Fallout Equestria: Sola Gratia
Chapter 19: Headlights Look Like Diamonds
“You're not from around here. Who're you?”

I had killed a lot of ponies today.
But I hadn’t shot a crippled mare down the barrel of my distant rifle.
In terms of life and death, I was fast becoming a major contributor to the latter.
But a band of pseudo-religious raiders were now cross-eyed corpses.
Tears and turmoil, blood and bullets had marked the day.
But now I sat beneath an ancient majesty of architecture and resolve, sipping a Sparkle-Cola, and watching the night dance with its reflection in the lake.
Today had been a terrible day.
But the sun had set.

“I was not legal, my birth, my existence, every breath I took was a crime.” Ash explained, her tears dry and distant, soothed by our assurances that she was now no different in our eyes, that despite the cloud-cut above, we would share a drink with a Pegasus. “A shamed secret.”

“What would they have done with you?” Caliber asked, her bottle somehow steady in her hoof. “It’s not like it was your fault that you were born.”

Ash had practiced skill, but would never have that magical understatement that was an earth ponies’ ability to do the impossible. “That’s the thing: my parents were culpable, so they were hiding me for my sake as well as their own. They would have been arraigned and punished for ‘overpopulating’ and, more severely, for attempting to conceal their crimes.”

“And you’d be left alone.” I nodded, floating my own sweet soda, cheating gravity.

“I’d have been branded and banished or, considering my age and… disposability… culled.” The taste of carrot swashing in my mouth became sickly at the words, as if the concept’s immorality was infusing the drink with its rot. “The Enclave thrives for its control, for its unyielding loyalty to regulation and law. They would remove me…to refine the population.”

Ash’s wings were no longer there. “Is that why they clipped you?” Caliber guessed.

“I was not clipped.” She shook her head, painstakingly forced to relieve her past by the inadvertent cruelty of curious peer pressure. “This was my own fault.”

“Looks like they were burned off.” I analyzed, the subtle wounds at the end of each stub had clearly been cauterized at some point, an unusually barbaric solution that I doubted the Enclave would use. They were morally destitute enough, but their technology was too great. “Then the excess was trimmed away.” Callously curt words uttered out of medical procedure.

“I tried to run, to exile myself.” She nodded, confirming my diagnosis. “To spare my parents and siblings the risk of persecution.” All probably still up there, I chastised the references. “But how do your run from the world? For all I knew, my everything was Enclave and my nothing was below. So I decided that I’d learn how to fly, then just do it until I was gone.”

“Why didn’t you ask your parents to leave with you?” Caliber asked, twisting open another bottle of the orange ancient. “To escape together.”

“I wanted to leave, so that they could live in peace, my brother and sisters did not deserve to be fugitives of a government that had little reason to harm them otherwise.” It sounded like the Enclave was not even idyllic in its own cowardly refuge. “I couldn’t tell them my intent.”

“So you learnt how to fly, like any Pegasus foal would want to do, and then…”

“I did not even make it that far into the plan.” She winced, as if remembering the sting of failure. A juvenile’s responsibility to grow up, their need to, never fulfilled. “A late bloomer, they said, but all that meant was more time that they risked themselves for me.”

“It must have been hard to learn, since you couldn’t go to school or even practice in very public places.” I bargained, trying to bring some appeasement to her somber story of self-depreciation.

“I made use of my isolation to learn mechanics, skills for the hoof and mind rather than the wing and heart, and became capable with the tools that I am now left with.” You have heart. “And with these skills I could build a substitute, or at least, an accelerant.”

“Like what the Enclave soldiers have in their suits,” Caliber contributed. “Whatever lets them fly despite all the added weight and stiffness around their wings.”

“It is that very metal and machinery that I recreated, to force my wings into flight.” The stubs at her side fluttered meekly, disturbingly, with the same ghostly instinct that a three legged dog will pump his useless stump with. “To make them learn, make them work.”

“And did they?” None of us had taken any sips since Caliber’s second bottle was opened, so the colas brimmed and pouted at our lips.

“I flew.” She stared into the exposed night sky with that same believing glow, distant stars twinkling in the voids of eye and infinity. “And in doing so: ensured I never would again.”

“What happened?” The shortness of a question often foretold the importance of its answer.

“I flew too close to the sun.” She surmised, tilting a drowning flow of Sparkle Cola into herself.

“What do you mean? That’s impossible…” Caliber argued. I didn’t know if she had realized what I had, that Ash could easily have seen what she had claimed, in Zion, to have seen.

“Take it literally, take it metaphorically.” The mare was awfully dismissive about the issue. “Take it however you would like to, you cannot change that it happened. That it would always have happened, that it always will have happened, or that it was meant to happen.”

“How can you say that?” She continued, another conflict brewing. “You need to know.”

“That an Enclave soldier shot me down as I was fleeing the seamless clouds?” she hypothesized. “That my crude device sparked and set itself afire?” Caliber retreated. “Or that the sun itself sought to share its blaze upon my back, to burn me to the earth that even it could no longer reach? …Why does it matter?”

Even Caliber wasn’t daring enough to question her mindset. “How did you survive?”

“Water.” Now her gaze fell to the glistening lake, sparkling in white fluorescents and warm artificial glows. “It was my baptism, first in fire, then in water.”

Her faith had grown to cope with this, I realized, as a defense, a refuge, a reason to go on.
“Here?” I gestured out over the wide, black mirror.

“I could’ve fallen anywhere else, I could’ve hit an island or a rock bed or even a sheet of ice, but I didn’t.” she smiled, somehow remembering the destruction of her wings as a growing experience, a step forward. “That is why nothing else matters.”

Caliber tilted her drink, some kind of barroom surrender. “Then you found the congregation?”

“I may have survived, but I was in no state to find anything.” Ash laughed, another upsettingly chipper, even genuine, reaction to a story well beyond my scope for tragedy. “My body washed up along the shore, wings in rags and swatches of burns and bruises covering me.” As many of them still did. “The Congregation found me, as destiny had brought me to them.”

“But you developed a different dogma than they had.” I pointed out, assuming that belief came solely from indoctrination. “And the Enclave certainly didn’t teach it to you.”
“No, they certainly didn’t. I learned all I know from the burning.” She affirmed. “I used it to fill in all the other’s mistakes.”

I expected Caliber to ask about the sky sharing, to admit defeat or rekindle the fight, but she knew how to treat a trauma. Ash could fix a machine, and I could fix a body, but Caliber understood traumas of the mind, she had surely lived with them enough. “How old were you?”

“It’s how I got my cutie-mark.”

…

I very nearly started crying.

These mares had suffered.
I didn’t have any idea what suffering was, what pain was… or even what loss was.
Innocence was one thing, but the very quality that defines you as one of three kinds, that lets you know where your magic lies… to lose that was inconceivable.
They would have to cut off my horn, they would have to remove Caliber’s… earth… gland?
Anyway, it was impossible to imagine how Ash could smile, how she could wave us off with more confidence or assertion than she had ever interacted with, how she had lived with the memory tattooed onto her flank… a falling star in place of her destiny.

She could, I realized, because she thought that it was her destiny.
“So none of them know,” I asked, desperate for information to dam up my welling empathy. “That the surface is hospitable?” Surely Ash would have thought to escape here, if they had.

“Some do, I assume, but for the most part it’s believed that you either live Enclave or you die.” Sounded like a prison gang. “Nopony ever rebels against them, nopony ever resists their law, and so nothing ever changes.” It really sounded like the Stable. “Except the Dashites.”

“That sounds positive.” Caliber giggled, like a schoolgirl encountering a dirty word.

“It’s meant as a derogatory term for Pegasus that abandon the Enclave for the surface, to instill a public hatred for any that speak of returning or offering aid.” She explained. “They brand them with a symbol over their cutie-marks, as any who have left may never return.”

“Interesting, do you think that Pegasus I saw in Acheron was a Dashite?” I asked, actually curious as to whether Ash had been withholding information, with fair reason, at the oasis.

“Hey, wait a second; weren’t you travelling through the Middle Passage at around the same time that Grace came stumbling on out into the world?” Caliber interrogated. I still really wanted to get her a police hat. “That’s very interesting…”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, I’ve got to warn you pal, my partner here gets awful mad when ponies lie.” I played along. “You’d better tell her what you know… before things get ugly.”

“I see. This is one of your little charades isn’t it?” Ash asked. Apparently, she had never read an issue of True Police Stories. “What’s the concept?”

“We ask the questions!” Caliber was now smoking a cigarette… somehow.

“Listen, I have my kids waiting on me. I’m supposed to be reading them a bedtime story right now.” I lied. “Let’s get this over with, you help us, we help you… then we can all go home.”

She lit another in her mouth, and then sidled up to me. “Here Commander, I think it’s going to be a long night.” I took the warm cylinder from her lips, ignoring saliva and safety to make my new character more believable. “Think you’re a tough nut, huh? Well, ya know what we do with tough nuts?” The Sparkle Cola bottle shattered under her hoof. “We crack ‘em.”

“Settle down…” I ordered, levitating an unbroken bottle of tremulous orange fluid to the suspect. “Want a drink, Ascella?”

The cigarette made my throat tingle, but every breath brought with it a billowing warmth that seemed to kindle a fire in my chest, glowing against the winter’s night. Its taste was sickening at first, but I realized that with the right dosage, inhales carried an encapsulating relief… an appeal that kept you from letting go. “No thank you… Commander?” Now she was getting it.

“We’ve got you for a double homicide, breaking and entering and de-struction of property.” If anything that was letting her off easy, I thought, her Congregation had also been squatting. “Yer going to jail for life, and let me tell you, I can’t wait to see you rot…”

Ash hung her head in mock – I could only hope - shame. “What do you want to know?”

“Good to see you have some sense, son.” Hey, it’s not my fault that the criminals in these stories never seemed to be mares. “What can you tell us about the soldier in Acheron.”

“I have a friend in Folsom prison… unsavory character.” Caliber added to ensure the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. “She loves fresh fish.” Maybe we were drawing inspiration from two different kinds of magazine. “I’ll bet she’d be very happy to meet you.”

“Look, I already told you, I don’t know anything!” Ash pleaded, just unconvincingly enough.

I sighed, and shook my head in the best display of pitying disappointment that I could muster. “It’s ponies like you… ponies like you that are sending this country down the drain.” I puffed dramatically. “I blame the public education system.”

“Maybe we should search her for concealed weapons.” I could almost hear the electric guitar. Caliber rounded on the quivering Pegasus, who, I realized, might easily have no idea that this was all an act. “What do you say? Do I need to frisk you?”

“Okay, hold on.” I interrupted, like a director calling cut. “What’s your character’s motivation.”

“I’m extending the long arm of the law.” Caliber giggled. “We’re doing Beverley’s Hills Cop right? As in cop a feel of Beverly’s hills? Remember? With Bucky Flankspank?”

I gaped. “… What!? I was doing Lethal Gun… who’s Bucky Flankspank?”

“What the hay is Lethal Gun? Isn’t that self-explanatory?” Caliber squinted, the act forgotten. “I mean who makes a gun that isn’t lethal?”

“Who names their foal Bucky Flankspank??”

“I’m so confused. Am I in trouble anymore?”

“He was in The Best Night Ever, The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000, Over a Barrel, Putting your Hoof Down, the odd Party of One and the controversial Family Appreciation Day. Let’s just say he’s been in a lot of things.”

“I truly do not know anything about that other Pegasus, if I can get us back on track.”

“Wait a minute, what exactly were we going to do with Ash…”

“Make her a star?”

“Goddesses…”

We stayed like this for a while, arguing over the quality of Caliber’s source material, and sending Ash into a befuddled panic. As this, in some strange way, was the perfect relief to the emotional strain of our terrible day. A ridiculous conversation about the only form of entertainment that the wasteland still bothered to pass around, based on another of our spontaneous charades.

No personal history, no secrets or revelations, no guilt or impossible optimism, just talk. The kind of conversation that sparked at water coolers or during cross-country road trips, ridiculous talk about ridiculous things, between ponies blissfully lost in the ridicule. Old-world converse in an old-world cornerstone, idle parley in an immortal place.

The house of a timeless stubbornness, it was a victory against war and wealth alike.
Filled with corpses now, it would stay. Flesh would rot and bone would break, the stench would fade and the dust would swirl out of Ash’s broken window, if from nowhere else, but the house would stay. The house would outlast all of us.

We ate and drank at its foot, huddling into two wolf-pelt blankets when the cold reached out from the icy north. The water shimmered, though it seemed immaculately still. Sparsely a ripple, never a rupture, always at rest. Like the house, it was slower than time.
There were better words to describe their age, words that I didn’t know how to use right.

Cigarettes were odd, but I could understand them, I could describe them.
Warm, hurtful, soothing, burning, smoke; in, out, excess, cough, again, words I knew.
Caliber described them as one thing that the wasteland improved, as cancer was now a kind of achievement in survival. To live long enough to contract any major disease was quite impressive. So I shared them with her, her stash, a pack she had resisted for fear of being left with none, more for want of a shared activity than for the harsh, yet easily revisited, taste.

I asked Ash many questions about the true Kingdom of the Skies, some stupid, others sound.
The Enclave only came to look worse, but I saw forgiveness for its citizens… its prisoners.
Flight, was not something that we discussed, not something that she could. The one regret.

There was wind and darkness, cold and shadows, but it was where we would stay.
She didn’t need to say it, Caliber had already read between the lines of glass and shrapnel, and not once did we pine for the warmth just behind, for it was the warmth of blood and copses. The wolf-pelts, morbid in their own right, held us against the cold. Separate but Safe.

No admission, or even connection, was going to get Ash to lose this compulsion; it was not a defect but an aspect, a part of her personality. Caliber was warm, and I was not going to complain about having a mare beside me as I stared into the stars, not if it was Caliber.
We were the best of friends… were we not?

Don’t be silly. Don’t get yourself hurt. Do not... do not…

My mother’s necklace was not forgotten, but its burial was. I had come to know how big the world was, how impossibly inescapable in places, how painfully alone in others.
Leaving her necklace would be leaving her as there was no one place that I could promise myself I would ever see again. So burying her would be saying goodbye, which I wouldn’t do again. As I fell asleep… I began to wonder if I was going to die.

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

I was watching myself smoke Golden smoke
From the island of my retirement
I checked to see if I was old but I was fine
I mean wasn’t old
Sorry

It’s alright Damascus said
Under the scars I am as fresh faced and bright eyed as you are
Good thing I didn’t smoke or I’d have a few hundred years of ash built up in my lungs

He laughed sharper than the Buffalo did
Not as largely
more sad

This is going to be a long dream he said
A long dream for a hard sleep

You were not in my last dream
Where were you

You see enough of me in the orbs
Though you have not visited in a while
Where are you

I am here

And there

Should I not be doing that
I ask because you are wiser than me

Smoking
Or
Being in two places at once

First selection please

Enter Cap

Darn
I have no caps on me
Can I have one of yours Damascus

I do not believe in carrying caps
They are too simple a way of getting things done
They and their kind are the reason so much wrong has been done
So much simple wrong
The great war was for diamonds
I almost killed myself for diamonds
So I cannot pass judgment

Diamonds were no longer beautiful during the war
They were a resource gems like fuel like coal like water like fire like ash like blood like life
You treat them rightly You should not compare yourself to them

Who

Me

Oh
But I want to change the world
I want to do what you did with Faith
I want to change

Why

Because I am worthless if I do not

Yes
All of them think that

All of who

All of you

Who are we

The Worthy

What are we making

A city

Which City

Ask a longer question

Which City are we making Damascus

Would you like me to tell you which city we are making

Yes I would like you to tell me which city we are making Damascus it is certainly a high one

If you will wait just a moment I can tell you which high city this is
This tower is thick and odd
But that is the nature of this city this city has a reputation for architecture and industry for beauty and for filth all into one place
We are downtown east of the square so I must continue for a little while

Are you done yet Damascus can you tell me the answer

This city is black New Calvary but it is not over

Please don’t make me do anymore

Alright
I suppose you will be seeing it soon enough will you not
Or that is what you think

My plan is not going as planned
There have been many distractions along the way and even now we are distracted

Are they not worth your time

I looked at Ash refusing to smoke beside us and us is Caliber and I smiling
They look happier than they would be in the City of Rats
I am happier than myself in that city aren’t I

What is happiness and why do you think I can answer that
You know very well that I am not happy

Why did you do that to yourself
Watching it makes me sad

I had to lose them or lose everything

I suppose I should not try to answer that question for you
We will speak more later when we’re both awake

I might die before then

So may I

At least we have now built a fine city together

Damascus you have tricked me

Yes I have
I am not sorry

Just don’t go erasing this memory with some zebra in the clean mountains
Ha ha
What do you think of that one Damascus
Damascus don’t cry
It was a joke
I’m crying now thanks to you
Because I’m guilty
I suppose we both are by trial in the Stable
I do not think that was a joke
A joke for tears maybe
A clown at a funeral
A corpse with white makeup and a red nose
Laugh at the dead for they can no longer laugh at themselves
This is good advice Damascus you should write it down
Tears like ink on pages leaking
Black like tar like oil like hearts
Past the margin it goes sneaking
A whole is none without its parts
You need your memories
You need her
Her and Her
Rose and Marie
Rosemary

Damascus stood up as if to leave
He walked to the water he walked to the end of stone and earth and safety and me
I thought he would not sink that he would keep walking on
But he drowned

I was left alone with myself and the island
The House across was stronger than me but was filled with just as many ghosts

When will your window break when will you be tested

Never never never never never and forever

Your head is a more interesting place than you are

I am not a place
Please amend this

Your head is a more interesting waste of space than you are

Acceptable phrasing
Hurtful message
I liked Damascus more than you he was nice to me and I at least want his approval

You want your own approval too
But you will never get it

Grace is Gone

The Lake glimmered with more lights than before
Lights that moved by their own will
Not stars or even the cresting moon but lights that move near and with malice
The lights of revenge and death and snakes in the grass
There are always snakes left in the grass
Cut off all the heads you want

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

I had to write it.
With only enough care not to wake Caliber, I leapt to my hooves.
There were reasons, I couldn’t remember them, but there were reasons to remember.
Corpses and long dried blood didn’t stop me from barging into the House.
The old house.

I found a journal, too quickly.
I had seen it yesterday, in the last bedroom, because I looked at pointless things.
Not so pointless now, I thought, as I paged through the abandoned endeavor.
This had undoubtedly been a project forced upon the old buck by his painter wife.
She would have said: “John, you should write down your emotions.” In a subtler way.
The first few pages had attempts that I would read later. For now I couldn’t be distracted.

Levitating a fountain pen, in aesthetic nature but not functional, I began to scrawl violently.
Amendments and edits abounded as I recalled things above things, impossibly simultaneous.
There was Grace and there was Damascus. Me, watching, myself, smoking, and I, judging.
After doing it once, I did it again.
The order had to be right, the shape.

The City of Gold, New Calvary, up a little, down, up, down, up, up, down, up a lot, down, up.
Was the last up a part of it? No. That shape was what made Damascus leave.
After that it was drivel, the ramblings of my self-hate, and a warning…
I hurried out of the house, looking for lights.

Nothing on my E.F.S. But lights could be the implication, they wouldn’t be the bars.
The bodies were like furniture now, familiar and forgotten, avoided with instinctual ease.
Dry blood like a carpet, or a tile due to blissful lack of fuzz, covered enough to mean nothing.

I shook Caliber awake, though I really wanted to climb back into the wolf-pelt with her, to be.
Last dream had warned me, too late, of the Zebras. I wasn’t going to ignore this one.
Ash was next, curled in her separate skin like a foal in a cot beside the bed of her parents.
New Calvary had been in the diner hadn’t it, a picture at least. Its skyline?

“Wake up.” I whispered, counter productively. The first mare was a light sleeper by necessity and was already packing up our things, no questions asked. It was still just dark.
“Ash!” This one had spent most of her life in cloud or comfort; so only snuggled deeper into the carcasses’ hide. Caliber hurried over and pinched her nose shut.

With a gasp the Pegasus awoke, stumps sticking out as much as they could. Still upsetting.
“Bah!” Was sort of the sound she made, though she was now fully upright. “Pardon?”
The ultimate morning pony once you got her up, apparently. Can I help you, madam?

“Pack your pelt.” I ordered, and then hurried to gather my own things.
I had forgotten the book, so after my coat was on and my saddlebags were strapped I hurried back into the house. “Wait here, watch the water.” Probably not good to leave that ambiguous, considering our past experience, but I did.

This was all for nothing, I bemoaned, as I hurried up the spiraling staircase.
They’re going to hate you for what you’ve done, for stealing their sleep. Next your going to insist that you swim over to that island with Damascus, and ban the use of punctuation.

“Anything?” I called, only sort of softly, out of the broken window. They nodded, so I left.
This was it, this was the last time I would walk through this house.
The feeling was surprisingly haunting, like I was leaving a home.

“What is it? The lights?” The mares were pressed against our headboard wall, not staring at anything but eyes frantic and active. Ash knew, it was clear from her heightened worry.

“Vipers.” She hissed. “It has to be them.”

Joining them against the expertly smoothened wood I pressed on. “What was in the lake?”

“Headlights.”

“Could be a cart or a car, its reflection was moving slow enough to be anything.” Caliber figured. “Must have started up at the edge of the ring over there,” she pointed east to the end of ruin and shore. “Then followed the road.”

“Where were they when you saw them?”

“Just nearby.” So I wasn’t a physic, just a very impressionable dreamer.
“Ash is sure that they’re coming here.”

I looked at her for an elaboration. “There’s nothing else.”
That was sound enough logic to base a panic off of.

“How could it be a car?” I asked, inappropriately curious.

“Some folks scrounge a living off of fusion cells or gasoline stores.” Caliber explained. “Though most ponies wouldn’t know what to do with one, even if it wasn’t totally decrepit.”

“Why don’t we shoot it?”

“We’re afraid, aren’t we?” Ash clarified. “We seem afraid.”

“Shooting our new car seems silly, don’t you think?” Caliber grinned. “There are a couple dozen dead Vipers in and around this house. Who d’you think should be afraid of who?”

“We’re going to steal it?”

“Inherit.”

Caliber didn’t know how to drive, Ash said she’d be able to figure it out if given a few hours with a comprehensive guide, and I had never seen a vehicle do anything but explode. This didn’t seem like a good plan, but it involved killing Vipers and getting to Cabanne, so screw it.

We snuck around the house, knowing full well that there were only hostiles awaiting us, rifles loaded and levitated. My E.F.S warned of four, which didn’t bother me as much as it should have. Raiders were different currency, in that they had an exchange rate when it came to odds. All in all the three of us, two of us at the toll, had killed nearly fifty of them.
Four to three was hopeless, four to three was pointless, four to three was easy.

Killing was becoming easy.

They stood out towards the road, their headlights cutting off behind them.
The light of the house held them, as it exposed the corpses on the lawn, the garden of gore.
Orders, clearly what that buck had come to deliver, a message from the Snake’s head.

He was muscle, but not brain, a neck, but not a head, strong, but not important.
I shot him in the chest, aiming for the flesh between clad leathers and rag, for the heart.
A few bucks could take that kind of shot, natural vests of muscle and bone warding, like him.
The other three came charging at our corner, rushing to defend their grunting commander.

If not for their own riflemare, we would have gunned the group down like unhinged police at a non-violent protest, but dying was also easy, so we took cover around the House’s reliable body. “Do we even need a plan?” I asked, wondering if this would be any more engaging than a slow crossfire, an exchanged race to the finish line.

“No.” Ash took the limbs off of an ambitious attacker, reducing him to a slithering stump.
She looked the same, as she should, in her new clothes and constructed battle saddle.

I would look at her differently, I could lie about that but it seemed better to be honest, to myself at least. She was a Pegasus; she was a foreigner, just like me.
Her saddle ratcheted back in another massive kickback, but she had already braced herself.
Unlike in the house’s bedroom… could that have been a mistake?

“You seem preoccupied, Shepard.” Our only real local cooed, her voice soaked in sarcastic concern. “Is this near-death experience not as riveting as your refined palette is used to?” she rolled away from the wall, firing her rifle with wild accuracy. “We could pretend the grass is lava, if it’d make things more interesting for you. Maybe play this one blindfolded, no guns allowed, make it a game of pin the knife on the pony.” Like a birthday party, I nodded.
“I really hope you didn’t mean that nod.”

Only two Vipers to go. I should probably contribute, at least finish off the one I started.
“Sorry.” I mumbled, like a stranger who bumped into another on the street.
I trotted out around the corner, still in another world, and readied the Fixit stick.

A mare seemed surprised to see me, long enough for her rifle to become meaningless.
I must be sleepy, I realized, as her head blossomed into a carnation for the night’s dark suit. Otherwise I’d care that her eyes had held pitiful emotion before they fell apart, pools of ivory thrown into a teeming chaos of shattered frame and lost perspective. I’d feel bad for the mare that I had just ended, for the blood and gore I’d spilled, if only I weren’t such a sleepyhead.
If only her cutie-mark hadn’t been a serpent writhing within a skull: a salty prison tattoo.

There was that shiver, that creeping undeniable feeling, a god-complex drowned in grief, the killer’s high. Some got off on it, some were torn apart by it, but in the wasteland it was the price, or payoff, of survival. I rode it for a little while, like inhaling cancer, and was awake.

I hurried over to the final, original survivor, who looked like he was in the middle of a cute-induced heart attack, clutching his chest and wincing. But blood leaked from around his grasping hoof, and even cholesterol was a preferable arterial clog when compared to a bullet.

“This thing works?” Caliber asked, appearing at my side. I looked at the car.

“Fuck you.”

It’s sharp, segmented body was cut into an angular chassis, extremities rising like shark’s fins on the rear. The headlights had heavy brows, as if level in an expression of wise frustration. There were parallel cuts running across the front, like neat furrows on a forehead. Four eyes.

It had been a convertible, but didn’t have the capacity to convert into anything other than an open topped, sleekly wind-shielded empty. The seats could’ve been quality material once, but were now stained and ragged, one open and spilling like a burst, fungal wound.

The wheels were shaped in compliment, but subtle within a cave of only slightly curved steel.
In the darkness, the knife-like car seemed to float. It was rusty, enough for its color to be described as such, if not as the faded chrome beneath.

It made me think of soda and cigarettes, the diner and the highway.
It was not a car for this curving stretch of ruined vacation homes; it was a traveler of open spaces, for gritty Equestria, for old-world blues. It was a product for pretty models, with crimson lips and disheveled hair, to sell, to present as a forbidden temptation.

“We’ll take it.” I shook the dying buck’s bloody hoof, too distracted to realize what I was doing.

“You give us the keys, we’ll put a bullet somewhere to make it hurt less.” Caliber offered.

“Don’t you mess this up, savage.” She yanked a glinting sliver of silver free from around his neck, tearing the tiny trigger off. “I always gotta be tested, doesn’t matter if it’s by venom or by yer bullet, I’m proving myself… gonna be a champion. You got no right to take that from me.”

I levitated the key into Caliber’s vest pocket. “Fair enough.” She closed the deal. “Keep your test, if you’d like. The car’s all we need from you, and I’m sure we’ll be very happy with it.”

We clambered into the Chrysalis, as the emblazed label across the vehicle’s flank claimed, and left the old buck to take his death defying challenge. “I don’t know it its good idea that I drive.” Caliber smiled wanly, I had ushered her into the hot seat, as it were.

“It’s not a good idea for any of us to.” Ash pointed out, as she curled up in the mild fluff of the torn back seat. “In fact, I think it’s a very bad idea that this car be used at all.”

“Behold, weaker beings! Though I bleed, I still breathe!” The Viper called.

“From a mechanical perspective.” She compromised. “However I, as a pony very eager to leave, am willing to ignore the risk of nuclear obliteration.”

“You’ve got the best reflexes, I’m sure, and besides the only thing we could really crash into is the Cabanne mesa, and that’s where we’re going anyway.” I assured.

“Yer going to Cabanne?” The buck wheezed, interrupting his own muttering conversation with some weaker being that I didn’t know. “That’s where we just came from.”

“Whaddaya want, a ride?” Caliber turned the key in the ignition, sending lifeblood coursing through the steel around us, feeding the machinery that now whirred with an excited energy. She slid her hooves into the steering wheel, which kind of looked like a black pretzel.

“You beasts dare to kill my brave companions!?” He screamed, rounding on us with what little strength he could muster. “And now you say that you are going to Cabanne?!”

“Yes: going, going now!” I hurriedly hinted to Caliber, kicking at the dashboard. The car jolted forward, lurching only a few yards down the road before coming to a violent halt.
The buck screamed behind us, a cry of bloodlust and anger that he couldn’t match with his enfeebled body. Though he was passionate, it wasn’t doing anything to help his heart.

“It’s an automatic.” Ash chastised. “What’s wrong?”

“I have to lower my seat.”

“Caeli, he could kill us.” She whispered, as if talking about the buck too loud would allow him to get us faster. If he had a pistol he had forgotten it in his blinding rage.

“I can’t reach the thingy, and that freaking Minotaur was sitting here before.” She excused.
“Just gimme a second… You’re being a back-seat driver.”

“At least I’m being some kind of driver.” Ash murmured under her breath, the words lost as she twisted around to watch the Minotaur’s gasping approach. “He’s gaining on us.”

“Everything’s gaining on us.” Caliber admitted. “I need a brick or something.”

“I’ll get it.” I offered, hopping out of the open casket. Big and Burly was shuffling down the sidewalk, leaving a thin trail of blood in his wake, screaming. It would have been frightening, the darkness, the leaking Minotaur pony and the suspense building behind our escape, if all of it wasn’t so ridiculous. He looked like an old buck chasing the kids off of his lawn, I giggled.

Everything was brick, cobblestone or cinderblock, rubble, ruin and remains, it was as if every house had been reduced to precisely the base reagents that we needed. I levitated a comfortably rounded chunk of marble, taking the time to pick it out of the wide selection, as if I was choosing the constituent material for a new kitchen counter.

I imagined beating the buck to death, for one terrifyingly lucid moment, and then hurriedly scrambled back into the car. My mind was still dreaming, still distracted, still Damascus. I promised myself an orb to sate the dream’s influence. After the radio tower, I promised.

“Here,” I carefully floated the brick beneath her hoof, propping it against the ‘go’ pedal.
The buck was straining just behind the car, as if touching it would be a victory in its own right.
He didn’t even reach that echelon of success as the Chrysalis lurched forward once again, this time picking up a steady roll at the end of the jolt. The road was level, arching around the lake shore ahead, so Caliber was now technically driving.

“Okay,” she whispered, wide-eyed and apprehensive. “We’re alive.”

Ash tugged a length of bandage from her saddlebags, her jury-rigged shotgun set like a fourth passenger on their shared seat. “The Vipers are going to be very angry.” At their mention I felt a certainty that there were nests of snakes beneath the seats, bristling over their lost masters.

“How many more of them in Cabanne?” I asked, as our driver cautiously attempted a U-turn, avoiding the pits of ruined foundation that marked the edges of the narrow road.
Though she almost hit a flickering street lamp, we were now backwards, or forwards.

“Less than there were here, when we arrived.” Ash estimated, voice muffled by the bands of white material. “They take residence just outside of the city, at the base of the mesa.”

So my virgin was still unspoiled? “Why wouldn’t they stay higher?”

“Cyrus says they have congregated around a large pit, which used to be a well or reservoir, but is now full of snakes.” She wrapped her middle in the soft dressing. “It is in what might have been the slums of the city, the place for peasants and passers-by.”

We passed the buck, who had now turned himself to the sky, crying out promises of strength and survival to the assumedly serpentine divines. He didn’t seem to care as we crawled by.

The feeling was admittedly unsettling, the unnatural movement of something around you, and your propagation despite sitting completely still. I didn’t feel nauseous, car-sick as I had seen it referred to; though the experience did bring an unpleasant sense of fearful wonder. A feeling that I was taking part in something that should be all rights end in my death.
Like riding an alicorn, but with a somehow maddening stability and comfort.

There was no adrenaline to mark the transversal of space, no immediate danger to overshadow the implied, no semblance of either control or chaos. It was like sitting on a couch, watching an all-encompassing movie, three dimensional, vivid and real.

“I’ll speed up once we’re clear of this rubble.” Caliber promised, to my anxious excitement.
“This is surreal…” she muttered, as streetlights danced away from us. “Like a dream.”

Ash mumbled some indiscernible agreement, her new wrap almost complete.

“How would ponies react?” I asked both of the mares. “If they saw your wings.”
They were stubs, subtle stumps of bone and featherless burns, but I wanted to be polite.

“Certainly not like you two did.” She smiled. “Thank you.”

“We weren’t jerking you around with that friendship stuff.” Caliber assured, nice and bluntly. “Travelling like this… it can get difficult with the wrong companions… we really lucked out.”
It seemed Caliber’s luck and Ash’s destiny were one and the same. “Bump!”

We were nearly thrown out of the car as it passed over a myriad of stone on its course to escape into the Plain. Quaking, teeth rattling vibrations were sent up the steel machine in rivets, and then the Chrysalis touched down on soft, golden grass. It was now a straight shot, barring a few sloping hills and half-submerged stones, to the Viper’s nest.

I sat backwards in my seat, front hooves hanging over the head-rest, watching the fading purity of night beyond the horizons. Stars died and clouds grayed as the sun’s influence cut over the expanse of Equestria. At this speed, I would lose my divines soon, as even on the highway the sky had been a tapering sliver between shifting roof and bristling earth.
Settling back down, I hung my hoof into the ocean of gold, as if cutting a ripple through the waters of the Northern Plain. It was like being on a sail-boat, the way Caliber cautiously drifted over the crests and curves of the shifting infinity, our gentle passage fueled by fear and unfamiliarity, but spurned by the Chrysalis’ purring desire.

Going downhill she would risk a rush, and cold wind would whip our manes, ripples of thick lavender fabric, short rising layers of golden bangs, and a bed of flickering red ruffles.

There was something so liberating about it, despite the confinements of steel and speed, it was freeing. Cabanne would grow and the land would lurch, my limbs staying blissfully unaware of progress, a body warmed and embraced, while my mind revered in the sights of seeping sunlight and repeating inconsistency.

By the time the mesa truly became huge, the clouds had lightened in misted morning, and our beaming headlights had all but disappeared. Walking would have taken longer than the emptiness implied, as you could not accurately estimate the size of an infinity.

Fires burned and smoke rose, billows of the gray waste pluming out from a great spillway.
Rock and boulder cascaded, frozen forever in a fall due to the impossibly strong hold of the earth, over the developed clearing. The city itself was walled, gated on the other side of the bluff, difficult to discern as anything but angular gray towers and stone extruding from stone.

This offshoot (what would now be called a suburb or outskirt) was low, developed in a clearing beneath a subtle overhang, as if the landform had been dug out to accommodate it. A wall, primitive timber latched by eternally frayed rope, formed a ring, contributing to the smokescreen. Its gate opening out to a subtle slope of dirt, a driveway.

The houses came out of the stone, some with thatched roofs of tawny grass, and others just simple carvings, with little definition apart from their pale surfaces and gaping apertures.
Living in one would have meant bitter exposure and looming collapses, a place for peasants.

Caliber slowed, not daring to announce our approach with Chrysalis’ roars or sputters.
“How many less?” she asked, following up on my earlier question.

“There were two hundred, in the very beginning, though that was their peak.” Ash explained. “Towns along the rails have been chipping away at their numbers, and the Vipers have never successfully taken any of them. Cyrus hunted many, enough for them to know him in bounty. As of now: I’d say there are only slightly fewer here.”

“Why would they send most of their… members to the lake house?” I asked, unsure what title a raider deserved for being a raider.

“They obviously found a lead on where to find Cyrus.” She assumed. “And once they realized that the house was abandoned, they must have used this car to occupy it. Perhaps to compensate for their inability to kill him, or perhaps to alleviate the cluster here.”
The fenced off clearing was certainly small, nestled between tumbled rock and mesa, almost beneath the city itself. “At the house: those were clearly novices, young and inexperienced Vipers, they may even have been planning to conduct an initiation there.”

“What happens in an initiation?” Caliber asked.
Perhaps she and I were the true foreigners. Just because Ash came from an impossibly different place, didn’t mean she hadn’t found a home, a stake, in the Northern Plain.
Maybe I was just desperate to find somepony who I could relate to my own exodus

“Well, it makes sense that they’d want to hold it elsewhere: it is nothing if not solitary.” The local elaborated. “They are challenged, forced, to inject paralytic, near-lethal venom into their bodies. Only the ones who survive are considered worthy of the Great Snake, needless to say: it is not helping their dwindling population.”

“So even if you get lucky and sur-vive the poison, you end up stuck in a tribe of batshit crazy raiders?”

“There’s no such thing as luck.” Ash affirmed, defending the Viper’s own belief as it briefly overlapped with her own.

“Yeah, tell that to Grace,” Caliber grinned. “She’s got it in extremes.”
I hadn’t even told her about the diamonds, and that had been a prime example of bipolar chance. You will be saved from being enslaved, but only if you almost kill yourself first.
Ash just gave me that knowing look, the spark glistening from within obsidian voids.

“We need to find a place to park.” I deferred, to which Chrysalis’ engines cut-off, subduing her subtle purring to a cooling silence. The car had already adopted a personality, I realized.

“This is your new Equestria.” Caliber smiled, as she kicked her door open.
“Walking for a while isn’t going to kill us.”

The wicker wood wall seemed to rise as we approached, looming over the dipping swell as we paddled through it. Smoke darkened the roof of the natural overhang, leaving itself in ashen permanence against the stone. The air smelt of saccharine meat, a smell I had come to associate with corpse-fires and wolf carcasses, with Zion.

The shoddy gate was open, though we sidled up beside the thin, splintering border.
Barking, the call of degenerated savages rather than genuine wildlife, and harshly spat words covered our ineffective creep. Ash could soften her hoofsteps against the familiar grass, but Caliber and I were left crackling, wincing at every brittle bristle. I was still louder, somehow.

“Children!” A mare called, using the term as a Confessor, rather than a parent. I ducked instinctively, as if the words were being thrown at me in assault. “Gather round the pit.”
The voice was coy, maternal in authority but seductive in its blatant tempting.

I ushered us on to the door, curious to find out, of all things, whether this mare was young or old. She had the wise assumption of a storied life, but the bubbling coy of a rebellious free radical. Peeking around the flimsy gate, I regarded the Viper’s priestess.

She stood on a pile of corpses, stacked before the expanse of a pit.
Her cloak was stitched of leather and bone, entire serpentine skeletons lining its hems.
On her head, over an indiscernible mane, was a great adornment, a near centerpiece.
Feathers, grandiose and colorful, rose from an oversized – hopefully fake- snake skull.
Beads hung from braided thread, and they jangled over the whispering fires of cremation.
Her coat was mottled, impossibly so, in varying shades of green, brown and red.
Eyes gleamed, yellow around unnatural black slits, like pierced stars.

“Before you are failures.” She gestured at the low corpse pyres, the cremations. “Those who burn fell to the intruders; those beneath me have failed to arise from the blessings of our Great Snake’s children. Some are charred; to cleanse them from outside influence, while these,” she stomped on the vertical graveyard. “Will be thrown, still sleeping, into the pit.”

“They’re only paralyzed.” I whispered, elevating my rifle at the ready.

“Don’t shoot her yet!” Ash whispered, and with sudden urgency she pushed my rifle off of its arcane axis. “She’s going to push them into the pit.” My telekinetic scrambling barely caught the gun. “They’ve failed to wake from the ritual. Why deprive them of their due punishment?”

“I wasn’t gonna, jeez.” I lied.

Sure enough, the serpentine Priestess rolled the first corpse, which had insofar served as a morbid pedestal, into the hissing obscurity below.

“I thought you said initiation either proved your worth or killed you?” I pressed.

“They also conduct a monthly ritual of paralysis. Any that don’t wake after seven days are cast into the snake children’s pit, as offering. This is also not very good for their population.”

“I’ll say.” The burning bodies followed in succession, and as the mare’s pile grew smaller the smoke began to form a pillar rising out of the earth, a black remnant to the meat below.
“Why did they burn some of them?” I asked, but Ash just shrugged.

“There’s something off about this.” Caliber stroked her chin. Ritual sacrifice? Off?
“They look tribal.” She was right about that. They were defined by furs, bone and leather; blades laced with gleaming venom and rusted rifles bordering on scrap.
“I’ve only heard tell of two working cars in existence, and the other was owned by some big hero in the South-West, kind of pony who exists more by myth and legend than anyway else.”

“What’s your point?” The smoke had almost become solid, and still bodies were sent tumbling into the blackening pit. The Priestess watched, with a sadistic glimmer in her unreal eyes.

“There are only about a dozen of them left.” She gestured, as there were more corpses than there were ponies discarding them. “How long could a massively self-destructive group like this hope to hold onto a functioning jalopy? And why would they even want to?”

“To get to the house.” Ash offered, half in asking.

“So they’ll subject their initiates to lethal venom, but won’t ask them to walk a couple dozen miles north?” she continued. “And besides, look at the survivors.”

They were slight, lithe muscular builds only apparent as they labored over their dead compatriots. Weary eyed, empty stomached… a dying breed. Nothing like the Minotaur.

“That isn’t the Vipers’ Chrysalis.” She concluded.

“Oh no…” I gaped. “No no no.” Sleepyhead.

“Then they were hunting the Vipers.” Ash said plainly. “Just like us.”

“We need to go back!” I cried, though I choked over my words, suddenly asphyxiating due to my own panic. The Priestesses’ broken, yellow eyes met my gold, but I didn’t spare her a second thought, instead toppling over myself to get back to the car. “Come on!”

That buck was going to die, that buck was already dead. I had killed the Minotaur.
Caliber and Ash sprinted alongside me, perhaps with the same flickers of emotion dancing in their dark eyes. Mahogany for spurning the flames of the theft’s initiation, coals for falsely assuming a known enemy. They had been hostile, I bargained, they had been red bars.

A bullet buried itself into my hind leg, just below my flank, sending me into a hard, tumbling collapse, punishing me. But they had been hostiles… like these, just as dangerous, just as deserving of death. Though I tried to comfort myself, there was the dauntless fact that I had to make sure… to acquit myself of the title that I had been so long associated with: murderer.

If only I could live long enough to do so.

I fired the Fixit stick (Name in Deliberation) wildly, dissuading the Vipers who rushed to finish me off with paralytic blades and bullets with a more permanent effect.
See Caliber, I though as she helped me to take cover behind the jalopy, Lethal Gun isn’t redundant. I was still alive, and for Celestia’s sake, the Minotaur had to be too.

A dozen Vipers had spilled from the primitive settlement, the ancient squatter camp, including the now battle-saddled Priestess. Three had already fallen, and now lay on display, filthy bodies rocking on the surface of the golden ocean.

“Kill the Priestess!” Ash eeped, her own weapon unable to overcome the mare’s guarded distance. “If she hits the car’s reactor it’ll explode.”

“I’ll get her.” I promised, as I pulled myself to the other end of the volatile derelict. “Just make sure the others don’t get close.” The Plain did not provide much cover, but the Vipers channeled their god’s sleek agility in combat. They maneuvered in a random coordination, dodging buckshot and rifle round alike to move ever closer to the stolen Chrysalis.

It was foolish of me to take responsibility for our imminent nuclear obliteration. Being crippled had its disadvantages, namely: I was now grossly disadvantaged.
Reaching the illusive mare, that herald of damning ritual and tribal suicide, would’ve been easy for Caliber, she probably could’ve made the shot from the jalopy, but I had to step up.
She was the one who had crippled me, after all… the one I could blame.

With a few pathetic lunges out of cover, spanning the extent of a frail stone’s toss, I raised my rifle in a golden-laced taunt. The Priestess ceased fire on the nuclear hot bed and, grinning, turned to gun down the mare who had interrupted her primal ceremony.
There wasn’t much honor on this battlefield…

I slid into S.A.T.S

The now unfamiliar sound of technology, the kind that shamed the laws of physics and time, the kind that made a dangerously nuclear jalopy, look like a… the kind that made absolutely anything else look like a dangerously nuclear jalopy.

Frozen, the world became drowned in a steely tint, turning the earth tones of tawny grass and splintering pinewood into artificial cools, the colors of the future – No - the colors of the past. Even her snake eyes soothed into the sleek conformity, though the savage lust still remained. Pierced stars stopped twinkling, reduced to the fractured silence of ice.

My Pip-buck claimed that I didn’t have good odds, but contradicted itself just by existing.
I had the best odds anypony could possibly have, that I could have, in this infinite moment.

I lined up two shots with her head.
A little ambition never hurt anypony… it was about time that it did.

I heisted before I let time resume, stalled by words dancing over the Priestess’ mouth.
Those who burn fell to the intruders; charred to cleanse them from outside influence.
The Minotaur buck had mentioned Cabanne, admitted that he had been here; he had become enraged when we had revealed it as our destination.

Time recomposed itself, and two shots fired from my rifle.
Rotting wood splintered instead of bone – of both snake and pony – rust instead of blood.
I had reprogrammed the shots to the Priestesses’ rifle, and the first had landed, immediately dematerializing the aged weapon rig.

She bit down on the trigger, less than seconds after it became obsolete.
The bloodlust died in her serpentine eyes, replaced with a fleeting worry.

I held the buffalo killer for all to see, its sights locked on the Viper’s matriarch.
Gunshots, too powerful to come from these decrepit raiders, sounded the death of her compatriots, the massacre of snakes in the grass… Cut off its head.

“Don’t move!” I ordered, hoping that Caliber would arrive to take over the interrogation soon. “I just need to ask you a few questions about those intruders.” It seemed the ‘God Cop’ was the role that I was born to play. But, looking on, I knew that it wouldn’t work on its own.

She spat, her saliva glistening in an unnaturally dark hue. “You are all the same to us.”

They were braver than raiders, smarter too; she wouldn’t want to help us with anything.
“Who were they?” Did they deserve to die? “I’ll let you go as soon as you tell Me.”

“Let me go where?” the slits in her eyes seemed to narrow. “To my empty home? To the empty vassals that are left? All I have waiting for me is the Great Snake.”

“You killed yourselves.” I deflected. “Left yourself defenseless and weak.”

“Wrong, the weak were the ones who were removed; the strong are all that remain.”
She began pacing towards me, ignoring my mocked rifle pokes. I must have looked so frail.

“You are all that remains.” I pointed out; trying to destroy whatever confidence was slowly driving her forward. “We killed your initiates at the lake; you may well be the last Viper.”
This didn’t work, the Priestess charged with newfound fury, seeking to avenger her slaughtered kin. After a moment’s hesitation, almost too long, I blew out her kneecap.

Paralytic, I thought, as the barely wielded blade disappeared into the grass.
She grunted, but had a remarkable recovery, rising to stand on shattered bone and cartilage. No walking, no further attacks, just an intensely hateful stare.

Caliber had appeared at my side, hurriedly joining me at the signs of escalating conflict.
“She won’t talk easily. She’s got resolve, they all did, wanted to seem honorable in front of their Great Snake.” The mercenary began to coo. “You’ve got nobody to protect but yourself.”

“There is a violence in your eyes.” The Priestess grinned. “I am interested in your threats.” Hello? Busted knee cap? Remember that? “Tell me… Why should I tell you anything?”

“There’s something in your eyes, too.” Caliber offered. “I bet it melts.”

She laughed. “Fair try, but this is a product of devotion and alchemy, not some contact lens.”

“Ocular fluid boils, all the same. It doesn’t matter whether you’re blinded by a coating of hot plastic or just a messy cauterization, I’m not picky.”

I kept my mouth shut, hoping that the Priestess would gift me with an early confession, before I had to stop Caliber. “You’ll kill me eventually, then I will be rewarded for my silence.”

“What good does keeping this information do your God?” I intermediated. “If you really wanted to please him then you’d keep the Vipers alive, you’d want to live on.”
I had to assume that we had really killed all of them. But what excuse did I have this time?

Genocide II: I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking Plain!

“We have failed the Great Snake, my survival doesn’t change that.” She refuted.
I looked to Ash for a more knowing perspective, but the counter-zealot seemed just as confused about their religion as we were. “His children feast on our failures.”

“Let me talk to her, Shepard.” Caliber purred. “Like at the toll, I’ll be gentle, maybe just apply some pressure to…” she pressed against the shattered joint, only inciting a wince, barely more than a smile, from the Priestess. “Old wounds.” It was going to take a lot more than that.

“No, that Slaver was dying already, she’s just crippled.” I justified. “We can’t torture her just because we made a mistake.” Caliber frowned. “I’m not changing.” I reaffirmed more to myself than to the invalid or the interrogator.

Same policy as at the toll: I was against it, but would have to let it go if it was unavoidable.
Now I knew the stakes, and I knew that Caliber wouldn’t do it unless I let her, I knew more about the wasteland… but it hadn’t changed me.

“Learning, growing, training… those are all kinds of change.” She argued. “We leave her then I bet you’re forcing us on a two way trip to the lake, in a jalopy with barely enough power for one. Assuming that buck is even alive, just because you think he matters.” She was incapable of acting without my consent, but would argue all the same. “We don’t have time for that.”

“The Vipers are despicable, you’ve seen it.” Ash chimed. “This mare was just pushing unconscious ponies into a snake pit.” And the Slaver was buying that family.

“I’ll kill her if she needs it… but I won’t allow you to torture her.” I affirmed.

“Letting me do this doesn’t change anything about you.” Caliber was looking at the Priestess with an anger that went beyond strategy or convenience. “For fuck’s sake, you’re travelling with a mercenary and a walking abortion clinic, how moral d’you have to be?”

“What is that supposed to mean!?” I balked. “Why would you call Ash that?”

They both looked at me in surprised scrutiny, like I had missed out on an important and obvious class somewhere along the line. Even the crippled Priestess looked curious.
“It was a harsh way to say it.” Ash admitted, making Caliber mutter implied apologies that were apparently unnecessary. “But it is technically true. Her point is sound.”

I just stared on in a blank, dead-eyed paralysis.

“The last mare in the lake house?” she continued, taking over the assault from Caliber.
You’re responsible for two lives.
“She was pregnant.”

“What!?” I backpedaled away from them, drawing myself closer to the Priestess. “What!?”

“She was a viper, Gr- Shepard. It’s no big deal.” I sat back beside the last of their kind, who just watched with a sickly smile as I hyperventilated, as I frantically swapped sides.

“That’s…” I panted; as trying to yell set my dying lungs on fire. “That’s sick! You murderer!”

Ash drew back, hurt. “Hey!” Caliber interjected, taking my adopted role. “Don’t call her that!”

“Get back!” I cried, tears welling beside serpentine eyes. “Don’t… don’t don’t don’t…”
They were completely depraved… they were wastelanders.
“How can you be so… so… you slaughtered a family!”

“Of raiders. I need not repent for every kill, do I? I live for the Goddesses to accept me.” She deflected. “In fact… I travel with you so that I can atone by my actions, do good to outweigh all my failings… all my years of blindness.”

“How are we any different from them?” I screamed, gesturing wildly at the corpses and their matriarch. “That mare was unarmed… pregnant, Ash! She was a hostage!” It had bothered me then… but I had been looking at Ash as an innocent: a victim, as well as a patient.

“We aren’t monsters.” The Priestess purred. “We love and regret just as you do, pilgrim. Our God demands the same obedience, the same devotion. We are not so different.”

“Shut up.” Caliber ordered curtly. “You’re not a part of this.”

“My people have been massacred!” The mare wobbled on shattered bone, bringing herself to eye-level with her prospective torturer. “That mare, that unborn foal, all of them… were my kin! Intruders have always come, following charges of zealous savagery and bloodlust, and now you have finally wiped us out, you have finally destroyed the Vipers! My family!”

Genocide I: Savages, animalist, brain-dead degenerates. Liberated a people, cleansed a homeland, and ended countless affronts of rape and violence. The Healing of Zion.

Genocide II: Religious differences.

“Ash, you said towns have been chipping away at the Vipers, that Cyrus hunted them…” I tried to reconstruct myself, though I still shivered beside my lonely crippler. “Why?”

“They are an affront to the Goddesses.” She stood, resolute. “To your Equestria.”

“There’s no torture, no terrorism, no besieging of defenseless towns or caravans.” No mutilated corpses decorating their camps, no signs of anything but heresy. We were becoming the sin. “The Vipers aren’t raiders… we are different from them… we’re worse.”

“They did attack towns, they cannot hunt, cannot sustain themselves.” Ash argued. “Everything they have was stolen from the ponies of the Northern Plain.”

The Priestess laughed, her beads and feathers bristling. “I won’t deny that we have no regard for filthy heretics, your kind serves no greater purpose than as offering to the Great Snake.”

“Kidnappings, culling, a false god’s claim to towns and settlements.” Ash continued. “You’re letting this monster win you over, and she isn’t even trying.”

“There is no reason for your pathetic moral distress.” The Viper whispered to me, unnervingly close. “I enjoy nothing more than wrenching your blasphemous filth from their homes, taking their food to feed my people, their bodies to feed the Great Snake’s children. Your only crime was following the wrong god, and for that… you are already damned.”

My panic was fading, but only to the point from which it had begun, losing its escalation to boil down to Ash’s crime. “Did you know?” I asked the sinner. “Before you killed that mare.”

“Yes.” She freely confe- no: announced. “It didn’t matter then, it doesn’t matter now.”

“I’ve killed mares with child.” The Priestess chirped, as if this were an abortionists anonymous meeting. “One I shot along the rails, a conflict in her sad little shanty town, a bullet in her sad little heart. The other I cast into the pit, as she failed to wake up from the ritual sleep.”

“Shepard did say that we could kill you.” Caliber reminded, only inciting another sickly smile.

“I’ve come to realize that there is still something I must do to appease the Great Snake.” I flinched away from her, expecting a sudden dagger or chokehold. “Not what you think,” she laughed. “But I will tell you what you want to know. I see that as you promise my survival, you will be unable to deprive me of it.” Those broken eyes tore into me.

I jumped at this. “Who were the intruders that came before us?” Did they deserve to die?

“The Libertines.” Her eyes narrowed, lids over slits, cleaving their yellow hearts.
I didn’t know if that meant anything, but I started pulsing healing magic into her shattered kneecap, drawing the pieces together as best I could.

“That… that sounds positive.” Caliber murmured, meeting my own hopeless eyes. I distracted myself in work, making reparations for the Priestess.

“It’s not.” Ash smiled weakly. “They’re anarchists; they follow impulse and pride, a band of rapists and braggarts.” The words sounded odd coming in such happy delivery. “Like Vipers, but with no doctrine other than besting each other’s conquests and pillages. That is no doubt why that buck was so intent on his test, he must have thought us Vipers, and was unsatisfied with the fight he had here. He saw no point in returning to his own unchallenged.”

I sighed, the weight of four lives lifting off of me. “Thank you.” The Priestess didn’t care.

“Pride…” Caliber repeated; worry fleeting back into her eyes. “What about when they fail? I’m guessing they’re not the type to go limping back home blackened and bruised without some kind of conquest under their belt.” I wrapped the Viper’s knee in gauze, still trying to distract myself from issues both new and old. “That buck might come after us.”

Ash nodded, the same concern dulling the relief in her eyes. “Worse than that.” She realized. “We’ve marked ourselves. Just like the Vipers must have done.”

“A challenge.” Caliber frowned. “Trophies.”

“If the other Libertines find out that we bested one of their strongest bucks…”

“They won’t only be coming after us for revenge...” The mercenary concluded. “We’ll be a trial, the next accolade for the taking.” I shivered. “We need to make sure he’s dead.”

“No.” I protested, blindly and instinctively. “Even if they deserved it, we still made a mistake. We’re not going to cheat our way out of this.”

Caliber sighed. “I’m sick of arguing, Shepard.” Her gaze fleeted to the Priestess as she used the pseudonym. “We’ve got trouble if that buck survives, too much unnecessary attention.”

“He might commit himself to us.” Ash offered in reassurance. “Too ashamed to tell his compatriots, too proud to let anypony else get his revenge for him.”

“Yeah, but we can’t bet on that. Besides: driving around in that car further south is going to draw the other Libertine’s attention anyway.” She had skipped over my protest. “We might as well use it one last time, there’s nothing in between here and the lake house.”

“I don’t want to go back there.” I pleaded, already trying to bury the abortion beneath the depths of my own guilt. “I need some time to forget this.”

“Don’t feel that you have to forget it.” Ash cooed. “When I…” The Priestess stretched out her stilted leg, and reminded us that we were no longer alone with our secrets. “I also found it hard to understand this kind of thing, once.” She amended.

Ash had killed a child, and clearly saw no need to repent…
Caliber had been a mercenary for nearly her whole life, and had lost something for it…
They were both capable of things, things that I saw as atrocities, things that were somehow justifiable in their minds, necessary or simply excusable to their minds.
Who was in the right? And could anypony really answer that?
They were strong.
I was weak.
I was good.
They were right.

“I… I can’t just drive off into the horizon, on the way to another fight.” I whispered, thin tears drying against my scarred cheek. “I need to think.” I can’t let it change me.

“My job…” Caliber held me at the shoulder. “Is to follow your orders, but, above and beyond that: I was told to protect you.” She tilted my head up, locking eyes. “Ash thinks the Libertines are a threat, that they’ll hunt us as they hunted the Vipers… for sport, for glory, they’ll come for us. My contractual duty is to make sure that that doesn’t happen.”

“Listen,” Ash interjected, drawing in to our odd circle. The Priestess still stared down the barrel of my floating rifle, waiting to be released, knowing that she would be. “This might not bother me, but I’ve hated the Vipers for as long as I’ve prayed. I’ve known to fear them for every relevant minute of my existence. I see a pregnant mare as another part of the machine, a contributor to the factory line, the bearer of another killer.”

“You can’t judge a fetus.” I argued meekly. “You can’t make that kind of assumption.”

“I can.” She gave me a pitying smile, thinking how hopelessly naïve I really was.
“But I see now that you cannot.” Caliber stood idly by, waiting for the instruction she needed. “You will not forgive me unless I let you, and I suppose it won’t matter if I force It.”

“If… if I forgive you then I-” Fail. “I wouldn’t have… in the Stable.” Her eyes were emotionless, almost uninterested. My judgment and forgiveness would never matter to her, at least, not in comparison. “But I can forget it… let me forget it.” Something her Goddesses couldn’t do.

“Fine.” She nodded, as if we had just agreed upon terms that she found acceptable. “We’ll go stop that Libertine buck, and leave you to Cabanne… to decide whether I can continue following you upon our return.” Of course you can, I wanted to say. Of course you will, but the offer of time… of a chance to bury this, was too important a prospect to deny.

“You’ll be stranded.” I reminded. “The Chrysalis will run out of power.”

Caliber shrugged. “We’ll figure it out, then meet you at the radio tower; give you a couple of days to sort whatever this is out.” We both knew that even she couldn’t help me. “I suggest you go talk to the buffalo after you’re done poking around the city, you’ll be safe with them.”

I didn’t want to be alone.
Left to drown in the infinity that was the Plain.
But I had to sacrifice one weakness to indulge another.
“I’m sorry,” I conceded, apologizing for my inherent failure to adapt. “Do what you need to do.”

They hesitantly backed away, edging towards the volatile jalopy.
“I won’t apologize for killing that mare.” Ash admitted. “But I am sorry that it hurt you.”

“Don’t- worry about it.” I tried to smile, waving them off as the tears ebbed on once again. “I’m sorry I called you a murderer… it’s just confusing… I’m afraid of-”

“Everything.” She nodded. “Me, the wasteland, yourself… I know.”
Caliber clambered into the driver’s seat, giving me a sad smile as she waited for Ash.
“Tell me if you couldn’t do it… when we see each other again. Don’t worry, just be honest.” The Pilgrim pleaded. “Tell me if I still need to work for forgiveness... to Atone”

“Okay,” I promised, crossing myself half-heartedly. “Keep each other safe… and, Ash,” I couldn’t help but to care for her then. “Come back.”

The abortionist… The religious realist, bowed in return of the sentiment, then joined Caliber in the jalopy. I had asked them not to leave me, then forced them to, weakness for weakness.

The knife-like Chrysalis rolled over golden surges, slowly disappearing into the North, to cross rail and road, returning to that great House, that massive, infallible grave of stemmed life and bitter memories. I would never see that place again. I would never have to be reminded of the failures associated with it, but I may not soon forget.

Foal killer, soul stealer, creeper of the night, hungry in the shadow, hiding in the light.
An old nursery rhyme, one to terrorize children into compliance rather than soothe them to sleep. I realized that the Vipers, this wasted tribe of devoted raiders, were the nightmares. Ash should get her forgiveness, as she was this story’s light, but there was still something soothing about being alone to think, something clarifying and simplistic.

The Priestess winced beside me, reminding me that I was crippled beside the head of a Snake, and promising that solitude and safety were both distant ideals.

“I can’t walk.” She hissed, wobbling on her feeble limb, as I tended to my own disability.

“I can’t deal with the loss of innocence.” The bullet spun out of its purchase in my flank.

“You win.” She laughed, innate sadism improving her mood. I felt she was very important then, as I had isolated myself for her decimated kind’s sake.

“Did you mean what you said?” I asked, cleaning the blood from my back leg. “About love.”

“No.” The more I hated the vipers, the easier it was to think about Ash. “My family,” she spat the word, as if it was a lie in itself. “Have always been failures. Now it has been proven.”

“What’s your Great Snake going to do about this?” I smiled, giving in to a sickly concord of friendliness with the zealous raider.

“The Vipers, myself included, are unworthy of his gifts.” She rubbed her eyes, reducing the serpentine design to a horribly chaotic mess of black and yellow, like bleeding Rorschach tests, turning her into something unnatural. “I would ask one more thing of you.”

“What’s that?” I stood, flexing my healing tendons.

“Take me to the pit.”

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Solar Powered: +2 health every 10 seconds from 6:00 a.m to 6:00 p.m, regardless of sun exposure.
(No strength bonus as Endurance is only 4.)

A SUPER SPECIAL MESSAGE:
Dear international audience, I am about to whore myself out:
And not in that way:
If you like this story, there's a button you can press.
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I urge you to do either accordingly, but for god's sake: tell me why you dislike it.
Find out where I live and write your reasoning on my house in goat's blood if you'd like... anything!
I feel there may be some haters we need to combat, even if I don't like to make an excuse out of this.
Anyway, let's use the POWER OF LOVE to defeat them! (Again: Not in that way.)
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