification of weapons, as if it were an insult to authentic life to attribute their exalted, in-god’s-image, nature to things more mechanical.

“Well, you built yours, so there’s already a pretty strong bond.” The oddly cockamamie mare said, in an answer that she thought rational. “Wouldn’t hurt to feel it out, and you might as well make sure it works.”

“It works.” If our pilgrim had confidence in anything: it was her own technical ability. I personally didn’t doubt the functionality of the new shotgun. Though it was a ramshackle jury-rig at best, all the important bits were there and the thing was made out of guns, after all. So it had to do something gunny, didn’t it?

“Well, let’s at least make sure that the kickback is manageable.” She compromised. “Fifty paces, ladies!” If Caliber’s voice ever devolved into a definitive twang, it was when she was acting as commentator on a good old fashioned shoot-out. I liked to imagine that her farmstead childhood had entertained her in bouts of a similarly themed charade or, more likely, trained her by this exact exercise, live ammunition included.

I levitated the Fix-it Stick, as Ash had inaccurately recalled the buffalo’s term for an item decorated like this, and made my regulated trot over the exposed ground. The fence, if nothing else, served as a border between lively grass and barren dirt. Whatever had been happening here seemed to have sucked the life out of the very earth. Ash scampered over to my side, constantly distracted in her last-minute tinkering.

“Okay,” Caliber called from just beside the windmill. “I’m going to stand right here so, for Celestia’s sake, don’t let your nerves get to you. I’m using what I’ve seen so far to assume that you won’t kill Me.”

“Nerves?” Ash suddenly became nervous, in worry that she should be nervous. “I’m supposed to-?
“I didn’t realize that this was a competition.”

“Don’t worry; it doesn’t have to be if you don’t want.” It’s not like we had anypony to impress. Except expert marksmare Caliber… who had no doubt already assumed the role of judge.

“So it is a competition!” She began trembling, but, as I nodded, something like a determined grin appeared, persisting over the obvious fear. “Then you’re not getting off that easily.”

Okay, not the pony I’d have expected to be harboring a competitive streak. If anything, she seemed hungry to prove her construction’s ability. “Oh, don’t misunderstand; it is so on if you want it to be.”

“Bring it, unicorn.” She whispered, as if apprehensive of the words. “Sorry: Bring it, please... unicorn.”

“Are we ready, over there?” We nodded. “Huh?!” we waved. “Okay, I’ll give you another minute.”

“Should I just count us in?” I asked, to which Ash gave a shivering smile. “Alright: 3…2…1!” I fired, and the whip-crack of the rifle’s report made Ash lift off of the ground in a skip of reflexive evasion. Her own shot, only a millisecond after my own, sent her flying backwards, obliterating the mare from sight.
“Whoa!” Caliber screamed. “What’re you trying to do, give me a heart-attack?” Ash’s half of the fence had been torn apart, reduced to nothing but ragged, hanging splinters and a subsiding cloud of sawdust, effectively ending the contest. “And you missed! So two counts of attempted murder… thanks!”

I nickered in disappointment, and then remembered that Ash’s crowning as champion might have to be awarded post-mortem. For a second that made me feel much better about losing… I justify this by assuring you that I didn’t really think she could’ve died.

The victor was sprawled in a bed of grass beyond the windmill’s stripped field, thankfully (don’t you mean regretfully, sadist) alive. “Hey, Ascella?” Caliber called, hurrying to my side. “You won!” The mare’s body remained limp, but she punched the air meekly with her hoof, silently celebrating her glorious triumph. “Don’t feel too bad,” the, probably biased, judge comforted me. “You almost hit the fence.”

“Her weapon has a much wider spread.” I felt an oddly desperate need to impress Caliber; though detracting from my collapsed friend’s victory probably wasn’t the best way to do it.

“She also built the damn thing.” Okay, so I had lost fairly hard. “Take a few more shots, get used to the reload, and then we’ll get back on the road. I’ll help her up in the meantime.”

I nodded and headed back to the firing line. The knotted beads of the Fix-it Stick (Name in Deliberation), beat together in a gentle breeze, dancing in the chill. I focused on the scarred dream-catcher, using it as an anchor for my line of sight. “Alright you beautiful buffalo-killer,” I whispered. “I’m going to help you turn your life around, but first, you need obliterate that exceptionally evasive fence.”

With another calm-shattering report, the 45-70 Govt. round was unleashed, and burrowed through the winter air as its brothers had before it, in pursuit of so many hides and horns. The fence, paper-thin when compared to the great, monolithic poacher’s prey, fragmented into shards of damp pinewood.

I slid two rounds into the magazine, replenishing it, and then strapped the magnificent, if darkly storied, weapon to my side. “I hit the fence!” I cried happily, staring at the space where my target had once been.

“Every runner finishes the race eventually.” My subjugator chided, making Caliber giggle beside her.

“Yeah? Well:” Don’t start a comeback that you can’t finish. “Bleh.” But if you do: stick out your tongue.

“...I’m gonna have t’break up this duel of wits.” Caliber apologized, though I was insurmountably grateful for the escape. “I think we ought to get back on the road now.”

We sauntered away from the ghoulish windmill, each with an endeared weapon at our side at last. “I truly wish we both could’ve won.” Ash comforted, readopting her usual sweetness. “But since there could only be one winner: I’m really glad that it was me.” There it goes again. “Not that you didn’t deserve to win… I mean, everypony should get to win something, but…” I honestly didn’t know whether she was rubbing it in or trying to make me feel better. “I’m really glad that it was me.” She bounced her gun in pride.

Caliber loved the whole exchange, no matter what the boldly/regretfully victorious mare was trying to do. “We’re gonna have to keep an eye on you in Littlerock, judgin’ on what you told us about the place.” Ash had elaborated earlier, under my questioning, on the names that she had mentioned with Cody. Littlerock was a town along the rails’ and highway’s convergence. A settlement nestled in the only viable pass through the southern mountain range, the Port between the Plains.

“What’s in Littlerock?” I pressed, wanting to know what Caliber had meant, and what to expect of the meagre, but first, bastion of civilization that we would undoubtedly pass through.

“Well, all I know is that a trading town like that makes for a hot-bed of gambling and crossed egos.” Caliber shrugged. “I’m just assuming from what I’ve heard, though. Ash’d know better.”

“Well, that’s a fair enough summation.” The Northerner agreed. “I have not seen it myself, but it was another reason that my Pilgrimage took the Middle Passage. There is rumour of a gang that dress themselves in prison uniform, for intimidation purposes I imagine, who govern the town.”

“Govern? I thought I wasn’t to expect the rule of law...”

“They’re dressed as prisoners, Sugar.” Caliber pointed out. “If anything: you should expect the exact opposite.” There goes that fantasy. “I’m betting its hooey, anyway... Rumours are nothing to ruminate on.”

Back on the asphalt, I glanced at my Pip-buck’s map, and Littlerock distinguished itself at the apex of both transport routes. The highway would continue east, fairly consistently, but the rails had already begun to curve north, a trend it would persist in throughout these wide Plains. The Ruined City of Cabanne was, in fact, marked between the two lines on the vaguely defined map. With the radio tower further along the more horizontal course, and the constant threat of a charging Coltilde appearing on the tracks, we had a pretty clear indication of which quite route to follow.

I had suggested that we make a detour back to Hell, as the mine was the closest we had come to it for some time, but Caliber had deemed it unnecessary. My guest-hosting of the just discernible Galaxy News Radio show, paired with the Zebra’s promised courier, would have given Damascus a fair enough indication of our progress. And, she had added, we could probably tap into his radio frequency from the relay tower, and send a message if needed. When I hadn’t even been able to think of anything that I would say to him, I agreed that the detour wasn’t worth it. How exactly did you go about chastising a pony that you revered and related to, for the extraction of memories that they had then entrusted to you?

Electrical pylons broke my view of the Middle Passage’s reaching southern mountains, rising in a flawed rhythm. Either standing along arcs of suspended cable, or simply collapsed in piles of crooked metal joints and limp linkage. If electricity was still flowing, which it seemed to be, it was routed underground.

Beyond the pylons, were pines, lining the base of the escarpment, and beyond those were antennae, building on its height. If this was an underdeveloped barren, then Calvary’s Plain was going to be a writhing, consuming mass of steel and ruin. It was technically the largest city in Equestria, after all. I wanted to ask why Cabanne had been abandoned, while the old city nestled behind New Calvary had been made the heart of expansion, but neither Ash nor Caliber ever seemed to have those kinds of answers. I suppose they hadn’t bothered to ask for them themselves. Curiosity was all well and good at a computer screen behind a thick, steel door, but in the wasteland it fell away to a focus on survival.

The frosty haze in the air was superficial, more an ocular tinge than an actual obstruction, and so I could still make out a rounded shape, too large to be anything but a building or a bus, sitting beside the highway a ways ahead. Though we hadn’t been very cautious insofar (singing songs on a stretch of road only a few dozen miles from where a raider-infested toll booth had been), the ominous shape made us slow.

“That looks like a diner.” Caliber assessed, to my internal disagreement. That looked nothing like a diner; diners were squarer, and sort of L-shaped. They’re also underground, I continued, proving myself wrong.

What it looked like was a bus whose wheels had been stolen, left to become a hollow carcass beside the road that it would never again be fit for travel. But I suppose somepony could find a reason to shape a restaurant like that, ponies had built buildings shaped like stranger things.
“Diner, as in a place to eat?” I clarified.

“Well, what used to be a place to eat, yeah.” Caliber nodded. “But don’t let that stop you from keeping an eye on your E.F.S.” Nothing yet, but we were still pretty far away from the abstract silhouette. An unfortunate flaw in Stable-Tec’s design was that bullets often had a greater range than a Pip-buck’s radar did. “There was a diner that I once underestimated back east.”

“You’re making them sound like sentient creatures.” Ash laughed, the image of a diner rearing up to swallow unsuspecting couples, who had only come looking for that authentic Equestrian experience, amusing her. That imagery, coupled with the oceanic grassland, made the diner look like a rising whale.

“Speaking of…” I glanced at the single white bar on my E.F.S, puzzled. “Look at this.” The mares peered at the device in turn, both frowning at it in distrust and confusion respectively.

“Okay, so would a potential hostile, though completely unaware of our presence, still show up as a red bar?” Ash asked, her constant quest to discredit the Pip-buck still enduring. “Even though we’re separate variables, even though neither of us knows what the other intends?” I nodded, from what I’d seen, yes. My only qualm with the system was that indirectly hostile ponies (i.e. Saber or Cody) seemed to show up white. “It’s devilry...” Ash murmured. “Discord’s in that accursed thing, I swear It.”

“So what could we be dealing with?” Caliber asked, equally unfamiliar if more accepting, with the E.F.S.

“Anything from a complacent rat to an enemy that we have yet to make.” I surmised. “The Poachers showed up white at first, though they may never have turned red at all.” Cody certainly hadn’t.

“So...” she rolled her hoof in the air, prompting me to continue.

“I can say with…with some certainty, that it isn’t a raider, or a giant river serpent.” So, essentially, the most obviously hostile could be ruled out. “Let’s move in quietly, just in case.”

“We could just walk past it.” Ash offered. “It’s not like we have to explore everything.”

“I don’t want to have to come back later.” I affirmed. “What if somepony we meet somewhere has something they want done here? We might just get it completed early by accident.” She looked at me like I had lost blood flow to an important part of my brain. “Say we get to Littlerock, and some old buck is like:

Oh, woe is me! My poor daughter! She has been kidnapped by raiders!” I donned the best enfeebled impression that I could muster. “You, heroes of the wasteland (That’s us), you must help me!”

“Then Caliber says: ‘Sure thing sir, where should we start?’” I threw in a poorly done Caliber voice for fun.

“A raider named… named Meanbuck McBloodlusty… has taken her to a diner just west of Cabanne!”

“’Oh my god, seriously sir?’ I would say ‘We literally just walked right by that place. We needed food and it was a restaurant, but my friend Ash was like: ‘’‘Onwards to Cabanne! Do not tarry, for we are on a divine quest!’’’ So, I guess we’ll have to go all the way back for her, it’ll sure be a hassle.’... See?”

Complete brain death, that’s what it looked like she was beholding. A victim of hypothermia, maybe? “Goddesses, that… that actually convinced me… I didn’t want it to, I honestly tried to ignore it, but it was just too powerful...” Yes! My tirade had reduced her to my own level of irrationality! “What are we waiting for? Let’s get in there! Before Meanbuck McBloodlusty returns!” Maybe one level lower…

“Calm ‘yer grits, Sugarcube!” Caliber hyper-drawled, in what had to be an impression of my own impersonation. “Mah daddy used t’say; this was back on th’ family farm o’course, he used t’say to me: ‘Amber-Lynn, listen up y’hear: don’t buy the cow, if you can get the goat fer free!” She giggled, breaking character. “Tell me that’s not what you think I sound like.” Her actual voice sounded regal in comparison.

“Godss, Gr-race,” Ash slowed the usually rapid rolling ‘rs and whispering esses of her Bohemian stumble-coo. “Excuse for-r pun but: your-r exager-rations are… how you say? R-r-raising r-rehdd flagss.”

After a pause, in which fear for a negative response to her assertion had already surged to Ash’s eyes, we began to laugh. The mare’s face lit up when she realized that it wasn’t directed at her, but rather, in some convoluted, roundabout way: at me. She joined in jovial abandon, and we bore the brunt, of what should have been my embarrassment, together.

For that moment, the diner was forgotten, its ominous presence lost in the absurdity of my ridiculous caricatures, and their subject’s subsequent revenge. Logically, I shouldn’t be enjoying this. But that feeling, and the part of me that worried about it, gave way to uncontrollable giggling.

Caliber was an Equestrian, plain and simple. What seemed rural to me did not take root in the farm of her birth; it was simply the way that ponies had come to talk, and how many had talked for eons before. Ash was from a corner, a convergence of North with East, and her accent, though not quite as zealous as I had made out, was admittedly foreign… but in truth, it was still not as foreign as mine. For I was the caricature, the odd one out. I, as Cody had said, was just a lost piece of the old-world.

But that place had never given me this, this disregard for self-consciousness, this comfortable belonging. The Stable had never really been a home. At least, not after my mother had passed on from it, not while I was alone. The Equestrian Wasteland, whether I walked it for countless Damascene decades before taking my dying breath, or if the journey only lasted until the diner just ahead, was my home… our home.

Even though it was the kind of place where my fantastical charade, could prove to be entirely real. No matter how happy I felt, the diner was still there, and so was the single white bar. But my willingness, my foolhardy desperation, to discover and oppose the dangers of the wastes was only another testament to how much I was beginning to love the lifeblood of Equestria persisting within it: Diamonds, more beautiful than those flawless stones, brighter than the fuel of war.

Ash and I waited for Caliber to control herself, although watching her giggle wasn’t exactly cohesive to our own recovery. The mercenary’s laugh came from beyond the bruised eye and seemingly permanent bandage, it was a part of her that the wasteland hadn’t been able to reach, an innocence, an undamaged shard of the filly who had otherwise been traumatized into an all consuming fear of weakness.

She had to dust herself off; because of how much she had been rolling, laughing at something almost already forgotten. If she hadn’t been trying to stop herself, I imagined the snorting giggle would have gone on much longer, and why not? Laughter was beyond even arcane levels of restoration.

“Okay… okay, I’m back in the game.” She promised. “Oh… we’d better check my stitches.”

I had forgotten about that. “I’ll take a look.” We’d have likely been able to see the blood, and Caliber would certainly have felt it already, so I wasn’t worried. I peeled away the gauze under her vest, making her giggle again as the adhesive material pulled against her coat. “All clear, in fact, I think we can leave it exposed.” I crumpled up the dressing, and then tossed it to wind at the anti-environmentalist’s scrupulous look. The stitching was sound, lacing the crimson gash together into a tight solidity.

“Good to go?” she asked, peering with a mild curiosity, as if looking at the bottom of a car on a jack rather than her own sundered undercarriage.

“Yep, if it survived that, then it’s probably as stable as it’s going to get for some time.” I assessed, hoping that Dr. Cross’ own optimistic opinions on this kind of wound, from which I drew inspiration, didn’t hinge on the gentler, less hysterical conditions of the Stable.

“Let’s go then.” Ash enthused, a concern for the arbitrary white bar now set in her mind thanks to my over exaggeration. It was honestly unlikely to be some little girl from Littlerock.

We marched onwards along the highway, keeping a guarded, light-hoofed pace, if anything our laughter had made the situation more dangerous. I levitated the Fix-it Stick (Name in Deliberation) at my side, steeling myself for whatever gritty reality would pull us back to the somber violence and sadness that filled the expansive gaps between moments of the purest calm and happiness.

The windows, while glassless and large, didn’t give us much warning or, less likely, reassurance. Like the steel walls of the collapsed bus, as I would forever regard the diner if not as a metallic whale, the insides were rusted, stained with iron and ambiguous crimsons. The door was a slight frame, like an inadvertent gap in the flimsy metal, and now stood before us, teasing us with vague promises of what lay within.

My E.F.S showed the placid figure to be at the left end, nestled beyond prediction. I poked my head into the door, immediately peering over to the cause for caution.

A buck, grisly but unassuming, was bound within a collapse of dirt and debris. The filth was not what kept him still, ropes had been tightly wound around his hooves, propping him into an upsetting and unnatural kneel. The disarray had either accumulated around him, or he had been corralled into it. Stools and tables had been cast into the small alcove, making the latter seem more likely, as if his captors had wanted to bury him alive, but hadn’t even made the effort to finish.

He was measly, pockmarked and slight, sure signs of infection and starvation. Whatever sadist had left him had no regard for the biting cold or extended time of incarceration, perhaps they simply hadn’t cared. The buck hadn’t noticed our arrival, though Caliber had clambered into the bus beside me, and now whispered to the decrepit captive. “Hey...“he didn’t look up.

I backed up against the counter, a stretching band of clutter and blemishes, allowing Ash to join us. A clock on the wall had frozen; I tried to remember what the time had been displayed in the Border Security Station. If they were the same, then my first guess had been right: they had all stopped with the world.

“Hey!” Caliber attempted, raising her voice to an urgent whisper. I decided that he was green, beneath the swatches of copper and ash, carmine and gray stains on his coat. Blood and dirt could infuse a pony with those colors, but what pestilence could herald itself with such a thorough, verdant rot?

The prisoner looked up, eyes wide in terrified apprehension, quivering dots of Caliber’s own chestnut hue. She approached slowly, trying to soothe his trembling fear with both slowing steps and softening words. “Don’t worry; we’re not going to hurt you.” Sadly, she looked to me for confirmation. He either couldn’t understand, or couldn’t believe. Somepony had damaged this buck, reducing him to a paranoid shadow of his former self. Though his body looked aged beyond health, and his mane was a faded mess, his eyes burned with otherwise stolen youth. “Okay, I know that you’re scared, but I’m just going to untie you.”

Ash huddled beside me, sharing my discomfort at the sight of the abhorrently mistreated captive. We watched as Caliber took slow, silent hoofsteps, each bringing a panging jolt of panic, despite her soothing whispers of peace, or her more determined assurances of good intention. He was clearly not deaf, as even her words incited flinches and a slower sense of dying in his eyes. The fear was a fire, but with it was a chilling acceptance, as if Caliber was causing him a numbing pain, killing him with every step.

He began crying, heaves of gagged despair drawing from a long expended source. The tears were clear, going so far as to dampen the gag stuffed into his mouth. If Caliber tarried for too long, he would drown. I didn’t envy her, with every one of the buck’s chocking pleas I winced. It was as if she was beating him, her hooves not gentle against a grimy floor, but instead callous, bruising the pleading beggar. He was watching her steps, balking with every soft collision, as if battered by their dislocated touch.

Amidst the clutter, subtly stretching beyond empty tins and glasses, was the real cause for his distress. I saw it glint at the absence of shadow, brought upon by Caliber’s final step. I saw the tripwire smile. My eyes darted about the room, searching for the implicit peril, searching for something to warn Caliber away from. But tables, matted with ancient newspaper and burned to jagged grit, covered the trap. “C-“ The severed warning barely registered, as I had already wasted what fleeting opportunity I may have had.

The buck’s head disappeared into a red mist, bone and tears alike occluded in the cloud of sanguine blood. His body didn’t collapse, as its bind kept it kneeling in the submission of those waiting to be executed, frozen as a morbid statue, spouting a red babble from its one, gaping orifice.

The indicator of its own failure had overblown my warning. A shotgun’s report had made the weapon known, and a blaze of shrapnel fire had revealed its location. Nestled between the planes of two up-turned tables, the murder weapon cowered.

Caliber had been patterned with gore, turned into a pox’s victim by the flurry of crimson dots. She didn’t retch, she didn’t tremble, the mare who had seen more death than daylight, simply stared. The corpse ran dry, or at least, the flow of blood had abandoned its course into the open world, and still she stared, and for that we were silent, waiting for just one of us to scream. If only so we could join them.

The wall’s stains were now embellished with a bright fluid, paling in comparison to its fresh forerunner. It dripped from Caliber, and soon the hollow steel whale began to reek as its carcass of real flesh would. Our silence was not broken in crescendo, but instead with the sound of Ash retching, wet but empty. She had toppled over the counter and loosed herself over into the cordoned off section of the diner, considerate of our sensitivities, even though we had all but abandoned them.

In her pulsing gags, glasses and plates came to shatter against the tile, destroying any semblance of silent horror along with them. Shifting paper and fragmenting ceramics wasn’t enough to pull Caliber from her daze, but instinct was. She dove into one of the stalls as the all too familiar sound of a bullet’s arrival came in a ringing collision with some metallic surface. Ash toppled over in a scampering retreat, forgetting the indeterminate amount of rumination awaiting her.

I joined Caliber in the stall, ducking under a hail of superficial rounds, seeking refuge from both bullet and bile. She had already lost herself in fight, and the fluid reflex of battle had come to replace its paralytic sister: fear. “They’re East!” she cried, scurrying from the stall and inadvertently distancing herself from the buck’s firm corpse. The other end of the diner was considerably clearer, and unquestionably safer.

I held my rifle up against the eastern window, firing wild to make up for my companion’s inability to. She couldn’t take a shot at these angels, at least not without clambering onto one of the tables, and into the firing lines of our assailant. My E.F.S claimed that the shooter was alone and, quite redundantly, that he was hostile. “Tell me where to shoot!” I ordered, levitating my weapon to a separate segment of window. “I’ll draw their attention, then you c-“ Caliber was removing the 45 from my saddlebags. “Cal?”

She dove out of the window. “Cal!”

My idiotic cries weren’t going to do anypony any good so, in fearful, faithful disregard, I followed the mare. We wove around bursts of dirt, pointlessly dodging bullets that had already missed their mark. Caliber darted ahead, though she was clearly the shooters primary target, in a bloody rage of adrenaline. Our assailment was either reloading, or running, interrupted as his peril came hurtling up behind him.

The buck was nondescript, reduced to a brief blur in retreat, and a faceless corpse in unbridled anger. The automatic pistol blew the profligate’s head to ribbons, round after round tearing into a rapidly dispersing mass of flesh and screaming muscle. The pain was pitifully brief, and his death came with undeserved ease. Caliber had thrown him to the ground, and then blown his brains apart from above, in a more horizontal, more savage version of the standard execution style.

She threw the gun, the impersonal thief of revenge, to the bloodied earth, and began beating the empty. The pox spread, now riddling her face in an almost complete mask of cardinal paste, blinding her beyond the rage. Pulp and plasma flew, until her hooves beat against the chill of crushed, morning grass.

“Son of a bitch.” She berated, as if speaking to the gore on her own face. “Son of a bitch!” The second sentiment was in abysmal regret, hailed at the past, rather than the now headless corpse.

I put a hoof on her shoulder, only to have it pushed away by the returned Automatic pistol, which tumbled from my clumsy ineptitude. “Let’s go get Ash.” She slapped a hoof across her eyes, sweeping away the blood, which had run in thin, vertical rivers, either with her tears, or simply in a mockery of them. Dragging up unsullied dust, she washed her face with the earth, and then began walking back to the diner.

Her expression was a placid nothing, hidden beneath the newly formed affectation of gray dirt. But the veil of soil could still not obscure the royal carnage beneath, and so her face was a bleeding mask.

“Ash!” she called, with no intonation of anger or sadness in her voice. “It’s all clear.”
The pilgrim came scrambling over the counter, clearing it clean in her scattering tumbles.
She wiped her mouth, but still looked to suffer under the misery of nausea, as if she had only accidentally taken cover, while adhering to the greater priority demanded by each draining retch.

Caliber simply sat, watching as Ash came toppling out of the diner window. “Are you alright?” I asked the drooping disfigurement as it melted from the mare beneath.

“Yes.” The maw of blood-muddied filth collapsed, peeling away like a beauty treatment, leaving a raccoon’s band over her shining brown eyes. “Don’t worry about it, boss.” I didn’t like that. Not at all.

Ash heard the answer, but proceeded to hug Caliber, breaching whatever intrinsic aversion she had. I followed her example, stalled by my own searing guilt, and together we warmed our sullied friend. She quivered once, in some sick anti-ecstasy, but did not return the embrace, instead breaking away. She gave us an almost pitying look, though not without its own strange gratitude.
“None of us saw the tripwire in time, but none of us are responsible.” She shook off our cloying.
“Let’s not waste any more time on this, all that matters, Is that we got the bastard.”

“We didn’t have to go into the diner.” I argued, reaffirming the validity of my guilt. Though, to my surprise, my heart wasn’t in blaming myself, and I was finding it much easier to expend my frustrations on the buck blasted headless and beaten apart by hooves, rather than to pine for the buck beheaded by buckshot.

“Yes, we did.” Ash assured, surprisingly adamant. “We gave that buck a mercy.”

How could I argue? Wouldn’t every effort I made to prove my culpability also prove Caliber’s?
If I was to blame, so were they. “Alright.” I agreed, with painfully obvious diffidence.
I could have warned her, if only I had spoken up straight away, there could still have been time. But what would I have said? Duck? Look out? I had hesitated to look for the trap, the threat. I had hesitated because I wasn’t thinking about the buck; I wasn’t thinking about anything… but Caliber. To say that she mattered more to me than a stranger, was saying nothing. But to say that she mattered more than common sense, more than rational thought… well, that meant something.

“We’re alright.” I expressed my own sanctity. “That was a trap, and we fell for it. There’s no reason to take the blame, or even harbor it. What’s important is that we walked into a situation designed to create as much death as possible, and survived.” I spoke decidedly, even as I made the realization myself.

“You think he was trying to kill us?” Ash asked, though she couldn’t have been so preoccupied with voiding herself to have missed the barrage of bullets.

“I don’t think he would’ve risked his own life just to scare us, Ash.” His risk-regret answered. The buck’s persistence had gotten him killed. I had only just seen him for a few seconds before he died, and if he had run just a few more seconds earlier, I may not have seen him at all.

“I mean us specifically.” She elaborated. “How many other wastelanders could you hope to tempt with that kind of bait?”

“How many other wastelanders even know we exist?” I interjected.

“Grace’s right, unless you’ve got some gang affiliations you’re not telling us about, we’re all pretty insignificant, at least in the Plains.” Caliber nodded, shedding more of the hardening coagulation from her face. “That trap would have worked on any scavenger, trader or even an especially hungry dog.”

“Wasn’t that a hunting rifle he was using?” I asked, recognizing the design from Colt’s Life’s pellet version –do not fire directly into eye- I’d used that advice several times with regular guns. “Maybe it was for a hungry dog, or some other animal, maybe he was a hunter.”

“Using pony bait.” Ash reminded morbidly. “Excessive.” Especially considering the crux of the trap.

“But effective, if you’re a hunter in the wasteland, then you’re not going to be picky.” It was horrendous, sure, but at least the buck had had ambition. He could have just eaten his bait.
“We need to move on.” I resolved. “I don’t like thinking about this.
“Let’s just leave, even if there is food in that diner, finding it would only make this whole thing more disturbing.” What could have been his motivation, if not sustenance? The thrill? Did he take enjoyment from watching the moral dilemmas of his creation unfold before him? Why was I thinking about this?

Whether by my semblance of command, or by a simple, unanimous desire to put this disturbia behind us, we left, beginning again down the highway. While shacking up emotional discord and cramming negative memories into the deepest abscesses had been working pretty well for me so far, I was worried that it wasn’t the best mentality to force onto the group. Sure, Ash seemed like the type, but would she not follow any course I set, no matter how self-detrimental? Caliber could fix this kind of thing, I knew from experience, but could that skill be turned inwards, or was she actually less than barely all right? Needless to say, I wasn’t feeling very confident in my leadership, and knew that, even if I was tearing apart their psyche, neither mare would speak up. One due to pride or obedience and the other to unassertiveness.

At least I knew that I was alright, what was one more for the vault?
Over the Commissary and past the shuns, look out daddy, here it comes!

Cabanne wasn’t getting any bigger, it seemed the Stone city would remain a vague, angular, extrusion from the mesa, never coming into the design of focus through the gray. Its elusive teasing only made me want it more, like a dog chasing a car, enamored over some unknown, just because I had yet to know it.
The size of the open world had always been visible, a fallacy in that it never seemed to affect me.
In Zion, the need to escape, to be free of the valley’s looming mountains, had not been issues of distance, but of the timeless place’s hold, its resolve to keep what it bore.
My journey to the MASEBS tower had mostly been censored and forgotten, due to Damascus’ will to do the same to his memories. I was tempted, for a selfish second, to enter the next orb, and ride, paralyzed and oblivious, as a leech on another’s odyssey. It wasn’t the walking, but the anticipation.

The prospect of the empty city, an impossibly old ruin in an otherwise freshly degenerated wasteland, was making me impatient, like an unemployed mare faced with the chance to be relevant in the morning. Within it were undoubtedly secrets of the past, stored like the data of a terminal, to await my prying eyes. But it was more appealing than a log or file, as its information was buried, unexpected, if I wanted to learn from Cabanne then I couldn’t just read data on a display, I would have to earn the right, hack the system. I would have to upturn its stones and face its inevitable perils, light its darkness and dig its graves.

I froze; coming to an almost absurdly tilting halt in the middle of the highway, but now was not the time to worry about risking absurdity, now was a time of heartened realization. I began to shiver, over the already periodic pulses that the cold sent through me. “We didn’t bury him.” I said, what felt like a tear, warm and brackish, travelled tremulously down my bruised and dusted cheek, cutting through the dirt.

“What?” One of them asked, from either my left side or my right, in either identical realization for our mistake or confusion over why such a thing should matter.

“We didn’t bury him!” I cried, suddenly pelting back along the highway, sprinting despite my already frail lungs. I wasn’t sure if the tears that came were natural, or simply wrenched out by the drag of passing air. “We have to!” The mares could have been beside me, or they could still be staring on in pitying apathy. “I need to…” Perhaps in desire for selfish closure, I pushed myself all the way back to the diner, which had dwindled into the obscurity of a hazy screen behind. When I arrived, I collapsed in drowning exhaustion.

I dragged myself up into the rotting whale carcass, ignoring dirt and grime besides to slide my way to the counter. There was no parking lot for this diner, no expectation that there would ever be enough customers to warrant one. It was on a highway, freshly built in a technological revolution that scared more ponies than it helped, a single pinpoint on a route that stretched for miles. Had this been the last stop before Littlerock? Would it be ours? I hadn’t been worrying about starvation, until I’d seen the desperation in both bucks. One was visually starving, while the other was devoid of mercy for his hunger.

Posters, most framed but many flayed, lined the walls. Starlets and sunsets, each twinkling with the demure of a dying day, filled the images. Blondes and curled brunettes, sleepily drawing eyes behind nearly genuine smiles. Hollyoaks and Manehattan lit up in show signs and streetlights, and both so alive. New Calvary, cold and lonely, soldiers and politicians had been born out of its black buildings and isolation: The stone, the mountain, a city that was born twice, once before the world and again in war.

The buck’s head was not beside his corpse, it was not anywhere, it had absconded on the wind like dust, and now a bloody cloud was all that had remained of it, and even that was gone. I was still wheezing, still suffocating for my own inability to draw breath. Nestling beneath the counter, where milkshakes and questionable burgers had once been served to all those amorous couples, I fought myself.

Caps were currency I thought, as I heard my friends clambering into the tiled bus, bottle caps.

“Grace?” Ash peered down at me, tilting her head only slightly to gaze into my sanctum of oxygen appreciation. I had all but regained my composure, save for the tear tracks down my otherwise dusted cheeks. “You’re right; we should’ve given this buck a better grave than this.”

I rolled out of my ineffectual hiding spot, neatly tilted over belly and back to end up lying face-up beneath Caliber. “I’m sorry I ran.” There was no denying my tears, but for a moment I thought I saw the same tracks, cast in blood more than dirt, on the mercenary’s face. “I’m sorry I made us leave.”

She just smiled wanly, staring down at me with that same projected pity. “Let’s untie him.” She and Ash started over to the corpse, as I rocked like a turtle to get back up to my hooves.

For all the empty bottles, there was not a single cap, as they had been picked away over decades of this newfangled sovereign currency. I thought, as I parted the sea of glass and imitation china, exposing pamphlets and menus below: Was it really more ridiculous a concept than bits?

I poked around the two as they worked, not able to get a spot in the ritualistic circle, obstructed by strewn furnishings and the collapse of earthy dirt. Soon the buck’s bonds were broken, and his body almost sprung out of the restrained kneel, a deeply upsetting position to behold, though not quite as bothering as the sight of a corpse escaping it. “How should we carry him?” There were no ladders this time.

Caliber slid beneath his toppled form, lifting him as she had undoubtedly done to me in the Poacher’s mine, though with a little more tenderness. The sanctity of a corpse during its funeral was obviously more important than that of a mare collapsing a mountain onto herself. “What happened, Grace?” Caliber asked suddenly, as if making the exact same comparison that I had. “At the mine.”

We hadn’t spoken about this yet, and now we were all willing to speak about anything, if only to distract from the dripping cargo on her back. “I don’t know,” I levitated out the three diamonds to show her. “I just felt these in the rock, like they were pulling me into them.” I had very nearly pulled them into me. Maybe I should mention the missing serpent’s scale, if only to ensure that nopony shot me in the heart as a joke.

“You don’t feel anything anymore?” Ash pressed, likely wondering if my magic had evolved somehow, hopefully to the point where I could lift the burden of the body.

But this was not so. “No,” I spun the diamonds in the air before my eyes, though they glowed in my telekinesis with no more intensity than anything else did. “They’re safe now.” You’re safe now.

“Where are we going?” Caliber asked, as her ability to escape into idle conversation was somewhat hindered by the headless horse on her back.

I hadn’t though that over, emotion didn’t usually go along with the approval of logic, and so we were now carrying a corpse, with no graves in sight. “We could… burn him. On the hill.” The Plains came into the occasional wave crest, rising into what could almost be called a peak in places.

“I suppose that’s more convenient.” This was, of course, an observation that made my idea seem like the easy way out. “But pawing at the ground for the next few hours isn’t going to do anyone any good.” It seemed we all wanted to make as much effort as we could, but couldn’t find the drive to.

“Let’s at least get him up there, so he can see the Plain.” I compromised, in a bargain that the corpse certainly didn’t care for. If the buck had had requests, it would’ve been for a more perceptive rescue party.

Caliber nodded, shunning her usual black and white attitude to death in respect for the casualty of our exploration. What difference does it make where a dead body is burned? She may have asked in any other case, if all our minds had not had a desperate need to be eased as they did now.

“I’ll drain some gasoline from the ovens.” Ash offered, seeming to strongly agree with the cremation idea. She hurried off to the diner, the most competent of us in terms of mechanical manipulation, as well as braving her own bile. I didn’t think we were that intimate as a group yet.

I kept the reeking ballast balanced; making sure that the slight incline didn’t send the buck rolling. His, indirect but responsible, killer was just at the base of the rise, unsettlingly (or appropriately) close. I liked to think that watching its captive’s cremation would incite some jealousy in the restless soul, as its vassal would be left to rot; bound forever to the bloody grass that the body lay on.

We set him down, and I moved to angle his… ah.
I shifted the body so that it would be looking at Cabanne, if its head hadn’t been decimated into dysfunction. Burying this corpse would have been morbid, leaving it flawed forever beneath the earth. Better to send the rest of it into the air that its helm had already escaped to.

Gasoline in a bottle, Ash had returned and now the cheap delivery system was being put to work. If anything, the smell was improved by the volatile substance, the sweet scent of benzene less regrettably pleasant compared to the similarly saccharine smell of blood. The buck’s last hours had undoubtedly been terrible, his last moments terrifying, but he was now better off than if we had just ignored his bar.

We were not so callous as to opt for incendiary rounds; you’d have to be pretty desperate to shoot a corpse at its own funeral. Caliber lit a match and then let me float it over the damp kindler, letting us back away from the predictably rapid blaze. A pyre rose, as the flickering flame grew by exponents, and licked at the winter air. It would’ve been hard to watch a face burn away, but I could bear this.

We watched in ceremonial silence, hooves clasped and mouths shut for fear of interrupting the ritual.
Ash mumbled, eyes closed and head bowed. A prayer.
Caliber just stared into the fire, watching as bone and flesh became undefined, a body reduced to ashes.
I was crying, but I didn’t really know why.

Burnt grass and blackened soil were all that remained, the wind taking whatever remained of the buck. His gray and carmine constituents were separated, a mist of blood and an exhaust of embers diverging over the Plains. We’d seen enough smoke dancing over the wasteland, but it would never stop, because in this new order: eventually, everything burned.

There was an oasis to the East, an extrusion from the Plain’s golden consistency, arising from the grass. Like the palms in some foreign desert, heralded in posters and advertisements, vacations that the rich spent their money on before Equestria was shut, trapped within itself, only reaching out to enact war.
Though this was not an oasis from the lack of life, just a derivation from the shifting sea of it.
Pines instead of palms, grass instead of sand, it was a refuge from repetition, if nothing else.

Nestled within the small family of trees, was what might have been a house, though it could have been a gargantuan salt lick for all I could tell. The faded white structure was nearby, though admittedly distant from the highway, as it waited only one empty expanse away. Although, by that logic: so was the sun.

“What do you think that is?” I asked, musing to myself. They didn’t answer, and for once my accidental asking went unanswered. I looked at them for consent, as they already knew what I wanted to ask for, and Caliber just shrugged and began down the hill. There would be no snide comments, no matter how jesting, no sly judgment or even the gentlest prodding. We weren’t going to laugh again, not for a while.

What had been an almost childishly giddy morning, marked by superficial competition and charade, had now devolved – or evolved – into the grit of a very adult depression.

Walking down the highway, knowing that all that waited was mile upon mile of nothing awaited, was not exactly therapeutic. If anything, I had learned that distraction was the easiest relief. Days shrouded in the shadows of depression, like those under a knowing impotency, were best spent doing anything but thinking. Unemployment, abysmal and unending, had taught me that.

Take in as much as you could, you couldn’t bury the shroud, but you could bury yourself.

The clouds never made familiar shapes, not like some stories claimed; I had come to realize this in my contradictory reverent aversion to them. They may have once, there may have been a time when you could spend hours finding likenesses in the sky, effigies of their earthly counterparts, very temporary imitations. I had read a book, where the personified colt had seen a giant ship in the sky, an ancient vessel of sea faring and adventure, and thought: Are there cloud pirates on that ship?
What a stupid thing to think, my filly self had chastised, nickering at the colt’s wasteful imagination.

Pegasus would shape them this way, I now knew, as an artistic expression or gift to those below. But they didn’t care about us anymore; their time was better spent hedonistically, in sloth and blind disregard. Couldn’t they make us something beautiful, just once?
Couldn’t they send a billowing ship to remind us that we were not alone, that they still cared enough to do just that, if nothing else? Well no, I answered, because they liked to pretend that we didn’t even exist.

“Ash? According to your beliefs…” I began to ask, once again deferring to her Faith for some foreign judgment, which felt nostalgic all the same. “What will happen to the Pegasus once... it’s over?”

“They’ll be fine.” She shrugged. “The Enclave on the other hoof, will finally learn what it feels like for their victims, what it feels like to be left behind. There are surely some up there that are simply deluded, and so their false Gods will be the ones to suffer in their stead. The Goddesses are nothing if not punishing to those who deserve it.” That’s not what the Confessor always said. Though the worst crime that he promised the chance of forgiveness for was murder, and that was starting to look like a very forgivable, even merciful, sin. “They’ll fly into the sun before they reach our earned ascension.”

“Good to know.” I nodded. ‘Earned’ not ‘gifted’, I was starting to think that the Confessor wouldn’t get through a sermon with Ash in the congregation. She had a rare kind of confidence in her mechanical ability and Faith… as well as in her obligation to do anything that was made into a competition, I noted.

“I’d like to get a chance to deliver some punishment myself.” Caliber growled, wishing that she could bring the same face smashing justice, with which she had bloodied her hooves, to the cowards above.

“There was a Pegasus soldier in Acheron.” They both stopped. The farmhouse (definitely not a salt lick) was now just ahead, the level field of gold between us less than a mile long. The building was buried amidst the tallest pines that I had yet to see, though the trees were still thin as bony fingers in the dead of wasteland and winter. My friends were staring at me, despite my unfocused demeanor. “What?”

“What do you mean soldier?” Caliber asked, squinting her persistent black eye at the word.

“Well, I just assumed.” They sighed, in what seemed like a simultaneous relief and disappointment. We started walking into the oasis. “He was kitted out in this very advanced suit, I couldn’t see his face behind the visor, but he just moved like a soldier, strategically you know, deadly.” That got them interested again, or afraid.

“Was he… did the armor make him look like an insect?” Ash asked.

“Yeah! That’s exactly how I described it, I think.” So I got it right sometimes. “It was segmented, and the visor had this fragmented, even compound-eyed, look.”
Were there antennae? No, surely that was going too far.

“That sounds like an Enclave soldier!” Caliber whispered, as if he would appear at his very mention, like Candle- Jack. “What are the Enclave doing poking around Acheron?”

“Yeah! That’s exactly what he was doing.” I nodded again, for some reason pleased at the accuracy of my aged description. “Poking around, mostly near the big town hall building.”

“What did he do then?” she pressed, though we already stood at the house’s fence perimeter.

“Well, he got distracted, so I can’t say what he would’ve been doing.” I admitted. “He got pretty into trying to kill me, so it couldn’t have been that important.”

“He tried to kill you?” Ash gaped, as if she didn’t believe that he could have failed. “How does a heavily armored soldier try to kill a stumbling Stable-baby.” Hey! “No offense.” Damn straight.

“Did Charon scare him off?”

“No.” Well, maybe eventually. “I escaped.” I had been quite proud of that, actually.

“Something must have dis-tracted him.” Oh, Come on! “Maybe whoever he was looking for tried to escape while he was bothering himself with you.” Caliber speculated.

“Okay, fair enough, I hid in the supermarket.” Not the most ingenious strategy. “And when I came out, the whole town was empty. I suppose he could’ve just found something more important to kill.”

Caliber purred in sympathy. “Sorry, Sugar, I didn’t mean to steal your thunder.” She assured. “Like Ash said, any other Stable-pup would have been a puddle of green plasma after a run in with the Enclave.” Instead of being consoled, I felt a pang of ebbing grief at the apparently common decimation of Stable ponies.
We would have failed. It doesn’t matter now. But still. Shut up.
“It’s just that they’re soldiers, they aren’t known to stray from an objective.”

“They aren’t known for anything.” Ash countered quietly, seemingly disinterested in the Pegasus’ orders. “Haven’t you ever seen a Dashite? Any Enclave on the surface are no longer Enclave.”

“Wait! Wait.” I refereed. “One interesting thing at a time, alright?” There was a farmhouse to explore. “There’s no reason to worry about him now, nothing here hinges on us figuring out what he’s doing.” Right you are, Commandant! “My E.F.S says it’s clear, so why don’t we have a nice, relaxing look around.”

Ash immediately wandered off, disappearing around the corner of the building, towards the house’s infinite back yard. I watched her bar this time, not wanting to make the same mistake that I had at the Border Security Station. We were definitively alone.

“You want to stick together?” I asked, which was much easier to do with the excuse of a Pip-buck screen to avert my eyes too. I was almost incapable of putting myself out there, always irrationally afraid of some great rejection. What was the worst that could happen?
Her running off, yelling back: ‘Hah, why would I want to stay with you? I’m not paid to be your friend!’
Her shooting me, then herself, then reanimating as a ghoul and eating Ash.
Yes, that was probably the worst possible outcome.

“Sure.” Ohthankgod. “Let’s see if this door’s locked.”

The house was built in rustic shambles, its exterior walls made up of splintering, whitewood planks. The roof was rusted metal sheeting, periodically dipping to forbid a build up of melting snow or rain.
Logs, derived from some collapsed pine, were stacked in the front door’s low balcony, an axe embedded into them. There was a chimney, just visible at the far corner of the buildings rectangular, pivotal body.
Two rooms extruded from the shape, one was made from brick, the other from the same softening wood.

Caliber peered into the lock, not even giving the door the benefit of the doubt by testing the handle first. She looked surprised. “There’s no lock… at all.” The portal swung open as she pushed its cracked paint surface. “How did these ponies sleep at night?” I had to admit, it was unfeasible. Even the room’s in the Stable had a key card system, and hardly anypony even thought of doing anything wrong there.

“You don’t think this place is as old as the city?” I wondered, Cabanne rose due east, and was still the closest known development apart from the diner and the highway.

“Couldn’t tell you, I don’t know any-thing about Cabanne.” Oh baby, yes. Nopony seemed to, which meant I was actually going to be a pioneer of sorts, I would know something that most didn’t; I could write the first book on Cabanne, assuming that there was even anything worth writing about anymore.
The house didn’t look incredibly old, to be fair, there was metal and an obvious relationship with the highway. But the highway could have been a simple dirt road once, and metal could be the first discovery ponies ever made for all I knew. I lit my horn. “Let me look for a switch.” Electricity would date this place.

The entrance hall was more like a brief alcove, quickly breaking apart into an obvious kitchen and bedroom on either side. The brick room was some sort of primitive scullery, and the other extrusion was a bathroom, sadly. We didn’t find anything interesting anywhere but the bedroom and entrance.

There was a small pile of letters, below the crack that had actually served as a mail slot in the door.
There was a skeleton on the bed; it looked older than I thought bones ever could. It was a dog. Everything else was standard fare. Pots in the scullery, a fireplace in the kitchen (serving as everything from stove to kettle), and… well, a hole in the bathroom. Just a hole.

Mottled walls imitated the rotting pines outside, as that is how they had once stood, and the ceiling was nothing but a pattern of dark banisters, some of which housed bird’s nests and ominous bite marks.
Probably rats, I dismissed, focusing instead on my fresh hatred for the flying variety of filthy pestilence. The flapping bastards weren’t home… Lucky them, I thought bad-assedly.

The biggest revelation came when I found a light switch.
The dating was not done by the flickering light that it now triggered, but rather by its very presence.
This house was not that old, just very, very… just a hole.

The rooms shared one faulty light bulb, as the sparse walls did not actually meet the ceiling for very long. It hung from a wire, which ran along the length of one of the cracked banisters. I could see the metal of the ceiling, though the meek yellow light barely reflected off of its thick rust.

Was this poverty? Actual, if aged, poverty?
Was this how the unemployed lived in the real world?
Celestia, how trivial my impotency was, when compared to this grimy depression.
I had had as much luxury as anypony else in the Stable, though I logged a fraction of the work hours.
Was this suffering what my guilt had been filling in for, what I had felt like I deserved?

Caliber and I had drifted in our scrupulous search, her looking for food and me looking for more ways to make myself feel bad, apparently. I had been spoiled, I chastised, privileged even by old-world standards.
So, now I had to complain about being luckier than pretty much every pony in history? Fantastic.
Maybe if I lament about it for the rest of my life, my own whining guilt will be punishment enough.

“Let’s read the letters.” I invited, trying to distract from how much I got on my own nerves.
They would be bills, wouldn’t they? You never had to pay any bills. You lousy layabout.
Caliber trotted over, disheartened.

“No luck on the food front, how goes… whatever it is that you like to do in these places.”
Well, we’ve certainly got enough guilt to go around... a lifetime’s supply, in fact.

“Don’t even ask, you’ll just get me started again,” I begged, feeling an odd kind of mental exhaustion due to my taxing thoughts. “How many more days can we go without a resupply?”

“However long it takes us to starve after our next…” she calculated. “Two meals.”

Two meals used to mean less than a day. “So, about two day’s worth of food?” Two empty days.

“You’ll need to eat soon, Ms. holier-than-wolf-meat.” She teased, although we both knew that I had had more than my fair share before that. “I have a tin of-“

“Nah,” I waived her impending offer. “I’m not hungry.” The grimy room and sickening guilt was helping with that, at least. I sorted through the letters, despairing at the red stamps on the bills I discarded. Somepony hadn’t paid their dues, but had their debt to society, I noticed. A Letter from Folsom Prison.

I slid the scrappy piece of card from the envelope, which was emblazoned with a silhouette of a galloping horse; the card was yellowing, but distinguished itself as official prison stationary.

Folsom Prison
Repraisa, NP 95671
The Pony Express
Courier Deliveries
Indeterminate

Prisoner 31,

This is the final correspondence you will receive regarding disregard for your probational obligations. You’re sure to be seeing us very soon, either on your terms or on ours.
As you have been told twice before, at the scheduled time that you so blatantly ignored, your condition of release decrees you to meet with a probation officer once a month. It has been three months since your last visit. Three strikes: you are probably familiar with the concept, Prisoner.

We will give you a 48-hour window, in which you are strongly advised to get yourself to Folsom. You will excuse any brevity or levity, of course, as I am writing this personally, only to adhere to your failure to communicate. You should be grateful, Prisoner, if you’d like to lose that title permanently.

Your last chance starts now, from the postage of this letter, which means you likely have less than a day. If you’re thinking about running, then you aren’t thinking. We will have you for violation of probation, you can soften the blow by making our jobs easier, or we can hunt you down.

The choice is yours. We will do what’s best for your rehabilitation, war or not.

Officer Brandenburg

P.S: I hear they’re sending prisoners off to some private contractor in the arcane-science business.
They’re thinking that Folsom would be a good pool for the extraction of test subjects.
Nobody misses a prisoner… Except when they try to run.
You got out on good behavior, now stay out on good behavior.

Doesn’t sound like this place was very old at all, I thought, while I waited for Caliber to finish reading. Folsom itself was all I could use to disprove the claims of pony-guinea-pigs, so I ignored that for now.
The Officer’s disdain was forgivable, if not relatable: this prisoner had been negligent. The convict must have run, even before this final warning, they had passed above and beyond a simple violation.

“Do you think they followed up?” I asked, after the mares’ eyes had bounced to the bottom of the page. She read each word with the same consideration that she would speak them with, her focus bounding along, one at a time, like the dot in a video sing-along. I doubted many other wastelanders could read.

“No,” she strung out. “It doesn’t look like they even got this far. Look at this place.”
I couldn’t see past the filth, which had accumulated over time and negligence, and the shoddy design. “You’d think they’d have searched it, or at least moved the dead dog off of the bed.”

“So, what, they just let the prisoner go?” She met my eyes with a patient smile, waiting for me to figure it out just as I had stood by while she finished reading. “The bombs?”

“Must’ve been, even the wasteland prisons wouldn’t let this kind of thing slide.” I imagined parole wasn’t exactly a courtesy offered nowadays, not to mention rehabilitation. “What’s the next letter say?”

I shook off that familiarly eerie war-ghost and opened the next envelope. This one didn’t have the Pony Express’ ensign, and the letter within was written, scrawled, on an otherwise nondescript sheet.

It’s me.

I know I haven’t written since, well, since I swore never to write again, but I can’t bear the guilt any longer. I’m so sorry for how I abandoned us. Goddesses, if I could, I would be on the first train to get back to you, even though I’d have to ride around the entirety of Equestria first. I don’t care that it only goes one way, it would be better to die on the Coltilde, thinking that I could see you again, than in this damned city.

New Calvary is nothing like we thought it would be, I know that you don’t want to hear that, considering what you did to get me here, but it’s as fucked up as everywhere else.

Now they’ve locked it down, so we’re trapped inside. They say that defenses are in place, in case the Zebras hit us like they’re hitting the capital, but if those shields fail… then they’ve killed us all.

I suppose I have no right to ask you to care, or even to read this, but… I need you.
When we were foals you said that we’d always be together, and you never did anything to break that promise. Folsom, more than anything, was my fault. So to do what I did... I’m so sorry.

Please, please come to Calvary.
I know that I hurt you, and I know that you hate me. But now I know that I was wrong, and I deserve it. Just know that I will take anything, anything you want to punish me with. Just be with me.
Scream and shout, ignore and insult, I don’t care. Just as long as its you.
You and me again, against… against the end of the world.

Caliber’s eyes flickered over the begging scripture, vibrantly rereading the lover’s plea.
She seemed more interested in it than I had been, taking even longer stalls as she imagined the writer offering themselves for the full extent of rage, if only to feel something other than guilt and emptiness.
I suppose it would invoke some kind of empathy, though it didn’t quite do it for me.

Do it for you? What are you, an apocalypse critic?
Ponies’ last moments had to be of the highest quality, to escape the scathing scrutiny of your standards.
Grace Brisby Marie: Connoisseur of Casualty, death-snob. Kitchen Accidents need not apply.

Before I could ask my fellow judge, who could have brought up the letter’s poor average, we heard a soft cry. The sound was like a foal’s fearful whispers, before the waling façade for the attention it craved came. Like doting parents, we would abandon our task to seek out the idyllic child: One who found it easy to keep us in consideration, by silencing the cries that it truly wanted to make. But there was no such thing as this kind of a foal, their nature kept them inconsiderate, a quality that was made necessary by their inability to survive alone. These were the wet coos of a friend, whose tears could only be genuine.

I cast the letter away, letting it sway through the house’s biting drafts, a piece of the past made irrelevant by the call of present emotion. We went clattering through the rooms, looking for a back door, and obscuring the low gasping with our rushed racket. Caliber waved me over to the scullery, the house of brick, and I joined her against the flimsy door. My E.F.S was clear, so we hurried out into the boreal oasis.

Ash was crying, the tar in her irises breaching from a live boil, spurring the unstoppable flow of tears.
Still in despair, the mare chirped and cooed, but what had once been a bright melody was now a crestfallen hymnal, an anthem for the songbirds of mourning.

A tree, whose prime had long passed, stood as a monument. It had clearly been planted with care, almost as if it was to be treated like an artwork, a beautiful addition to this otherwise decrepit place. Loneliness, as its parents abandoned it for Folsom and Calvary, had come to turn it into a gnarled gravestone.

It was now a harbinger, a eulogy for the skeleton hanging from its strongest branch.
The bones were old, ashen and brittle to match its rooted purchase, and they danced like a somber marionette at the end of the noose, a slow, rhythmic romance.

Ash clutched a small, black device in her hooves, and from it came the cause of her distress.
My criticisms for the storied house were torn asunder, and I was seized in fear for the ghosts within.
A tinny voice, ancient and disturbed, came from the recorder, repeating at the mare’s command.

“Goddesses forgive me…”

“Goddesses forgive me…”

“Goddesses forgive me…”

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added:Tag!: Fourth ‘tag’ skill: +15 to that skill. Small guns is increased by 15.
The Small guns skill applies to the use, care and general knowledge of small firearms – pistols, SMGs, and rifles.
Get out of your head, Grace… while you still can.

Next Chapter: Chapter 18: When Doves Cry Estimated time remaining: 3 Hours, 41 Minutes