Fallout Equestria: Sola Gratia
Chapter 18: When Doves Cry
“Incompetence at the highest echelons of leadership! We put our trust, our faith, in half-wits!”

We were falling apart.

In just one day, one day, we’d all found ourselves in tears, from three entirely separate events. I had cried for the buck in the diner, Ash was crying for this recreation of her past, and Caliber had laughed herself to tears.

That last one was good, beautiful, but her own weeping may simply not have manifested for us to see, in fact, it would’ve been worse to think that she felt nothing.

I hadn’t asked her to share, I hadn’t given her the invitation any friend should, and any real friend would. She was working, on a contract, so impracticalities like emotion were kept at bay, but I could’ve been more than her commander, I could’ve, should’ve, been her friend.

Ash curled into a round little ball on the faded grass, the unkempt yard of a suicidal prisoner: an abandoned lover. The tape recorder fell away, left to taper into its last apology.

“Goddesses, forgive me…” That old-world ghost begged one final time. The hanging skeleton now watched on in its usual silence, tinny pleas no longer seeming to whisper down to us from its well broken smile, one that was more indicative of sorrow than laughter.

Whoever the tape was intended for hadn’t been able to bypass the obstacle of war to return and listen to this self-made eulogy. So those terrible last words had waited, for decade after decade, only to draw the tears that it had so patiently hungered for from the first hapless wanderer to finally come upon them: Ash, our Ash.

We ran to her, for I wasn’t going to miss another chance, and held her in our arms.
Caliber rocked her, bringing the pilgrim to that always-comforting nestle against her warm chest. I helped to dissuade the mare’s panicked resistance, assuring her that she was safe.

She didn’t need safety; she needed forgiveness, for her Pilgrimage and for her failures.

It was something that neither of us could understand: grief born from faith, paired with an undeserved guilt that swore itself to unforgiving beings of unpredictable wrath and unconfirmed existence. I felt a pang of hatred for the Goddesses then, as if anything in the wasteland had seemed like a divinely sprung trap, a malicious joke: it was this.

“No…” she tried to roll away from our warming consolation. “Stop.” In one final rock she broke free, scampering out of what Caliber had meant as a shielding, a gift.
Ash nestled into a ball again, somehow upright, and held herself in shivering constraints.

She wasn’t as superficial as I was, I willingly realized, she would have to be deeply hurt for her pain to be expressed like this. Embraces and coos weren’t going to work as the miracle cure, not as they had for my all too frequent affiliations with this emotional seizure.

There would be no cure. Her tears had stopped, not because our arrival had brought restoration, but because it had stolen her from a veil of privacy, which she now had to fabricate within her own mind.

I could almost see the walls going up, pillars of cold steel like impassable prison bars to brace the damming constructions. Her cell, her sanctuary, would be windowless and dark.

We had all incarcerated ourselves like this before; the only variance was in our reasoning.
Why did I think that my own retreat was any healthier than theirs?
And how did I know what Ash was doing to herself? What she was going through?
I couldn’t. I didn’t.
And this made me a poor excuse for a leader.
A mutiny? On my ship? Yes please.

“I’m fine.” Maybe, but we’re falling apart, you know? You might as well join us.
“I’m fine.” She gasped, but I knew that she wasn’t.

“It’s okay.” Caliber whispered, quite wrongly.

“Ash, tell me how to fix this.” I ordered.
“Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do It.”

“Let’s talk about it, okay?” The other… the only consoler offered. “We’re here for you.”

“I need to go.” Ash stood, brushing Caliber off like the dead grass on her patchy ecru coat. “Thank you for your help, for your companionship, but there’s something that I need to do.”

She was dead serious, and fully intended to march off into the Plains, resolved and alone.
“Tell me…” I begged, unable to do anything right without orders or instruction.
“We’re friends.” A concept that neither of us had previously been very familiar with.

There was a spark in her eyes, one I knew. “Yes.” She agreed.
I had her, for some sick few seconds I imagine our exchange as a fisherman reeling in a sleek salmon, wrenching its pink, flapping body from the surging waters below.

Quickly amending the image, I imagined a mare freeing a bird, only to have it swoop in a single glorious arch to perch on her shoulder, where it would roost for evermore.

“We don’t have to be alone anymore.” I added, continuing to hit the empathy nerve that I had found. This was like a medical procedure, a test of reflex and resolve. “We don’t have to carry all of our burdens in silence, leaving them to fester and spread, infecting and crippling us, like a disease. They can, they must, be healed.”

“But… but you’re going to Cabanne.” She had already segregated herself from the group. “And I… I have to go north…There is nothing for you to gain with Me.”

“That’s not the point.” Caliber joined, sealing over the ‘bond of friendship’ argument nicely. “Friends supposed to be there for each other, even if they stand to lose something.”

“Cabanne wasn’t even part of the mission.” I reminded. “You agreed to take me there, and I don’t want to go without you. Even if it means I have to wait.”

She smiled, sending that dagger of empathy into my heart, and cleaning out the clutter in my mind. I may never become a good leader, but it was easy to be a good friend.
The gnawing guilt was replaced with an understanding of this bond’s value, why she and I mattered as units as well as a whole. Why all of us needed each other.

“It’s been a terrible day.” Ash laughed giddily, riding that same shimmering spark.
Her euphoria would last, I realized, that spark wouldn’t fade quite so easily.

We hurried to her side, but didn’t hug her.
She reached her hooves around, roping us into another shared embrace.
“It’s been a terrible day!” she broadcast, letting the world know just what a poor hand it had dealt. She held us close, only letting us go to hop over to the tape recorder.

The mare eagerly pitched it into the pines of the oasis, letting it drown in the golden grass beyond. I worried for the hanging skeleton, concerned for its fragile suspension.
Ash grabbed a fallen branch in her mouth and began to charge the hangman, the same glistening inebriation clear in her expression.

“We should go!” I cried, jumping into her path of rampant, happy destruction.

“Ah.” She mumbled from around the pine’s fallen limb. Her meek disappointment like that of a filly who just realized that the beach was a lot more fun than she had predicted in her screaming refusal to leave the house.
“I… I gueff I got a liddle carried away.”

Caliber gripped the branch; tenderly loosing it from the zealot’s grasp, and continued the mumbled exchange.
“Leff go, den. Butchoo lead, okai?” It was not the best speaking conch.

“You’re really willing to go with me?” she asked, coherently, regaining a hold on her excitement. It was an oddly beautiful thing, to realize that you were no longer truly alone, and I understood where the brief surge of childish abandon had come from. “Before I’ve e-“

“Yes!” I cheered, both as an answer and a celebration for a disaster well averted. There was something that I could do to help Ash, a clean procedure, something tangible, doable.

I would have made a worse psychiatrist than Dr. Cross had been. The mare had served as the Stable’s healer of mind as well as body, but it was becoming clearer that the two were painfully different in their treatment.

“I need to go back to my Congregation’s home.” She confessed. “If only to get some closure.”

“The house on the lake?” I asked, as our current navigator had yet to remove the stick from her mouth. Though her competition, my Pip-buck, was already hard at work.

“Yes, we abandoned it when we left on our Pilgrimage, but it will stand in the same place that it always has.” On prime real estate, I noted, watching as the marker appeared just beside the expansive lake of northern Equestrian borderline.

“It must be beautiful.” I smiled, already in better spirits than this dreary house had put me in.

“Yes.” She nodded, a memory passing behind her black eyes. “And I cannot leave it empty to forever have its last inhabitance marked with some faraway death.”

“So…” Caliber had set the branch aside. “You’re pilgrimage was…”

“My Congregation: my entire family, yes.” Celestia. “There will not be any food there.”

“That wasn’t my concern.” The spark glimmered on, dulling the bitter sting of this revelation.
Until now, as she had come to recognize our wholehearted friendship, Ash had been completely alone, only a few minutes ago she may have thought there was nothing to fight for. Was I worth fighting for? Were we? I had to hope so. “We’ll figure something else out.”

“Thank you.” She whispered, showing that even our offer alone had stemmed the flow of tears, that even the promise of friendship, could heal a wound.

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

Now, with no highway to tether us, the Plains were truly infinite.
We bobbed in the ocean of gold; three castaways from some sunken ship, never drowning.
From the rise Cabanne it appeared as a map would, like parchment with scrawled features spread across it, a simplistic, ancient place.

There were many monolithic features to hold accountable as guide, however, so it was impossible to get lost in the grand scheme of Equestria. Mountains to the south and clear sky to the distant north, a stone city to the east and gaping valley mouths to the west.

I had been to so little of it, I thought, as I plotted the points from my mechanized map onto the physical world. Two valleys, both wide and stretching, were the cores of my travelling:
The Middle Passage and Zion, both singular stretches of this country, lonely expanses.

What was it like beyond Caliber’s South, in places like Manehattan or Fillydelphia?
I couldn’t even imagine a possible balance between the two spatial extremes that I had become familiar with, an ideal compromise between agoraphobia and claustrophobia, though it was what many took as normal. Places where there were neither infinities nor airlocks.

From what I’d heard, Calvary was not going to give me an answer to what a place without extremes was like. The Plain to the south had been chastised as a writhing mess of development and massive clutter. It was a hive of townships and industrial strips around a city that was simultaneously ancient and new, dead and alive.

One eventuality stood out as the most terrifying: The detachment from the sun.
South meant clouds, south meant less snow but persisting cold, south meant solitary.

The burning star gifted me once again, its presence on the near horizon warming both my mind and body. This was medicine, I thought, this was the miracle cure.

Though the clouds were lighter, and the earth was brighter, I felt nostalgia for my cart-ride in the West. If New Calvary had nothing else for us, we’d at least have promises to count on.

In the oasis, as it would always be known just as diner had forever become a morbid whale, the setting sun had cut through dark branches and plank to infiltrate the shoddy house, breaching a thin layer of wood and dirt to grace the grime within, and serve as a warning of the sun’s time to say goodbye…

“Did you ever sing hymns?” I asked Ash, the question coming to mind due to my discomfort with one in particular. “After a Faith sermon, we always used to sing a hymn together.”

She didn’t answer, and though she may have eventually; Caliber filled the silence.
“There was a gospel church in Fairmount,” she spoke as if discussing something alien, such was the severity of religion’s strangeness to her. “They went nuts every Sunday, like they were trying to get revenge on the hung-over for their own drunken devotion the night before.”

“Went nuts?” I couldn’t remember anything in the hymnbook that might incite that description.

“Don’t get me wrong, it was great! You’d never think a church could out-party a saloon, but it was kinda like they were drunk on something stronger than liquor, more freeing.” She admitted, as if it had been a competition. “Their presenter-guy was always so animated and cha-ris-matic, like he was hosting a concert or something. Then the organs would start playing, the voices of the choir would pick up and the whole street would dance.” Even her hoofsteps were getting uppity, excited by some remembered rhythm.

“We were too few to ever have real sermons.” Ash answered, as if she had phased away from the question until now. “But we sang for special occasions, like hearth’s warming eve.”

“It’s coming up.” I smiled, pleased to hear that it was still somehow recognized out here.
“You guys want to do a Secret-Chancellor-Puddinghead kind of thing?”

“Sure, but we’ve already pooled all of our caps together.” Caliber grinned, guiltily meeting eyes with Ash like a couple who wed behind their parent’s back. “So it doesn’t really matter.”

“About that,” I diverged, having finally accepted this implausible form of currency as law.
“How did it come to caps?”

“There was this pro-motional campaign running for Sparkle Cola, pretty much throughout the entire war” Caliber explained with certainty, as if this was now common knowledge. “Anyway, a myth came about, saying that the gimmick’s end prize was still good and gettable, and grander than anything a wastelander’s black little heart could imagine.”

“What do we have to go to get the prize?” I perked up.

“A myth… “Caliber sighed, we knew that she hated being interrupted in the middle of a story. “So the wastes were riddled with ponies – like you – who just had to get their hooves around that ‘treasure’, as it came to be called. To get it, you had to collect a certain number of special bottle caps, marked for the competition all spe-cifically, and bring them to the Sparkle Cola factory. Once folks started putting value on caps, and realized how many of the damn things there were, it was only natural that it would become a kind of currency for us.”

“Did anypony ever get the prize?” I had clearly become a little treasure-hungry.

“Not that I’ve heard, though many suspect it had no material value at all.”

“It’s not about the money,” I elaborated on my lust. “It’s the getting… the glory.”

“Let’s deal with the slavers first, then once the high from that just isn’t enough for you anymore, we’ll focus on this mythical cap treasure.” Caliber compromised. “Keep our future prospects in mind, we wouldn’t want to use up all the glory at once.”

“Okay,” I might have just agreed to wile my retirement away digging through serrated metal. “I suppose the treasure has waited almost two hundred years already.”

If nothing else: I hoped that Ash would buy into this queued quest, hypothetical as it was.
Ash Ascella: Treasure Hunter had enough potential for a movie deal at least.

We were on the final stretch, which admittedly didn’t mean much on the Plain.
But over the swell of one last peaking hill, the lake glistened in anticipation for a setting sun.

Its former division, between a foreign, lighter side and a dark Equestrian south, was forgotten for an all-encompassing reflection of golden-gray light. The water could’ve been miles deep, or only a shallow wade, its reach was indiscernible beneath the still, but burning, surface.

Pine clusters marked the lake’s borders, leeching off of its immortality to silhouette in mottled shades of sunlit green instead of the skeletal black of barren bark. Some were tinged in an almost living color, as if unchanged by the efforts of both winter and war.

A testament to the sun’s old-world glory.

The light was life giving, but not warm, and snow powdered the hemisphere of the lake like sugar on the rim of a cocktail. The landscape on the other side was indiscernible, but it was assuredly white, buried beneath a thick, healthy pelt of northern frost.

The Zion River, black and narrow, cut into the western brink, darkening the water as if it were leaking tar into the lake. It must have dispensed the serpent’s scales here, letting them sink into the calm to become a once organic wreck beneath the grave’s shining face.

That must have been an odd thing to see, I would have thought, if not for the complete absence of passably intact structures on the gently lapping shores.
It was as if, once, the tides had become violent and dauntless, swallowing the entire ring of surrounding intruders in a juvenile fit of rage, leaving only jutting ruin and imploded foundations behind. One house stood, tall and strong, rising from the shambles.

It certainly wasn’t an unimpressive construction, both for its timeless stature and solid build.
There was no fence or border of any sort around it, as if it was daring any who would oppose it, daring the waters and wind of a century’s passing to beat themselves sore against its walls.

“How did it survive?” I asked, interested in the infallible architecture.

“The others were demolished during the war, vacation homes and hotels, all.” Ash explained. “The borders weren’t considered to be the prime real estate that they once were. So the ponies left, with all the money.” This was certainly a place that deserved to be seen.

“I’m guessing that house was there before the others.” Caliber smiled. “And the crotchety old buck who built it just wouldn’t let it go, come Zebras or high water.”

“Exactly,” Ash nodded, impressed. “How did you know?”

“There’s always one.” Her amused glow made the respect she harbored for their kind clear.
“They’re as timeless as the focus of their stubborn passions.”

“Cyrus reclaimed it from some ramshackle band of heathens a long time ago… he said he never did a thing to restore the place, that it seemed to take care of itself.” She reminisced.

“Was he your…” I began to ask, before stopping myself.

“I hope you were going to say father.” She smiled faintly. “But no.” That was that.

There was one other survivor, an expansive lodge built onto one of the lake’s distant islands.
Whether it was technically Equestrian or… undefined, was unclear, but compared to the ruin everywhere else, it was certainly impressive. The sun burned against the distant wood and glass, making me wish I had a boat, and all the time in the world.

Though the view from that distant resort: a barren shore of collapsed furloughs and kinsmen would likely be less enjoyable than the view of the island itself. And an island might certainly get lonely… unless I could get Caliber to go with me, and maybe Ash if she ever got tired of her illustrious treasure-hunting career… But, I reminded, the Railway comes first.

Congregation house, then Cabanne, then… maybe I shouldn’t be planning for retirement just yet. My old plan had been Buffalo-Cabanne-DJ-Road to the southern Plain.
Not only was ‘Buffalo’ unresolved, but new priorities were popping up with every step forward.
Even the hyphens seemed to be getting longer.

A road came from the eastern side of the lake, linking all the abscesses in a chain of demolition and abandonment. We could take it to Littlerock, skip Cabanne, let the buffalos sit, but that would be sloppy, wouldn’t it? Better to wrap up any loose ends, even if doing so unravels another. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand having a list of unresolved objectives.

“What are you guys going to do when this is all over?” I asked, as we approached the stretching line of municipal destruction. I wouldn’t want them to make any plans before I got the chance to invite them to my hypothetical island book-fort.

“Don’t think about that kind of thing, Grace.” Caliber warned. “It assumes too much.”
In the Stable that would have implied that our friendship was conditional, contractual, but this is the wasteland, you see, and things mean differently in the wasteland. Right?

“We need to get around to the lakeside; all the other entrances should still be barred.” Ash explained, distracting me from my inquiry, and my fleeting insecurity.

The wide house rose just across a battered asphalt road, even more imposing in proximity. It was three stories high, with aesthetic windows and ordainments marking its face. Each section, from the sleek boarding of its core to the cement angles at each corner, was complimentary. Whatever palette it had been designed in, had not survived, but the appealing cohesion had, as each color was augmented proportionally by the same fading factors.

The yard, front if the road took priority over the lake, was simplistically modeled. Rounded stone marked dead flowerbeds and a cobbled, dirty path cut through to a barred entryway.

The windows were similarly boarded up, but from the other side, as if to keep something in. Cracking ivy and vine rose from the dead vegetation below, reaching to the shut apertures.

“Something just moved in there.” Caliber whispered, eerily calm. We stopped in the middle of the road, suddenly apprehensive despite Ash’s excited homecoming. “And there’s light.”

It wasn’t obvious, thanks to the sun cutting out from behind the hickory and shingles, but she was right. I couldn’t see any shadows shifting, but there was a definitive glow seeping out.
“You’re imagining things.” Ash waved, beckoning us to follow. She was hopping in front of us, urging us to unfreeze - Green light! Green Light! - But I didn’t have reason to doubt Caliber, and she was adamantly planted. “We’ve only been gone a couple of weeks.”

“There!” Caliber yelped loudly at the sudden, if temporary, appearance of proof. “Top-right window.” All I saw was another excessive blockade. “Check your E.F.S.”

“Nothing, we should get a little closer, though.” The range had always been ambiguous on this thing, but I wouldn’t trust its promise of safety at this distance. “Just a little.” I promised.

Red bars.

After only a few steps, an abundance of crimson had bled over the screen’s display, proving Caliber very, very right. I held my companions at bay, trying to push our group back from the apparent range of detection. “Lots!” Was all that needed saying to get them moving.

I levitated the Poacher’s rifle at my side, readying it for a single shifting bar.
We had made it to the other side of the road, when a mare pounced out from around the house’s reinforced corner, scampering onwards in a jaunting, but unalarmed charge.

“Inside the thing!” I ordered, trying to lead a retreat into one of the forgotten collapses, but the mare had already set an eventual course for us, wisely diving behind a garden wall first.

She was disturbingly Ash-like, thick maned and lithe, though her palette was reversed, with sickly implications. Her coat was a grimy lavender, while her mane exhibited the ecru inconsistency. I didn’t know if she had a gun, but I hurried back across the street, alone.

The sentry, accidental in her role or not, was sounding an improvised alarm, calling out barking warnings to the house. I hoped that she couldn’t multi-task.

Sprinting into the yard, floating the Fixit stick perpendicular to my back, I opened myself to whatever weaponry my opponent might prepare in time. But she was an earth pony, and when it came to being vocal and being armed, and earth pony could not multi-task.

I shot her in the gut, just barely abandoning my intended, and much more decisive, hit.
A second passed, as I looked her over, making sure there were no obvious signs of a misunderstanding. Though only a maternally swollen stomach or a sign that said: ‘WARNING! Your E.F.S may misinterpret me as a hostile, please don’t shoot; I’m two months pregnant!’ Would have been enough to warrant a mercy.

I shot her again, quite decisively, and then hurried back to my friends, as they, in turn, hurried over to me. “Come on! We can hide in some of that debris!”

We bound into an opposite ruin, ducking into the abscess of soil left by an absent foundation, long torn to sporadic shreds. Whoever had been responsible for clearing this mess had clearly not been paid enough to come to work… not on the border, not during a peaking war.

Three other ponies, still much fewer than my Pip-buck had first identified, came to the mare’s side. They quickly realized that she was dead, and began combing the area, one with guns saddled, one muzzling a pistol and the last with a glinting ivory knife.

“Goddesses, I think those are Vipers.” Ash whispered, though we were out of both scan range and earshot. “They shouldn’t be in there.” There was an uncommon anger in her voice.

“They raiders?” Caliber asked, as unfamiliar with the name as I was.
“Smarter, they’re a religi-“ We both groaned before she could finish. “What?”

“Tell me this isn’t some persecution thing.” I pleaded. “I want to have a better excuse for killing that mare than: She had different opinions than someone else, officer, I had to do it!”

“They’re raiders, in that they frequently pillage and murder. Just because they also belie-“

“Good enough.” Caliber interrupted, as she hopped out of the ruined trench and shot one of the bucks prying nearby, taking no more than a few seconds to line up her sights and stance.

I joined her at the brink of our improvised foxhole, though my telekinesis let me keep my body shielded beneath both earth and cement. The sun was now burning through the house’s solid, but aged, walls with enough intensity to make it look as if the entire building had been set alight from the inside. With the lake’s waters afire beside it, reflecting the brightest of rays in an intense ivory, the view was quickly going from beautiful to blinding.

“Switch to the nine and get down here!” I ordered Caliber curtly, as if she were a filly dancing on the dinner table. The other two investigators weren’t stupid enough to have any more searching to do; they’d caught the culprits red-hoofed.

She clambered back into the pit, and followed as I wound my way deeper into the sporadically sheltering mess of rubble. Entire hallways had broken down into makeshift tunnels and the building’s original foundations jutted from the earth as idols of cement who wore crowns of thick wire, towers over most of the ruin, casting long, tired shadows for the sinking sun.

There was a partially intact staircase reaching into the sky.

“Call the others! I’ll keep ‘em pinned!” My counter-commander yelled from nearby.

I scrambled up the slanted staircase. “Keep that buck off me! I’ll get the runner!”
Dirty tactic, sending two against one, and there was nothing threatening me on my jagged sniper’s nest. I told myself not to care, that they were only raiders, but I found it difficult to despise these hostiles. I wanted the usual introduction of decorative gore and battered prisoners, à la toll-booth, more than I should care to admit.

Now, at what was technically ground level, I could see my target, but also the buck standing between us, at the trenches lip. Ash’s jury-rigged shotgun bellowed as it tore this living obstruction’s entire leg off. He toppled, wide-eyed in numbing shock, and in great need of a dictionary to use as a prop, containing every known language in history, at least.

I leveled the criminally scope-less gun; appropriate for the earth pony that I had inherited it from, and lined its sights with a cobra in the middle of a cannibalistic meal, swallowing the tail of another writhing serpent. That had to be the strangest cutie-mark I’d seen in a while.

I pretended it was a fence.

A 45-70 round buried itself into the retreating flank, taking the herald down in spasms of dysfunctional muscle. I couldn’t bring myself to shoot the twitching body, as the distance between us made it feel even more dishonorable. Besides, she wasn’t going anywhere soon.

I hopped back into the pit, heading for the three bars, and the persistent conflict they signified.
Caliber and Ash were taking cover behind a stack of bricks, shielding themselves from a wild, unpredictable barrage of random ricochets. Commander Kickstand was clearly still alive.

“What happened?” I asked over the conversation between hot metal and stone.

“Buck’s got resolve, I’ll give him that.” Caliber replied. “He’s no push-over.” Oh god.

Ash didn’t share our levity. “He’s got a pistol in his mouth, and is managing to reload, but he does it slowly. He’s only a couple of clips down, but certainly isn’t going anywhere.”
“The runner’s down. I put a bullet in her flank, but she’s still alive.” I admitted, still feeling less guilty than I could’ve been. “There’s no time to wait this buck out, we need to move on the next reload.” As they nodded, I felt an odd sense of pride, as well as cold responsibility.

There was a succession of reports; followed by a mask of whining reflections. “That’s it!” Caliber cried, somehow keeping count in the chaotic symphony of bullets. “Let’s go!”

We dove down the inconsistent hallways of steel mesh and cinderblocks, now devoid of deadly, whistling lead. I could hear the buck’s winces and grunts as he fumbled with the clip, trying to slide it across the tremulous floor of ruin and into his lowered pistol.

We reached him just as he cheered from around his freshly loaded gun, which Caliber easily bucked from his limp grasp, leaving an emptied, gaping look of crushed hope.
“Don’t get close!” Ash warned. “They lace their blades with snake venom.” As if as evidence, the buck’s cutie-mark, bloody and stripped, was a dripping fang. “Keep your distance.”

“Alright.” Caliber put the cursing cripple out of his misery with a stark lack of hesitation, her rifle deafening in its echoes around the ruin. Just one more to go.

I vaulted out of the abscess, bounding off of ruin in a distantly rehearsed sequence.
The Sun still set the house alight in a mirage of fire. Now flames seemed to lick the walls from the inside out, writhing out of every scar. The wood was surely strong, but couldn’t stop them.

It was getting darker, though I could still see the second mare, crawling just beside the first.
She had bled a crimson trail into the dead garden, and her cutie-mark was in ribbons.
These Vipers were certainly persistent.

There would be no honorable way to do this, but I hurried across the road anyway. My companions following in a requested cease-fire: Don’t shoot the messenger.

I rolled her over; interrupting the pitiful drag that she was putting herself through.
She didn’t scream, the house was alive with activity; our gunfire had been message enough. “Will they care enough to bargain for your life?” I asked, as I floated the rifle beneath her chin.

“No.” Damascus had told me that ponies would say anything to make their last moments mean something, so I shot her. The plume of blood and brain matter concluded her arching path, cresting it in a fan of lighter crimson. It probably looked like a flower from somewhere.

“They’re smarter,” I panted, exerted from physical and moral taxing. “Braver too.”

“Trust me; they deserve no more mercy for it.” Ash assured. “They are just intrinsically disturbed; it’s pathology to them. They’re not degenerates, but rather a cult.”

“Where should we go?” I asked Caliber, sure that the easily accessible pit was not a good place to stage a holdout. We certainly shouldn’t stay here for long, screamed my Pip-buck.

“I assume there are big windows in the front, view of the lake, so we can’t camp at the door.” She decided, not even pausing for confirmation from Ash. “No windows, that’s a risk we can’t take when we know they have rifles. If we break through the back door, we can find a room inside to root ourselves in. Ash can show us the best place once were inside.”

“It’ll take me a minute to get this open.” Ash hurried over to the door, already familiar with the barricade, she could play it like a game of pick-up sticks. “Don’t get stabbed, it’s paralytic.”

Caliber gave me a militarily curt nod and gripped the nine-millimeter in her muzzle. “Weft side!” Luckily, west and left were the same thing in this assignment, so I got the message.

I poked the Fixit stick around the house’s garden patch corner, and fired three warning shots, which may just as easily have translated into an invitation. There was enough of the raider bloodlust in these cultists for them to take that kind of challenge.

A pair tumbled over each other, fighting over the outside stretch. I shot the loser, but he took it in stride, not falling, only flinching, to the bullet’s impact. These ponies were armored with thick, black leather and shoddily tied scrap metal, though their persistence was enough to keep them going even after grave injury.

The outside runner grasped a pistol in his mouth and, in blatant disregard, leveled it on the other attacker, using him as both cover and a prop. I ducked around the corner, firing a shot and getting a satisfyingly descriptive sequence of sounds. A whistle, a grunt then a slump.

Unfortunately, I had killed the cover and not the coward behind it.
Then, as if to prove that selfishness did not equate to cowardice, the outside runner pounced around the house, kicking up garden soil and stumbling over cobblestone.
He still had his pistol, so I charged him before he could angle a shot.

We fell over into the soil, his clumsy gait easily converted into collapse by the weight of my Stable-softened body (I’m sure he would have fallen over for anypony). I pound against his face, trying to replicate Caliber’s trademark pulping, but found that bone was really quite hard.

Oh well, we all have our own special talents.
I hit the buck with my rifle, swinging it like a golf club to loose the weapon from his muzzle. Then, relishing the savagery in his diseased eyes, I pressed the barrel against his temple.
“I go… to the Great Snake.” He winced, winking away from the warmed steel.

That’s a new one. I averted my gaze and pulled the trigger, sending another carmine flower of sanguine fluid blossoming out into the garden. They were certainly creative.

“You almost done, Ash!?” I heard Caliber cry, distant due to the house’s wide girth. The primitive locksmith, tearing away at a primitive lock, was nestled in an alcove.
She poked her head out. “Thirty seconds, if we’re lucky!”

That sounded all right, before I saw an easy half dozen peering at me from the lakeside.
A rifle round reflected off of the metal framework, nearly perforating my hide.
I put on my most intimidating face, probably indiscernible at this distance, and returned fire.
A mare lost an eye, as well as everything behind it, and one of the buck’s kneecaps exploded.

Three of his compatriots charged, leaving him to bleed.
The rifleman stayed behind to cover them as they charged.

One of the assailers wore an impossible large snake skull on her forehead; it had to be an imitation, didn’t it? The bone absorbed two shots before splintering like the skull it shielded.

I retreated; frantically floating rounds into the magazine, in a painstakingly individual reload.
Caliber was firing with both weapons at some obscured amassment of Vipers, still holding her ground. “Ash!” I ordered, encouraging her to hurry the heck up.

My two pursuers pelted into the yard, and I knew the rifle buck wouldn’t be far behind.
Only knives for now, but knives laced with enough venom to tease the lips of their bearers.

With my rifle askew at their sides, I landed a solid gut shot, which burrowed its way through several vital organs to reach its defining purchase, and was left with one contender.

The final mare pushed against my telekinetic focus, only kept at bay by a single, sleek bar of hickory and rusted steel. She barked and yelped despite her glinting gag, which she swung in desperate arcs. I could feel droplets of either saliva or poison against my scarred face.
Probably the first time I’d ever wished that I was only being spit on.

“Alright, we’re clear!” Ash cried, following up her invitation with a thundering report, hailing buckshot into my wrestled opponent. The mare lost most of her insides.
This garden was certainly more vibrant that it had been before, not that the morbid crimson brushstrokes would have helped the house’s market value much.
The door was intact, and its liberator held it open for our approach.
Caliber hadn’t had to contend with any close calls, her double barrage had been enough to keep her attackers at bay. “You have a mine?” she asked, her intent clear.

I nodded and floated the yellow disk at my side, arming it as we dove into the house.
As Ash shut the door I set the fragmentation mine down just within the portal’s arc.
“Will this stop them?” I asked, as we backed away from the explosive.

“I don’t think they’d come in anyway, they’re smart enough to know we’d have ‘em bottlenecked in the hallway.” The narrow passage was similarly formed out of smooth wood, somehow still polished and reflective in the dim light of an ornately shaded bulb on the wall.

The carpet was a mottled purple, and stretched out into a wide hall until it reached the opposite door. My E.F.S claimed that there were still hostiles in the house, but that most were now out loitering over in the lakeside yard. The hall was humble in design but luxurious in size and scope, earthy tones to compliment the traditional art and warm lighting.

Nothing abstract, nothing ‘modern’, it was not a house built by money, but by hard work.
I wouldn’t be surprised to know that the old buck had constructed the entire thing himself, setting up near the lake to fish or sail, not to be surrounded by tourists and their obnoxious children. Maybe his wife had painted the humble art, recreating landscapes as her husband stubbornly toiled away at the house’s expansive structure, chastised at every offer to help.

Caliber fired three 556 rounds through the front door, making me wince for the splintering pinewood, but delivering a warning message to the Vipers hissing outside.

“We should go upstairs,” Ash said, to which I showed her my red-ridden E.F.S. “Regardless.”

“It’s a very nice house.” I offered, acting more interested in the impressive architecture than our potentially dire predicament. “I can see why its owner didn’t want it torn down.”

“They couldn’t’ve taken it down if they’d tried.” Caliber nodded, similarly reverent.
“What’d’you think the Vipers want here?”

“Cyrus, most likely.” Ash sighed. “He once tried to purge Cabanne of them, on his own. There used to be over two hundred, desecrating the city with their rituals and black blood. When he first found Faith, he made it his mission to liberate the old church from their hold.”

“There’s a church in Cabanne?” There are Vipers in Cabanne? My virgin? Damn it!
No wonder nopony had written a book about the place… Plus the mass illiteracy thing.

Ash smiled. “There’s a church in every city from New Calvary to Fillydelphia, we were never that much of a minority.” She began, slow and silent, into the hall.

The front door collapsed inwards, under a writhing mass of the somehow serpentine ponies. Their cutie-marks, all incorporating the same factional references, made it look like they were panicking under an attack by a nest of snakes.

Ash fired before she could brace herself for the buffalo-worthy kickback, and though the invaders were now bleeding each other’s blood, we were sent crashing back into the narrow hallway, sharing in the shotgun’s dauntless return of force.

The mine was triggered.
Thankfully it yielded to another collapsing door, and not to our stumbling dissolution nearby.
I watched as splinters cut into the second flood of Vipers, shards of rich wood burying themselves in the careless cultists. One mare had a fragment as long as a leg impaled through her muzzle, like a dentist’s greatest exaggeration.

Though they limped and whimpered, bodies laced with shrapnel and splinters, the Vipers had us on either side. Ash and Caliber continued a suppression of the hall’s serpents, easy targets as they slithered and stumbled in pools of their own blood.

I fired the Fixit stick as fast as it would fire, subconsciously unwilling to use my father’s pistol either for fear of shared saliva with the mares before or for need of paternal dissociation.
The reloads were slow, but my targets were already dead or dying, the mine having done most of my work for me.

Caliber and Ash, had less of an advantage, and they were already being forced back by approaching promises of poison. “Get out into the yard.” Ash ordered (requested)

I hopped over my last target, pushing a shard of door deeper into his spine as I passed.
Though he groaned, the buck could not even flail, and was now left a short-lived paraplegic.
He was trampled as seven sets of hooves passed over him, and even kinsmen ignored his cries. I promised to make sure he was dead later.

The final four were biting at our tails, and we came spilling out of the house together, dangerously close. Bone daggers flashed as the Vipers regained their bearings, immediately thrashing in wild attempts to bury their blades. One didn’t get up, lying still, dead or paralyzed.

We danced in exchanges of vices and venom, but the raider cult had already dwindled to a sloppy slur. Buckshot, then bullet, Ash and Caliber took their toll on the three, quickly turning strikes into swoons and lunges into last attempts.

I had taken to using Cody’s rifle as a blunt weapon, a makeshift barricade to hold up against close quarter combatants or an effective cattle prod with which to beat them back. Bringing it into one final arc, I dislocated the last Viper’s jaw, forcing the skeletal dagger out of his grasp. The rest of his skull lasted for a successive pair of solid hits. Three strikes and you’re out.

My Pip-buck tsked and tutted, bemoaning my mistreatment of the beautifully crafted rifle.
Ash could build a shotgun, I reminded it, and could certainly patch up a few splinters.
But that would have to wait, as there were still two red bars inside the house.

“We’re not done.” I panted, worn out from my displaced exertion. “Two more inside.”
Ash glanced at my E.F.S, combining its vague spatial information with her own knowledge of the construct to pinpoint the last couple’s location.

“They must be upstairs, or we’d see them in the hall.” She asserted, prompting us to follow.

“We’re dealing with somebody at the top of the chain or the very bottom.” Caliber speculated, as we made our way down the hall. “A complete coward, or some kind of a commander.”

“Probably both.” I shrugged, it’s not like we’d shoot either one any less.

We scrambled up a fine spiral staircase, stepping off onto floorboards just below the attic.
This floor had an overlook on the entrance hall, the bloody slaughterhouse of red corpses.
The bars told of a stationary pair of hostiles just beyond this – bedroom, according to Ash – door. They were close to one another, superimposed, huddling in either fear or conspiracy.

Caliber stepped forward, clearly intent on firing through the door with her insurgent’s rifle.
“Don’t.” I pleaded, stopping her muzzle mid-bite over the bit trigger. “Let’s take a look.”
Stepping ahead of the skeptical mare, I pushed the door open.

The portal opened right out onto the lake, at least, that’s what it seemed like.
Caliber had been right about the front windows, they were huge, stretching from wall to wall.
Glass made up the entire opposite side of the chamber, revealing a drowning sun beyond.

“Walk over to the window.” A buck’s voice hissed. The room was dimly lit, almost romantic, and the silhouettes of an embracing buck and mare stood out against the glimmering water. “You’re responsible for two lives.” Not an embrace, I realized, not at all.

“I could just shoot you.” Caliber growled, taking caution not to act before knowing the consequences, perhaps for my sake. The buck grinned, his smile white and serpentine.

“Walk over to the window, and I’ll tell you why that would be a very bad idea.”
Despite their shadowed faces, I could tell that my followers were frowning in distaste, but I ushered them into the room, circling the dark couple with guarded berth.
“You fight with restraint,” He cooed at me. “You’ll want to hear this.”

Reducing our selves to nondescript silhouettes, we stood at attention before the great lake. “So you’ve got yourself a hostage.” Caliber perceived. “One of your own?”

“Yes, but here’s why you’re going to let me go.” How scummy. If any of the Vipers had displayed similarities with the less dogmatic raiders: it was this one. “I and I alone, know how to make an antidote. Which you’ll need if you have any consideration for this mare and h-“

His words were drowned out by a howling shotgun and a shattering window, as Ash sent herself crashing through the magnificent panes of glass, out into the world. The black couple divorced in ribbons of glistening crimson, both mare and buck torn apart by the buckshot.

I pulled myself into my coat, like a turtle retreating into its shell, as the wall of glass fractured into a hailstorm of daggers. The torrent fell outwards, however, following the mare who had called it. Fresh air flooded the room in a billowing plume, forcing Caliber and I to step away from the high horizon’s edge, blinded by whipping wind and dying sunshine.

“What the shit!?” Caliber screamed, the implosion of disarray throwing everything into an eventuality neither of us had cause to expect. “What the actual shit?” In other words, yes.

“Is she alive?” I asked, peering over the edge to find my answer. The mare lay in ribbons, though they were white and black rather than ecru and red. She had been cut naked, but seemed otherwise unharmed. “You’re crazy!” She was blinking up into the void of cloud’s end, the border between empty, golden-laced sky and the shifting black roof of Equestria.

Hard winds bent the pines around the lake, as if the water itself was drawing them to their own bleak reflections, calling them to meet their fading mirages. It was eerie to watch the wall of clouds, wildly colliding and dancing in this maelstrom, but only up to the clearly defined end, as if their volatility couldn’t even breach the now unwritten law of the Enclaves’ influence.

The world had been calm when we first entered the house; but now… it was almost as if Ash had thrown it into chaos, tearing apart logic and restraint in her near suicidal outburst. She began laughing.
“Goddesses…” I whispered. “She’s gone off the wall.”

Caliber smiled down at the giggling psychopath, with something that almost looked like pride. “You hear that, Ash? The mighty alicorn hijacker thinks you’re crazy!” They chirped together, as if they’d inhaled some kind of cheap narcotic.
“Hold on, we’re coming down!”
Caliber was going to jump after her; I had never been so sure of anything in my life.
But she didn’t. “Let’s go make sure she’s alright.” Yes, because physically, she could be fine.

Blood had already spread about the entirety of the bedroom, so we hopped up onto the bed, like we were playing ‘the floor is made of lava’. The Viper couple had almost melded together in the morbid darkness; only their wounds formed an abscess in between them, a shredded gap of shrapnel pulp. The dark venom in the mare seemed to pout for its stolen kill.

Crimson lapped against the doorframe, gently caressing like the awakening lake below.
I skidded in the pool, landing just short of clean wood and splattering my rear hoof in blood. My E.F.S, however, was pristine, two glimmering ivories and not a single surviving hostile.
There weren’t any snakes left in the grass. But the serpent’s head watched from Cabanne.

“Would’ya look at this.” Caliber beamed, standing with hooves crossed at the bottom of the stairs. “I hope you’re hungry!” she skipped through the adjacent doorway.

Clear of corpses, the kitchen held a thieves’ hoard of cans and packages.
Smooth marble, ebony against wood, and sleek, silver utilities, it was the nicest room in the house. Only the best for you, darling. “We’re not going to starve!” I cheered, as Caliber packed us like a pair of mules. I spotted a few tins of Pork and Beans as she slipped them into my saddlebags with a wry smile. They alone could feed us for days.

The divergence to the oasis had, ironically, left us with nothing, and that rotted old house had done little to improve our situation, apart from redirecting us to this veritable cornucopia.

While walking to this lake, we had reluctantly eaten our last reserves, grimly admitting that we would likely go hungry for a very long time. But we hadn’t expected the Vipers.
“Boy, I’m glad we’re not out west.” Caliber admitted, as we lugged our feast back to the abattoir. “Our resident pseudo-raiders, the Jackals, aren’t the kind of ponies you want to break bread with. Or steal bread from, anyway.”

“What’s wrong with their food?” I asked, distracting myself from the mangled corpses.

“You are what you eat…” She grinned. “Is a saying that they take a bit too literally.”
I swear, I was hungry a second ago.
“Get everything you need from in here.” She stopped me before I could duck out of the door. “I don’t think Ash is going to want to come back, considering what she did that for.”
I stared in blank asking.
“Closure.”

We left after gathering a few salvageable parts and a particularly unsullied cruiser’s outfit for the spontaneous stripper outside. I decided that I would have to wash it in the lake…
the outfit, not the stripper.

The front yard was even less processed, as there were no garden patches or cobbled stones; the architect had left it in simplistic reverence for the lake’s beauty.
Night had fallen, and streetlamps rose in a ring along the shore’s embracing road.

The lake howled in dark solace, now reflecting the paltry fluorescents in place of brilliant sunshine. Golden light leaked from Ash’s improvised exit, and the mare stared up into that rich haze as it dispersed into the darkness of cold winter night.

Her vest was in shreds and torn bandages hung loose and bloodied at her side.
She could’ve been dead, a corpse set out for display, if not for the life shining from her eyes.

They looked relieved, the shadow of this afternoon’s remembrance beaten back by what Caliber assessed as closure, but above all, the obsidians glowed with a warming gratitude.

Not to us, but to some intangible interferer.

“You knew the Vipers would be here.” I understood, standing over her with my medical supplies ready. She clearly didn’t care about the pain, but blood was coming from somewhere.

“Part of the reason that we all had to leave on this Pilgrimage, was so that no one would be left behind to face them if they came.” She whispered, her thankful prayers interrupted.
“I didn’t know it for a fact, but I had my suspicions.”

“Tell me that you didn’t want to die.”

“I was willing to.” The dancing lights in her eyes shone over to me. “I was ready to… but it seems the Goddesses know I’ve got a promise to fulfill.” She smiled. “I am destined to you.”

Caliber giggled. “It’s a damn shame all this romance is wasted on you two.”
I had to admit that it was beautiful out, but the devotion in Ash’s eyes was clearly burning for elsewhere, a place, an idea that no pony could ever compete with.

“Not the best atmosphere to avoid an awkward medical exam.” I nodded; you might as well have a buck playing saxophone during invasive surgery. “Speaking of…”

Ash’s eyes widened as I nuzzled into her side, searching for a source to the trickling flow of blood. “No!” she rolled away, wincing. “Don’t!”

I put on my best ‘this-isn’t-going-to-hurt-a-bit’ smile and walked back over to her. “Trust me; it’ll be less uncomfortable for both of us if you don’t make a fuss.” Nurse Clearheart had taught me this approach, having performed intimate triage on a number of patients. “I won’t have to go looking if you’ll narrow down where the pain is coming from.” I offered.

Unfortunately, that hadn’t been an option with some examinations.

As she rolled over, her desperately clutched blanket of loose bandages shifted, revealing a glinting extrusion that shone out from beneath brilliant streaks of red. “Ash, that’s glass!” I yelled, gesturing for Caliber to hold the writhing mare down. “Now this’ll only ta-“ She hit me.

I didn’t sprawl as I had under assaults by Cody or Caliber, but my scarred left cheek seared from the impact, and a reflexive tear began to well up in my eye. “Get away from me!” she cried, her voice faltering as she curled back up into that little ball, all the while pushing down on the dagger of glass poking out from her soft underside, almost within the ribcage.

I met Caliber’s worrying eyes, and initiated my callous plan. “Sorry, Ash.” We pounced on her, forcing her out of the curl before she could do any more damage. The mare flailed, the kind of patient that needed handcuffs or a strong sedative to work on safely. I resisted the urge to anesthetize her. “If you don’t stop moving…” I froze.

Caliber saw it too.

The glass’s purchase was shallow, superficial. It dug into her bare side, but the blood flow had already subsided. A bone had obstructed the shard from digging any deeper.

A bone that should not have been there.

“Ash…”

The Pegasus began to cry.

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Ready for the Races: Your chance to cripple an opponent is increased +25%

Companions:
Ash is now Loyal
Your Repair skill is effectively 100 and recipe/improvised weapons can be crafted while she is in the party.

Next Chapter: Chapter 19: Headlights Look Like Diamonds Estimated time remaining: 3 Hours, 4 Minutes