Fallout Equestria: Sola Gratia
Chapter 8: Where is my Mind?
“Life in the vault is about to change.”

I woke up in the cold. I was naked, I could feel it as the chilling wind burned against my body, and it felt like it was cutting me, though it passed by so slowly. I was waking up and the pain hadn’t gone. My limbs felt fine, functional and unbroken, my head felt fine, unbruised and no longer bleeding. My skin burned.

The pain was less intense, but more lasting. My body didn’t flinch at it; reflexes that would have once reacted had long since grown tired of trying. I wanted to move, to find out what was happening to me, what worked to bring on this sharp, soft pain. I still couldn’t move.

My gaze was fixed over a valley. This couldn’t be Littlehorn, the air was clear and the clouds were white, thin even. I could almost see sky behind them, not like the wall of gray and black that I was used to. Pine trees dusted with snow swayed in the corners of my eyes; if I could only look down; then I could see the living land, unburned, green and white instead of ashy pale. But my body wouldn’t comply.

This wasn’t my body.

I was detached from it, a part of the mind rather than the physical being. But I could still feel everything that made this existence a lie, the strength, the pain… As I got my bearings I realized that things were very wrong indeed. I was no longer a unicorn mare, I was an earth buck. This was a dream.

Or a memory, I realized, putting the shattered pieces making up the recent sequence of events together. I was unconscious, but at the same time I was here. I was inside a memory orb, watching a part of Damascus’ life play out before my eyes. A part of his life that he claimed to no longer know existed.

“So it starts now?” I said, in this unnaturally deep voice, unnatural moving. I felt myself speak, though I didn’t command it, and the voice was not mine. It was his, defined and powerful, but younger somehow. The mature, worldly tone I had come to obey was joined by a curiosity and innocence, softened by it.

“The recollector has begun recording, yes…” A heavily accented, attractive voice said.

“Now what?” I asked, in my new testosterone-laced pattern of speech, which was still laced with that Stable eloquence. “How will this serve to remove past memories if all it’s doing is saving the present?”

“That is not a normal recollector, it is an extractor.” Explained the exotic sounding mare. I continued to stare infuriatingly over the distant mountains, not shifting my gaze from the apparently cleansed land.

“I don’t need this memory extracted.” I… Damascus was starting to sound impatient.

“We can either do this… or I can explain it to you.” I could feel her standing at my side, her personable warmth acting against the searing cold. “You seemed excited to get this over with earlier.”

“I don’t want anything done to me that I don’t understand.”

“Always so curious.” She nuzzled against my side; her warmth brought me respite, a small smile danced to my host’s face. “I will try to simplify it… no offense.”

“Your people always intrigued ours. I don’t feel bad knowing that I can never understand things the way you do.” I finally turned away from the cliff face.

The mare was a zebra. Her lithe, light gray body was stripped with beautiful curving bands of black. Her hair was thick and rich, it was held in three zebra-tails by golden rings at the back of her head and in front of her ears. The rest of her mane rested against her soft, wise face. Her eyes were an intense blue. She wore a small brown jacket lined with white fur that covered little of her body, impractically but appealingly.

We stood on a long triangular outcropping of gray rock, clean rock. And the mouth of a cave lay at the end of it, entering the snowy mountain face. I wanted to take a moment to appreciate all the new things before me: The clean air, the thick snow, the green life and the pretty zebra. But Damascus was used to it all, he looked at the things I didn’t want to and continued to speak as I stared at what little I could in wonder.“A short explanation would be nice.”

“Short?” she scoffed playfully. “Zebras worked for years to adapt the Equestrian memory technology, to improve it with our own alchemistic magic, to expand the borders of mental manipulation to the point where we could experience two lives, ours at day and another’s while we slept.”

“So is that what I’m going to do? Sleep?” Damascus picked up, his mind working faster than its passenger’s. ‘Memory Technology’ was an entirely new concept to my own virgin consciousness.

“You want specific memories removed, yes?”

“You know what I want removed.” Sadness entered his tone; as a similar emotion flickered in her eyes. “First, I want to forget her. I cannot live with the guilt…” we met eyes, all three of us. “It is not my own...”

We embraced, bringing warmth to the cold between us. No… They embraced… and I, through some sick invasion, became a part of it as it replayed through the orb. I could feel the hesitance in his body when he kissed her; he reacted as one would when they thought that they were doing something ethically wrong.

“Why does that life still haunt you? What is stopping you?” she asked as he pulled away.

“My faith…” It was odd seeing Damascus emotional from such a close perspective. I hoped this extraction hadn’t brittled him into the guarded pony I had met in Hell, and that this warm emotion still existed within. “There are things that happened in that Stable that I haven’t spoken a passing word about to anybody.”

“You don’t want your entire life there erased!?” she was suddenly very apprehensive. “You accomplished so much! You are who you are because of those experiences! You changed so many lives!”

“Don’t worry; it’s just a few specific moments… like I promised. Most probably won’t even be from the Stable.” We reassured her. “Now will you tell me what I need to do?”

“Everything you want to erase.” She said as she collected herself. “Has an anchor. If we extract that anchor, all the memories attached to it come too.” We sat together in the snow. “My people discovered methods of controlling consciousness… so that that anchor could be accessed through thought.”

“A memory could be accessed by remembering it while wearing a recollector.” Damascus was picking up on this stuff a lot better than I was. I was still trying to process the situation that I was in which, according to the Zebra, was the simple form of memory recording and review.
“Exactly,” she smiled, enjoying their compatible understanding of each other. “I will use the extractor to remove these very moments, and in these moments you will intensely recall your anchors. One by one.”

“Doesn’t that mean I’ll also lose this explanation.”

“Yes,” she laughed. “I suppose I’ll have to go through it again in one of the gaps between filling each orb.”

“But surely no imaginings on my part could compare to recording the actual moment as it happened.” I felt satisfied as he continued to dig for the very information I wanted. “And what constitutes an anchor?”

“The intensity of the memory has to be incredible for it to be harvested through another memory, for extraction to happen over two streams of time is a difficult thing. But that’s where the alchemy comes in.” she pulled a bottle from her satchel and placed it in front of her. The liquid inside was clear but sparkled silver and gold. “We developed this… what your kind would call technology… to enable lucid dreaming. And I have adapted it for you to essentially relive a memory, through exploration of your sub-conscious. Everything you’ve ever seen or experienced is stored perfectly somewhere in there.” It sounded like she could have written Caliber’s dream book.

“How do I know what to remember? What qualifies as a suitable anchor?” I pried.

“What do you want to erase first?”

“My family.” He answered bluntly.

“Then think of the most important moment you had with them… preferably one that encompasses as many aspects and variables as possible. A first meeting or a special moment.” She hinted. “Make sure it was vivid, the best way to choose is by thinking of the memory that stands out the most to you now. Before you are under the influence of this.”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“Then we try another anchor.” She handed him the bottle. “Now please, all this explaining is futile. I will tell you everything you want to know… preferably when you aren’t wearing a device that will remove the information from your head directly afterwards.”

Damascus grasped the bottle of glinting fluid in his mouth then followed the zebra into the cave. The rocky insides of the crevice were lit up in the dim golden light of a fir fire. Herbs, talismans, masks and ornaments decorated the walls and surfaces. The horrific masks were what I had been taught to expect from a zebra, not the loving warmth and generosity that the mare with me was displaying. I felt bad for applying the stereotypes of her race onto her while we had yet to technically meet.

“After you drink it, you’ll pass out.” She ushered Damascus onto a warm, fur rug. The way these two were living implied that they were avid hunters. The thought was unsettling, but who was I to judge considering that I had already killed ponies that were frighteningly comparable to wild animals? “As your consciousness fades, I want you to think intently about the start of that memory; though it will be straining to your mind.” I felt relieved, thinking that I might not take a part of the painstaking mental effort. “And the memory will end as soon as you stop thinking about it, so stay focused.”

“I won’t be able to impact anything, will I? Like in a real lucid dream?”
“No, this is just a memory. It will be like entering a memory orb, actually.” She compared… ironically.

“And what happens to a unicorn that watches the orb we make from this extraction?” That was me!

“You said that wouldn’t happen.” Not a comforting response. “I thought you ‘just couldn’t stand the thought of deleting them forever and wanted to keep the black opals out of sentiment’.” She quoted.

“Hypothetically,” he humored her concern.

“I’m honestly not sure. It was hard enough for us to study this field considering we usually can’t watch the orbs ourselves, not without a recollector.” That seemed to make him think.

“Can we destroy the recollector after we’re done? And would watching these removed anchors bring back all my memories?” Don’t change the subject! Find out more about the very real, personal, hypothetical!

“Yes it would, but that device is too rare, I could not bring myself to destroy it.” She said apologetically. Damascus had spoken about allowing a unicorn to enter one of his orbs when he had given into the temptation of curiosity before. It didn’t sound like anything bad had happened to them, I consoled myself. It also didn’t sound like he had had access to the recollector anymore.

“Then you must hide it from me,” he reaffirmed. “You cannot let me access these orbs… Please.”

“We wouldn’t be doing this if I couldn’t promise that.” She reassured him. “Now, are you ready to begin?”

“Yes.” He picked up the bottle and tilted his head back, letting the contents flow down our throat. The feeling of detachment was unbearable. I got the nervous impulses that I was accustomed to but my mind couldn’t rationalize the source. It pondered why I felt liquid pouring down my throat and yet I had made no order to do so. And why my actual body was probably still thirsty.

“Don’t lose the Faith.” She lay us onto the rug as our body grew limp and loose. “It’s too important to you.”

“I would never… betray my Goddesses.” I could tell it was getting harder for him to talk. “I just want the guilt for sins that I am not guilty of, to leave me.” I couldn’t feel his apparent loss of consciousness. Ironically, in the real world it was Damascus who was conscious and I who was not. But in this plane of memories and dreams I was riding the mind of a sleeping pony, watching everything he saw, which at this moment was simply eternal darkness.

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

I could no longer feel his body as mine. I imagined that this was because he didn’t feel it either. I shared his senses, sights, smell, hearing, taste and touch but now the receptors drew empty. Apart from the blackness. This is what it was to be asleep, in the dreamless, speeding time of the resting mind. Except I was awake, and slowly but surely, my host began to join me.

I began to see what he was dreaming, what he was remembering. But not directly through my eyes. In the dark distance it was all happening, the memories of his life were flashing before him as he searched for his anchor. As he looked for the linking moment that could drag his family out of his mind. The images seemed to appear on a screen, far away, but they became bigger as he focused. The screen loomed closer as he narrowed into the time period that he wanted.

Steel flashed, familiar colors of gray with bands of yellow. We were going to the Stable. Intermittently, after what would translate to years of his life if played out in full, flashes of another color came through. Dim red and magical candle-light, as the Faith became a part of Damascus’ life the show slowed down. The screen almost filled my vision, our vision, and like a gradually slowing dial his recall approached real time. He had found the anchor.

We were in the memory.

Once again I felt like I was seeing the world through his eyes. The senses came back online as the memory grew incredibly vivid thanks to the Zebra concoction. I could feel the Stable, I could feel my home. We stood, Damascus stood, as his older self, and I watched.

The searing pain was gone, this buck was young, healthy and the cleanliness and comfort was stricking, even to me. He was easily my age, old enough to work, old enough to have a cutie-mark. But in front of us stood somepony with eyes of the same altitude sky blue, a buck that I could feel Damascus respecting. His body language towards the figure implied reverence mixed with ease, familiarity mixed with distance. A buck he had cared for his whole life, but wouldn’t embrace in public. His father.

“You’re old enough to know better.” We cut had cut into the middle of a conversation. “I don’t want you to end up like your mother.”

“She’s in the hospital, you know that I won’t get hurt doing this.” Our voice was young; its accent was slightly different to the one the Damascus I knew spoke with. The power behind it was milder, but present.

“You know what I mean Damascus. They keep her locked to that bed, handcuffed; she might as well be in the holding cells.” Remorse filled the old buck’s voice. His graying mane was unkempt and his brown coat was almost mangy. He looked like a bachelor, the state of the room indicated that he lived like one too. “If they didn’t think there was something wrong with her, some excuse, then she’d be locked up just like anypony else. Just like you will be.”

“You have to let her go.” We placed our hoof on his shoulder. “Remember the last time we talked with her? She barely even knew who we were. She couldn’t even figure out where she was.”

“The last time WE talked with her… was a long time ago.” He countered.

“Like I said… you need to let her go.”

“I don’t want to lose you too… I don’t like to admit it, but I’m getting old Damascus. I might go the way she did soon.”

“She isn’t senile… she’s damaged.”

The older buck sighed. “I’m just worried you’re going to get locked up again. The commissary promised they would be cracking down on the insurgence in the coming weeks.”

“They’re calling us the insurgence now?” Could there be discord in the Stable? I wondered.

“You’re acting like a rebellion, how do you expect them to react?”
“I want them to let us live our lives as we want to. Not monitored by these damned devices.” He waved our Pip-buck in the air.

“You’ve always wanted that… but before it was juvenile. They threw you in the cells for being a delinquent, for petty crimes and stupid, childish behavior. Now they’re treating you like a political enemy. The fallout will be much worse for what you’re doing now, than for any of the crimes you committed before.”

“Can’t you just be happy that I’m out of that life!?” we demanded. “I haven’t been in the Security wing for years! I used to go down to Maintenance and inject chemicals with those delinquents that I called friends! You can’t possibly want me to go back to that!” He was breathing deeper, emotional toil coursed through his body. “I would have died… they would have thrown me out!”

“But why couldn’t you come to us for help? Why him?”

“He taught me everything that I believe. Mother was going insane, whether you like to admit it or not, and you had your hooves full dealing with her. Besides… he came to me.” Our similar eyes locked. “If you had done the same… maybe things would have turned out differently.” We began to walk for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I called a meeting. The Faith is going to make itself known.” Damascus spun around to face his father. “We’re going to make ponies see the truth, the oppression these walls entail. The lies that riddle our system of Governance.”

“You don’t have to be a part of this! Let your Prophet do his own dirty work!”

“The Prophet is my teacher, but he is not our leader.” We replied with cool control. “He kept the Faith from his grandfather, passed it along. He preserved our beliefs, to share them with us now. But he will not bring light to this Stable.”

“And you will?”

“The Faith will… and if I am the one that must endure the fallout to achieve this, then so be It.”

“Leave it be, Damascus.” The old buck pleaded.

“I can’t… it’s my destiny. The symbol on my flank came before I met the Prophet. It drew him to me, let him know that the time for truth, for freedom, had come.”

“You’re blind.” He spat. “You think you owe this buck, but you don’t, you think you owe the Goddesses, but their long dead. And above all, your letting that girl cloud your judgment.”

“I haven’t touched her! I have adhered to the rules; I haven’t deceived or insulted my Goddesses. And from tonight onwards I will never be tempted to again, not only for her, but for anything. Following my oath has changed me, for the better. Take solace in that.”

The buck across the room paused. His head bowed as he struggled with his anger and fear for his son.

“If I can’t change the path you’re on...” Damascus took interest in this submission. “Then I suppose there’s no sense in losing you by trying.” He walked over to us and offered his hoof to shake. “Congratulations, I hope you’ll bring her to meet me someday.”

“Tomorrow.” We returned the respectful shake then turned to leave out of the sleek door as it slid open.

A familiar hallway, my hallway. In fact the room that I had slept in only a couple of nights ago lay just a few doors down. We were on the upper, administrative level and Damascus continued on a path I knew all too well. We were going down, presumably to the lower Atrium if the Faith had begun where it still congregated today. The yellow striped gray steel was familiar, almost comforting, synonymously with its disturbia. I felt like I wanted to get out, and that I never wanted to leave, all at the same time.

The sounds of the Stable took me home; the feel of the metal under-hoof and the encapsulating air hit me with nostalgic force. I almost felt like I was in my own body, walking down the stairs to the middle level on my way to see Dr. Cross or Nurse Clearheart, eager to get another menial task to occupy myself with. It was an eerily pleasant feeling, the consistency, knowing what to expect around every turn as we passed through the residential area of the Stable. No raiders or Slavers, no alicorns or radiation, just gray and yellow. It was safe, but wrong.

I wondered if enough time had passed in this continuum for Slaver bands to have formed on the surface of Equestria. Damascus had said that his ‘Prophet’ passed the Faith down from his grandfather, which would mean we could be but two generations after the Great War.

As we passed the school I realized definitively how much of a gap there was between my time in the Stable and Damascus’. The mural that would come to exist over the generations that followed was, in this memory, nothing but a few juvenile scribbles on the schoolroom hallway walls. Eventually an enterprising teacher would get the inspiration to turn the disobedience of writing on this steel into a creation of art. That had yet to happen though, and now the hallway was as dull as any other, save for the work of a few untalented juvenile delinquents and their crayons.

We were going to the Maintenance level, I realized, a place that I had rarely frequented and was almost unfamiliar with. Damascus clopped down the last stair-case into the dingy lower floor. It wasn’t as rusty or scratched as I had known it, but the gritty atmosphere was the same.

Before we proceeded much further, Damascus ducked into a bathroom. Thankfully he stopped at a mirror rather than heading for the stalls or the unfamiliar devices that weren’t present in the ladies’ room.
Damascus looked at himself, he looked at himself looking at himself, and I watched.

The buck before us looked young, but I could see Damascus in his eyes. He was not the color of meat but a pale tawny brown, and his coat looked unnaturally healthy compared to how I knew him. His hair was a cinnamon red, his tail and mane both short and wavy, their colors were pure and hadn’t even begun to fade into the gray he would have over a hundred and fifty years from now. His shining, naïve eyes coupled with the white freckles above his snout made him look very young. His pupils were the usual obsidian and his irises retained that inherited, atmospheric blue.

He examined himself carefully, pushing a short wavy fringe until it set nicely away from his eyes. As I watched his innocence I hoped that mine was still intact. I had been in the wasteland for just about a day and I was already feeling as if this Stable-grown, pure part of myself was slipping away. Any trace of this young buck in Hell’s Damascus was gone, and I hoped that wouldn’t happen to me someday. I wanted to stay the way that I had last seen myself in a mirror, if not a little wiser and worldlier, but I doubted I could control the parts of me that the wasteland would come to change or steal.

Once the young, self-conscious Damascus was done examining himself we turned to leave the bathroom. As his body reflected in the mirror I caught a glimpse of his cutie-mark. It was the same as the one that I had seen burned or scabbed into his side except it retained its rich color, as the same golden cross that adorned my father’s coat. I didn’t know what could cause a cutie-mark to change from this to the wound on present-day Damascus, but the symbols were the same. His destiny was truly the Faith.

Down the hallway a ways we approached another sliding door. At our arrival it spread open to reveal the dimly lit, red and candle-dotted room within. Actual candles glowed, not the magical conjuration of imitation that I was used to. The atmosphere reminded me of a service, but the room itself was still in common with the rest of the maintenance floor, dirty and dank. Something dripped in the corner.

Less than a dozen ponies stood in the dim light, mares and bucks of varying ages. Most noticeable, if only for the sense of power and wisdom emanating from him, was an aged buck rested on his haunches in the corner. He was a rich, deep gold and his silver eyes glinted in the candle-light, his mane was a faded dark brown and his age was apparent in every aspect of him, but still the aura of power emanated.

Despite the respectful nod Damascus gave the old buck, his attention was quickly drawn to another pony shrouded in the darkness. A mare, beautiful even in the dim candle-light. Every shade of her palette was a derivation of gold, hair like afternoon sunlight and a coat like earthy corn, even her eyes, a rich brown, were laced with bands of the same royal color. She had no horn or wings, though Damascus had eyes only for her pretty face, so I could only assume that she wasn’t a Pegasus. Her mane and tail were painstakingly kempt and well-tamed, she looked like a model from a pre-war advertisement, but her eyes shone with depth of character rather than the cheap, faked emotions of a smiling spokes-mare.

Time sped up, as Damascus skimmed over the events that followed, editing the memory as we lived through it. He didn’t change anything, but just shifted his focus. All he was thinking about was that mare. The world resumed its normal progression every time he looked at her, slowing just enough to get a solid picture of the memory that he truly wanted to leave behind.

His Faith was his own, his failures were his own, but she was something he could not ignore, an independent factor of his life. A being that affected him, rather than a moment he had affected.

He was speaking to the gathering, that much I could tell, but he didn’t want to delete this moment, just her presence. So with every glance at her he allowed the extractor to take her in, to erase her. His work could stay, the Prophet could stay, and his founding of the Faith had made him who he was. But she weakened him, he had become the pony devoid as I had met him because he had omitted every positive pined for from his memory, his loves, his happiness and his vestiges of a good life led.

He was hardening himself to deal with the world. I worried for the zebra on the mountain with his sleeping body, would he ask her to remove herself from his mind? Was he preparing himself to return to the Wasteland from their living sanctuary in the snow and pines by removing anything that he believed slowed him down, any emotional ballast that weighed on him, positively or not?

I wanted to tell him that happiness was one of our greatest gifts, that if it stopped him from being the cold buck he felt he needed to be then he should let it. He should keep these moments, or when he lay dying he would have only a barren, grayscale wasteland to look back on. But I couldn’t speak to either version of Damascus, not the eraser or the memory, as the moment sped by.

The congregation was applauding, cheering him on as he announced whatever plans he had for the Faith. As he spoke of whatever course of action they would take to ‘save’ the Stable from disbelief and indoctrination. The Prophet didn’t speak; he just sat beside Damascus and nodded as the student preached his teacher’s words. Eventually the aged buck stood, to a roar of slowed cheering as Damascus stared at the golden mare just in time to make the moment tangible.

“We will make ourselves known, we will offer our beliefs to those who would partake of them, and we will fight the oppression of this despotic dystopia!” continued Damascus, addressing the small crowd and his Prophet, while looking only at his mare. “Every moment this Commissary’s system persists is another moment that insults the Goddesses, that suppresses our ability to reason, to think for ourselves. Belief should be a choice; Faith shouldn’t be ignored because somepony is dangling a carrot at the end of a string down a road of blasphemy.” I understood his metaphor for Ascension. “We don’t need genes preserved in pods to make Equestrian good again, morals aren’t genetic, we need a creed, a promise that keeps us faithful to the old Equestria, to the wishes of our Goddesses, who can no longer rule and govern us directly, thanks to our own selfishness and violence. We need to make ourselves good out of nature, not out of a desire for personal gain.” Irony, if sin was avoided to attain a different kind of Ascension. “We need to show the Stable that we aren’t what they think we are: we aren’t a band of juvenile anarchists or a troupe of showy, bored, children. We aren’t zealots, we aren’t insane. We are simply free thinkers, and we choose to believe what we want to, not what we are instilled to. It is this mentality, not only the Faith, which we need to spread to our conformed brothers and sisters, by any means necessary.” He concluded, the passion and power I knew his voice for had been clear in his speech, and it let everypony listening know that this was what he was fighting for, this was what he truly believed in.

Time accelerated once more as the Prophet came up to more cheers and shook Damascus’ hoof. He was the speaker, the arm, but the Prophet was who they still saw as their leader. Together they had founded the Faith, so may decades ago, that had now grown to constitute at least a third of the Stable. I was watching history speed by me as my host preserved it against the extractor. I had never heard Damascus’ name spoken in reverence, as a founder or a father to the now large order. He had seemingly been forgotten by his flock, leaving the only credit he had in his own mind. And so he kept it.

The ponies filed out, Prophet first, leaving Damascus behind. The stunning mare stayed with him.

Memory clear, slow, real, they embraced. Guarded intimacy between them, Goddesses’ assumed law keeping them from being together. I felt her warmth, the physical as she kissed the buck whose mind I occupied decades later, and the emotional that filled the young body of said host.

“What did you think?” he asked her, smiling warmly, still close to her in the candle-lit room.

“You’re really charismatic when you want to be.” She laughed warmly. “If they weren’t ready before then they certainly are now.” Her voice was sweet and young, like his own as he spoke to her.

“Are you ready?” they still held each other close as they sat together on the metal floor. “After we make this public they’ll be no going back. You’ll always be a part of the Faith in their eyes.”

“I’m sick of lying. It’ll be nice to live in a place where everypony lets everypony else be. Where you can live how you want to live and feel like you can think for yourself again.”

“I didn’t mean the movement…” her eyes widened in excitement.

“Then whatever did you mean?” she asked slyly, hoof rested against his chest and deep eyes fixed intently on his own.

“Will you marry me?” she rocked over onto him and they fell, sprawled, onto the floor together. She kissed him deeply, body curled up on top of him, eyes closed.

“Yes, Goddesses yes.” She whispered. Again I felt like an intruder in an intimate exchange as they held each other on the cold floor of Maintenance, on the very lowest plane of our Stable.

I couldn’t imagine how Damascus had been feeling, as he was watching parts of his life for the last time. If this worked he would never know this moment happened. He would never know how happy he had been, curled up with his wife to be in the middle of such volatile times. I wished more than anything else that, at that instant, I could just speak to him, tell him to replay this anchor to himself, to reattach these memories to the stream of his life.

What else would this delete? Their marriage? Their children? I knew the answer was everything. Everything he had ever experienced with this mare would be taken away from him, pulled out by a single powerful memory. This was wrong.

They lay together, resting in each other’s embrace, staring up at the golden lit ceiling. The candles were going out, slowly but surely, the wax was burning down over the wicks and extinguishing the flames. The speech we had bypassed must have been longer than I had thought, though it had been the unofficial founding of the Faith after all, the moment when they became more than a small collection of idealists, and became ponies willing to fight for their ideals. By any means necessary.

“They’re really up there, aren’t they?” She asked, nuzzling into his strong chest, as his arm wrapped around her.

“Of course.”

“Do you think we’ll ever meet them?” she sounded so beautiful, I couldn’t help but share in Damascus’ emotions, his body felt them, so I did too. The warmth on my chest, the warmth in my heart.

“I’ll be waiting for you with them.” He promised.

“Don’t… don’t talk like that.” She seemed like she had heard him make this dark promise before.

“Alright.” He complied, wisely preserving the moment in perfection. They continued to stare at the fading ceiling, the room getting darker as the lights burned out.

“Can we sleep here tonight?”

“You… you know I can’t do that until…”

“Just sleep.” She assured him, laughing her golden laugh. “And each other.”

“Alright.” He held her close and buried his head into her soft mane, closing his eyes.
“I love you Sweetheart…”

Her breath was soft against my chest; I could feel her arms on our body, limp and resting. She was asleep. So we followed her into the darkness.

As Damascus slept the memory ended, I was pulled back into the numb void. Floating in pure black in a form that I could only imagine was my own, otherwise I would be nothing. The screen pulled away, getting smaller and smaller as it faded into the eternity. And, once again, I was watching sleep.

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

I worried that I would be trapped in this nothingness until Damascus awoke, but as quickly as we had zoned in onto the memory I was being pulled out of it. The link to my host was breaking, though he wasn’t waking up, I was being disconnected from his sub-conscious. The zebra must have realized that the memory was over, and now began to remove the extractor from Damascus’ head. The orb that sat within it would come to anaesthetize me years later, but for now it had served its purpose, the memory of Damascus’ mare had been destroyed, but preserved. Kept separate but safe.

As the orb left it harvested every memory Damascus had of her, as promised.
They flashed by me, if Damascus watched this they would reaffirm the memories into his mind, reattaching him with his past, but to me they were just blurs and fleeting moments.

More meetings, candle-lit and cozy, became expansive. Pony after pony added to the crowd where the golden mare stood, I saw the lower atrium flash by, then the main one, the cafeteria, their room…

A wedding, in the most spectacular sense of the word, flashed by. White and Red paper roses decorated the walls of the lower atrium to honor her name. The group watching was small, but she wasn’t in the crowd. She was right in front of me. She does.

Hospital, happy for once. No mother imprisoned to a bed, talking to herself, father beside me. She was at peace, a life for another, a natural exchange.

A child played, a filly, rolled and laughed in between her toys that lay scattered across a steel floor.
Marie.
She was young, too young to speak, too young to run. She had the bluest eyes.

Soon after the child, came red. Too much red to comprehend, all over my hooves, all over my home. The child was crying somewhere. But she was silent, she wasn’t breathing, and she couldn’t look at me.
Rose.

A bleeding Prophet, my hooves became bruised and bloody, but I didn’t care.
A life for another…
The satisfying end must have stayed behind, Damascus would keep it, he wouldn’t understand it, but he would remember the feeling of rage being sated, and sadness persisting.
Repent.
<-=======ooO Ooo=======->

Stone instead of Steel or Rock. Ruin instead of Safety or Peace. Wasteland instead of Stable or Life.

I woke up in the cold. I was naked, I could feel it. The grated metal chilled my back, but there wasn’t any pain. My body didn’t ache, it didn’t sear, and it wasn’t scarred or broken or burnt. My limbs were functional and unfractured; my head felt fine, unbruised and no longer bleeding.

This was my body.

I was out in the world, not in the Stable that the metal floor had implied to me. In fact it wasn’t a floor at all, it was a cart. Like those I had seen at the Acheron Supermarket, horse-drawn and made of thin metal. I was surrounded by junk, cans of preserved food, scraps of technology and boxes of ammunition. The cart rattled as it was pulled along the barren landscape.

I first saw the sun, directly ahead, hovering in that space of sky between the horizons of earth and cloud. Just to the right of it was Zion Mountain, but instead of menacing, it was beautiful. White trails of dust, streamed off it as they were lit up by the brilliant gold of the sun. Snow and Sunshine, White and Gold.

The black mountain was dusted with frost and at this distance it was clearly a lot more jagged and layered than I had expected. Its range stretched out to the East, encompassing a distant valley filled with tall trees, whose vague bodies almost looked green. Directly to my right was the tapering conclusion of another mountain range, the South Zion range, one that just moments ago had been far away from me.

Not moments ago, I realized, hours.

I didn’t want to look around anymore, I wanted to sit back and engorge myself in the sun. The band of clear sky had doubled in size thanks to my new proximity; it was faded blue, almost gray in fact. But the magnificent sun burning pale gold dominated it. The rays cut through thin clouds and snowy mist, lighting up the cold world in its implied warmth.

Wherever I was going, I was heading towards it. And that was good enough for me. Whoever was pulling this cart, was taking me exactly to where I wanted to be. I would thank them when we got there.

My head lolled in the slowly lurching vehicle, I submit and pulled my eyes from the sky to look at my surroundings. The land was flatter, but still rocked over itself making the line of sight to my sides short. Pine trees rose out of the ground sporadically, barren and dead, leafless and gray. The thin branches could no longer catch the falling snow. Snow that now dusted the ground as it did the mountains.

It looked like somepony had poured a little sugar over the world.

I loved where I was, I loved the fresh, cold air, I loved the beautifully simplistic palette of the land and I loved the sun. Why couldn’t I have a sun cutie-mark like Harvest had? When was I ever going to find a couple of ones with a dot in the middle lighting up the sky? Making everything so… perfect.

Bouncing over rocks and dirt the cart rocked me gently, juggling the junk within over me as we went. I hadn’t really moved since I had awoken, and simply allowed my head to be shifted about while I took everything in. This was just fine, north was where the MASEBS tower was, I had seen it from the gas station. Whatever was happening was right, I was making progress, so why not just sit here and bask?

No reason at all.
My head was jolted back; it lay loosely over the bottom left corner of the cart. I was now staring at a colossus. An earth mover, over four hundred feet tall, easily. I had read about them, I think Crane, a pre-war pony whose logs I read, had worked with them. In that south western quadrant of the bracket the metallic behemoth stood, far away but still so large.

A Bucket Wheel Excavator, I remembered the technical term. The largest was eight hundred feet long and four hundred high. I wondered where it was, because the one I was looking at easily met those specifications by my, admittedly groggy, estimate.

It was sort of shaped like a squat crane, upside-down because of the way I regarded it, and at the end of its arm was a round scoop that looked like a flat saw blade at this distance. In fact, from here it looked more like a weapon than an excavating tool. It had two shorter arms that stuck up in an upside-down (currently right side up from my perspective) V that supported the longer, more horizontal arm.

Its base was thick, looking like an angular pyramid with four or five levels that grew smaller and smaller from the ground up. But the arms themselves were thin, at least they were made up of seemingly thin beams of metal, gaps were evident in patterns along all of them. Its arm wasn’t bent into the ground; I doubted anypony would actually find cause to do any mining now that the world had ended.

I actually felt the urge to twist myself around so I could see it facing the right way up, converting the gray clouds from bottom to top again. The cart said different though and I shifted deeper into it as it lurched again, my head rested against the back of the framework, facing the sun. Fine by me, Cart, I smiled.

This is how I stayed for a fairly long time, Zion got bigger as me and Cart headed north to meet the Sun. In school they had introduced the celestial body to us, personified it, oddly enough it had always worn sun-glasses. I wasn’t naïve enough to think that’s how it would be, but I still wanted to be closer to it, if not to meet it then just to feel it as much as I could. It was the only thing that was the same.

Beyond the freakily constant clouds and the beautifully dead land the sun was the only thing that I had heard described that fit its description. The war hadn’t changed it. It was the kind of thing that could almost make you believe that Celestia was actually up there. I promised myself that I would awake very early the next morning, in hopes of seeing the moon. That certainly wouldn’t have changed either; they were both so far away, so detached from our mortal problems. Goddesses in the sky, I entertained. It wasn’t hard to see where that idea had come from.

Ash… I realized the importance of taking stock of who I was with. Not for my sake, but for my companions, anything could have happened in the hours that I dreamed a memory. I could be in a Slaver’s caravan, being dragged to the pens. I could have become the toy of a Raider, mutilated and molested in my unconsciousness. And in either of those situations, Caliber and Ash would have had to have failed in protecting my useless body. They would be dead, or in just as much trouble as I was in.

I tried to look over the junk to who was pulling my cart but it obscured my view. I kicked my hind legs softly, shifting the pile on top of them. I crooked my neck to look just ahead, at my captive/driver.

It was the flank side of a buck; his gray tail was electric, spiky and unkempt as was the mane poking out from beneath his military green cap. His coat was a chocolate brown but his face was invisible to me. His cutie mark was a yellow road sign, two black arrows pointing up and down respectively in the confines of the diamond shaped sign.

From what I could tell he was wearing a pale green trader’s vest, thick with a black collar and several stuffed pockets, cutlery hung from the side of it. Underneath it he wore a dark brown sweater that was rolled up at his front legs, it was only a couple of shades darker than his coat. He wasn’t wearing a battle saddle, meaning he was either not a smart wastelander, or he was a unicorn.

I was definitely a unicorn, so I levitated my… I didn’t have any weapons on me. My mother’s gold locket still lay on my bare chest, indicating I hadn’t been robbed, though my belongings were not on me or in the cart. My legs felt fine but were set in braces; I could move them with ease, to the point where I hadn’t even noticed their support. I could pounce him, I hypothesized, being a wasteland buck he was most likely stronger than me but I had the element of surprise on my side. Though he did too considering I had no idea if his allies followed behind us, I hadn’t seen anything when looking at the Earth Mover, but then again, I had been looking at the Earth Mover, a towering metal beast of pure distraction.

My Pip-buck was still on my wrist, so I checked the E.F.S. radar, one ahead two behind, friendlies… No, non-hostiles, all of them.

“I might have to stop here, ladies.” Called back the buck, his accent was fast-rated and a little nasal, not unpleasantly so, just interestingly. In fact I liked his dialect, though he had interrupted my great escape’s planning with it. “I’m certainly not going through Zion to get to where I’m headin’”

“Fair enough,” replied the slightly rural, gentler dialect of my first friend in the wasteland. Her voice gave the greatest feeling of comfort in my panicked state. I eased up immediately. “If you don’t mind waiting until she wakes up…”

“No problem, I’m, not going to make you drag a limp mare through the dirt after what you all did for me.” He stopped walking. “I figure that, if anything, I still owe you.”

“And I apparently have nothing against cashing in on gratitude.” Laughed Caliber. “You really have helped us out, Stockholm; let’s say were even once we part ways, huh?”

“Good deal for me.” He turned in the cart’s harness. He wore glasses, a thin set that rested on the very end of his snout. His eyes were a clear green and he wore a ragged neckerchief tucked into his neat outfit. His mane was trying even harder to get out from beneath the front of his cap. On which a pair of black goggles were strapped. “Looks like we aren’t going to be waiting at all…”

I had forgotten that I was blatantly staring at him.

“Grace!” Ash suddenly appeared at the side of the cart, the winter breeze making her pale lavender locks dance ever so slightly, highlighted in the sunlight. She didn’t seem to know what to do now, uncomfortable after her short burst of excitement. It was nice to see her acting young, as until now I had only seen her mourning and fighting. She had to be at least a couple of years my junior, and I was barely an adult, except for in the most general sense of the word.

“I would say that we were worried about you, but Damascus isn’t the kind of pony to give out volatile memory orbs.” Caliber joined Ash beside me, her short auburn hair shining brilliantly in the sun, inflamed. I was happy to realize that they hadn’t actually had a reason to worry about me, especially considering the healthy state I was in. “How’re you feeling?”

“Unsettlingly good, last time I was conscious I felt like I had broken…everything.” I bounced my legs around in the cart, shifting the salvage within.

“I’ve never had to deal with a victim and perpetrator of an alicorn crash before, but with Stockholm’s supplies we managed to patch you up completely.” Ash said, informally introducing the buck.

“Grace, right? You alright to shake?” Stockholm asked extending his hoof out. I shook in response.

“Manners?” I asked dumbly. Caliber had told me not to expect them. It made sense that most ponies in the wasteland wouldn’t bother to maintain the introductory gesture.

“Oh, sorry, I’m just used to eventually trying to sell something to everypony I meet. It helps to be nice.” He explained with a grin. “Everything’s free for you, of course!”

“What’d I do?” My mind still felt slow, mostly due to everything new that I was experiencing all at once. “You guys didn’t fix everything while I was unconscious did you?” I asked half-joking, it certainly felt like a lot had happened in only a few hours.

“Nope! We just ac-ciden-tally saved this trader from the alicorns!” she announced with mock pride.

“We asked him to tell us about it once you woke up.” Added Ash. “Caliber explained that you like to know about things first hoof.” I looked at Stockholm expectantly.

“Well first off, I’m from Manehattan, so it took a little extra stupidity for me to stumble onto a camp of alicorns. Caliber explained that they haven’t really gotten up here yet.” Caliber had explained a lot. “But down South they kind of just sprung up out of nowhere, they aren’t an epidemic or anything, but they’ve sure got ponies scared. Kind of like a new boogey-man that people can pretend are more dangerous than anything else out here.”

“How are ponies of the Faith reacting in Manehattan?” asked Ash, hoping to find something to compare her friends’ reaction to.

“Don’t really have much religion down south.” Ash seemed disappointed, and amazed. “A couple of radical groups sprung up, Worshippers of Atom and the like, but nothing that you could really see any credibility behind. Not like what I heard about from folks in Fairmount, they told me about your Faith”

“You’re not thinking of joining, are you?” Ash asked drearily.

“Sorry, it’s hard to think of them as anything but cultists ‘coz of the crazies I’ve seen in Manehattan.”

“Good, I’m not in the mood for missionary work.” She smiled, apparently relieved.

“Well if that’s what it takes to join,” Stockholm smiled sleazily. “Maybe I’m feeling a little religious.”

“That doesn’t mean the same thing to them.” Caliber laughed. “Dirtbag.”

“Oh, heh. That means… something else in Manehattan.” Ash looked puzzled. “Anyway…”

They had a familiarity that I couldn’t help but admire. It was nice to see a group of ponies being friendly with each other. I felt a little left out, but took solace considering that I hadn’t really been around for a while. I let them work through the conversation together, enjoying their smiles.

“So I got caught on my way to Calvary. I wanted a little variety in my trade routes and since no one really heads this way, thanks to Littlehorn, I figured I could cash in.” he thought for a moment. “Just because the Middle Passage is the safest way East doesn’t mean that it’s actually safe.”

“Wait,” I cut in. “We heard Fairmount was dusted by the Slavers. How long did it take you to get from there to here?” If he was there so recently surely he would have come across the bare ruin that the DJ described and not the settlement that it once was.

“Not long, even though I steered clear of that scary-lookin’ thing” he gestured to the Earth Mover. “I’ve been with the alicorns for a couple of days.”

“Days?!” I exclaimed as I sat up in his cart-full of items for sale. “How did you survive?”

“Apart from the lack of food and water, it wasn’t so bad.” I suddenly had a horrible feeling that killing the alicorns had been a big mistake.

“That is not possible.” Ash said with a frown. “I fought those things… twice.”

“Yeah, I mean Ash showed me the worst parts of that ruin.” Caliber looked at me. “It got pretty gruesome.” I immediately felt relieved, but hoped that Stockholm would explain.

“I hate to say it, but I got lucky.” He shrugged. “There was something wrong with those alicorns. The corpses you saw torn up and mutilated, those were… like tests to them.” Looking around at our asking expressions he continued. “Let me explain… the alicorns in the south are said to prefer kidnapping ponies to killing them, nopony knows what they do to them, but the victims don’t come back. These alicorns were confused; and they spent most of their time there arguing about what they were supposed to do with Me.”

“So those corpses were their attempts to do whatever they do to ponies in Manehattan.” Caliber deduced.

“Right, I didn’t see it happen to anypony but the remains made me pretty damn uneasy, afraid for my life. Fortunately they were so hung up on what each of them thought their Goddess wanted them to do that they barely tried anything on me.” He smiled. “Their biggest obstacle was the blue one who kept insisting that she WAS the goddess, if any of them had cracked, it was her.”

“I remember that one… I flew it into the ground.” I said passively. “She was even arguing with herself about whether she was the Goddess or not.” I felt better knowing that I had crashed a psychopath.

“So there was something wrong with them!” Caliber seemed validated. “I knew it! They didn’t fight like the DJ described in the legends, they fought like…raiders.”

“I guess we were all lucky that they couldn’t contact their Goddess. It sounds like she can communicate with them down in Manehattan, give them orders and make them more powerful somehow. They must be out of range this far North, and that leaves them disorientated and weak.” Ash said, looking saddened by the fact that her friends had killed themselves over a fractionally terrifying monstrosity.

“You aren’t thinking that their Goddess…” I was concerned that Ash may have seen similarities between her Faith and the leader that the alicorns followed.

“No,” she laughed. “The real Goddesses aren’t limited by range.” I smiled at her unwavering devotion.

“I’d never seen one in person before, but I heard rumors of teleportation, telekinesis and shields that even a Steel ranger struggled to get through. Doesn’t sound like they could do any of that.” Stockholm addressed Caliber.

“No sir, they most definitely weren’t com-muni-cating or using any advanced spells aside from telekinesis. If they were missing out on that kind of potential then we really did get lucky.”

“You didn’t know that though, that you weren’t walking towards certain death, so as far as I’m concerned I still owe you.” Insisted the buck. “Tell you what, if you’re ever in New Calvary look for me, I’m planning to have that whole city sold on this Manehattan junk as soon as I can, so I might have something more valuable to sell you.” I was glad he had said ‘sell’ and not ‘give’. It didn’t feel right taking advantage of a rescue I had not been conscious for.

“So you’re still heading East?” asked Ash. “Even after the alicorns?”

“If I was scared of alicorns then it sounds like East would be the best place to go, anyway. And I sure didn’t come this far to turn back now.” I clambered out of the cart, slipping the braces off before I exited.

“Good luck then, and stay off the rails.” Advised Caliber. “The slavers know exactly what they’re supposed to do with their captives.”

“Trader living can be brutal.” He shrugged. “I’ll be fine.”

“We’ll see you there then.” I didn’t have the same familiarity with this buck that Ash and Caliber did but I appreciated his part in getting me functional again. “Stockholm…”

He gave a salute and repositioned himself with the cart’s harness; he was a unicorn, I realized, and so felt the need to salute him back. I had never taken much stock in the three variants of ponykind but in the North it seemed that unicorns were a rare thing. A Pegasus would no doubt straight-out hug another Pegasus it came across, considering how scarce they were.

Earth pony fortitude fought the wasteland well; I had seen it in Caliber, and even Ash. If any of the three genotypes spearheaded the surviving Equestrians of the North, it was them.

We started walking again, after we had watched the roving trader on his way until he disappeared out of sight over a ridge. The MASEBS tower stood not a mile away; we would reach it before nightfall easily. It stood on a mountain range that served as part of the Great Equestrian border, meaning that if we hurried, we could be directly under exposed evening sky. To bask in the highlight of that eternity.

“What happened to the Pegasus?” I asked, as their rarity and ability to control the weather had peaked my suspicion. “Were they responsible for the cloud curtain?”

“Most ponies are too afraid of the implications to ask that question.” Ash looked impressed.
“The implications?” She couldn’t mean what I thought she meant.

“Nothing happened to the Pegasus, in fact, their living in just as much safety and comfort as they did before the war.” She explained. “As they ran from their dying country they closed up the sky behind them, refuting their fellow citizens, their families and their Goddesses.”
“They just sit there.” Caliber fumed. “Some think that they can even watch us as we suffer and die.”

“They’ve created their own Kingdom in the Skies, but they will never be allowed into the one we are destined for. They have damned themselves in their selfish abandon.”

I stared up at the clouds as we walked on, regarding them in new understanding. They weren’t an anomaly, they were a barrier. A means to allow denial and detachment for the old loyalists, turned cowards. I didn’t voice my opinions; the mares on either side of me could see I shared their disapproval, their disappointment. Caliber was especially angry, having suffered the most while those above her grew fat and ignorant. Ash looked sad, as if she pitied them for their impending destiny. She was upset to see such a grand-scale failure across morals and empathy. I was disgusted, Slavers worked out of greed, Raiders out of anarchistic instinct, but the Pegasus were motivated by nothing but fear and sloth.

“They’ve been up there since the war?”

“Just about, they’re led by an order that was formed eons ago… called the Enclave, though nopony knows if they even bother with the name anymore. Considering that, to them, they’re all that’s left, all that matters, why would they need to differentiate themselves?” Caliber asked rhetorically.

“They’re still the Enclave. Just like the Steel Rangers cling to their title they cling to theirs. Between them they hold almost all of the greatest technologies left in the world, but they still intend to ‘wait it out’, or ignore it completely in the Enclave’s case.” Ash explained.

“Sounds like both groups see the wasteland and its inhabitants as something to avoid, to survive rather than to help, or even consider themselves a part of.” I related the two. “I’m starting to worry that the DJ isn’t going to find any potential if we can get him to look over the Calvary Steel Rangers.”

“Information is power, even if it’s bad. Better to rule them out as allies than do nothing.” Caliber justified.

“Speaking of allies…” I changed the subject to address our apparent new companion. “How did Caliber convince you to come along?”

“It wasn’t hard,” the recruiter interjected. “After fighting the alicorns with her, I couldn’t help but to insist.”

“Usually when you think you’ve lost your way on one path, options open up to you.” Said Ash. “My pilgrimage isn’t over, and it may never be. But running home with my tail between my legs when an invitation to do some good stood open, would have just been another failure.”

“So you understand why we’re here?” the tower stood high on the escarpments above , and now that we were so close it loomed over us. We just had to find a path up.

“Yes, but I don’t think I can help you when you’re dealing with the DJ.” She apologized. “I’m not very charismatic.”

I looked at Caliber, assuming the task of getting the DJ to accept our help (not necessarily a challenge) would fall to her. I didn’t think of myself as charming or persuasive in the least.

“Sorry Grace, I’m paid to fight. Damascus hired me, and has charged me with shooting things that try to bother you while you go about rallying all the remaining good in the wasteland.”
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“It’s in the contract.”

“You sound like Charon.” I laughed. “You know you’re not doing this for the money… neither was he.”

“Still, I follow orders. And if that means you’re the boss, then you’re the boss.”

“Why can’t Ash be the boss?” I shifted the honor over, passing the buck, as it were.

“I’m too young and foolish.” She emulated a filly’s wide-eyed innocence, the shadow of a smile dancing at her lips as she almost broke character.

“Face it Grace. Damascus knows that the DJ will jump at a chance to work with another idealist, he’ll see you as the material embodiment of his Good Fight as soon as you bat your pretty little baby eyes at him.” Caliber dismissed my weak protest. “You’re going to have to get used to trying to make ‘friends’.”

“The wasteland depends on it.” Ash added jovially, still wearing her mock expression of awe and reverence. “Anyway, this is certainly going to be easier than the Zion tribes or the Buffalo. It’ll be good for you to get some practice.”

“What?” I hadn’t heard about that part of the plan.

“If we’re headed to Calvary to do whatever will get the DJ operating in that area, then I figured we might as well go through Zion and the Plains on our way.” Explained Caliber. “The zebra and buffalo could be vital to facing whatever the Slavers have going for them.”

“They can’t have that big an army.” I argued, the Slavers couldn’t be so much of a threat that we had to go begging tribes across the northernmost reaches of Equestria. Right?

“Considering that our army currently consists of Damascus, Charon, Me and you…”

“I’ll help.” Ash added meekly.

“And Ash. They’ll steamroll us as we are now. Two Mercenaries, two zealots and a Stable pony aren’t going to make a dent in their forces and that Earth Mover.”

“That thing is functional?” I didn’t see the threat it could pose, apart from tearing up dirt. A lot of dirt… whole towns worth of dirt… Nevermind.

“If they got a train working we have to expect that they can get that thing moving too.” The thought of the four hundred foot tall monstrosity tearing across Equestria was admittedly terrifying. Caliber watched me as the image flickered in my mind. “So are we done arguing about this?”

“We were arguing?” Ash asked. “Whose side was I on?” Caliber smiled at her adorable confusion.

“Alright, if you really think I’m the best one to talk to these ponies,” what could I call buffalo and zebra? “Then I’ll do It.”

“Not what I think, honestly, but Damascus made it clear.” Caliber admitted, we both agreed that so far I hadn’t shown any particular political negotiating prowess. If such a skill even existed anymore.

We had been walking slowly around the base of the mountains, absently searching for a way up, for the road or pass that had once been used to access the large satellite tower. Our scan was fruitless and we were about to run out of places to look.

The Equestrian border lay before us, stretching far from the MASEBS Mountains to Zion’s own, covering the gap of relatively flat land that left the country exposed. It was a great wall, darkened by ash and age, standing tall but narrow as it extended across the terrain. Intermittently small towers jutted out, cylinders breaking the walls flat curve; they were adorned with dead floodlights and sirens. Ready for a long abandoned Zebra invasion. In places the wall had cracked and collapsed, leaving gaps that had either been made by erosion or attackers, it didn’t matter now.

A few of the floodlights burned on, some flickered, though most were dark. But the implied weak power source made me worry about automated defense systems that may never have been disengaged. According to my Pip-buck the topography of the land was such that we could access the MASEBS tower from behind, by approaching from the other side of the range, from out of Equestria.

“There’s the pass.” Ash relieved us. A narrow gap split the sharp escarpment of rock that the tower sat high atop of. It had been built before the war, I assumed, considering that it was more accessible from the wilds than from Equestria. A security risk that would have undoubtedly been compensated for in the decade of war-time revolution and development. Another reason I was glad we had found the way.

“It’s blocked.” Caliber’s face fell as we looked down the gap. A colossal pile of rocks stacked tightly, forming a barrier in the middle of the pass. Too steep to climb, and too large to shift. “Looks like there was a landslide, probably from the bombings.”

“Or it could have been intentional, a ways to keep ponies out. The obstruction is perfectly placed.” Ash suggested. “There’s no way over.”

“Then we’ll go around.” I said matter-of-factly.

“What, all the way back? It would take us days to walk along these mountains twice.” Ash pointed out.

“No…” I had come to a realization.

“Through the Divide.” Caliber understood, she met my shining eyes in the afternoon glow, and for a moment I forgot my concerns, ignored them, as we would be walking ever closer to the sun.

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Travel Light: While wearing light or no armor you run 10% faster. You’re still naked by the way.

Quest Perk: Sky Seeker: When under direct exposure to the sun’s rays or the moon’s glow you gain the powers of the Princesses. Not really. That would have been cool though. You actually get +1 Endurance. That’s not so bad, right?
How about I throw in +2 Luck since I got your hopes up and then crushed them like grapes at the Sister-hooves social.

Next Chapter: Chapter 9: Video Killed the Radio Star Estimated time remaining: 11 Hours, 48 Minutes