Teak and her mother followed Ambassador Abyssian on what he reassured them would be a short tour of the palace. Much to her growing dismay, she discovered that hers and the towering zebra diplomat’s definition of “short” were measured on vastly different scales.

A pony could mistake the Vhannan palace for a museum and nobody would blame them. Teak didn’t have to know which of the long-forgotten zebra kingdoms inspired the ancient looking architecture to know that every inch of the palace had been painstakingly designed to reflect the long and fractured history of the continent. Vaulted ceilings replete with brightly polished copper tiles hung overhead like a second sunrise, each large square patterned with intricate symbols born from a quiltwork of cultures. Decorative pillars lined the walls of the main hallways, giving the illusion that they held the ceiling aloft. In the spaces between them, bits of Vhannan history stood on pedestals or lay under spotless glass within ornate display cases.

Busts of recent leaders, painstakingly carved from obsidian, shared the same space as priceless artifacts. Everything from colorful tribal masks to a three foot slab of cinnabar with chiseled writing in a language Teak couldn’t read filled the palace at every turn. Each piece was accompanied by small, uniform placards, reinforcing the museum aesthetic. Abyssian stopped to share an anecdote or story about just about every one of them. It became evident that this wasn’t his first time giving this particular tour.

Boredom set in quickly.

For the sake of her sanity, Teak began tuning out the adults as they nattered on about Vhannan history. Their conversation truly hit it stride when Zecora mentioned that her mother, Teak’s grandmother, Olea had migrated from Vhanna to Equestria when she was very young. Teak had heard the story a dozen times before and while her grandmother had passed away before she could meet her, she felt a flicker of defensive heat rise in her chest to hear her mom speak so completely about a thing she discussed with Teak only in bits and pieces.

It didn’t help that the polished marble floor of the palace halls made it very clear who had the smallest hooves of the trio. She clicked alongside her mother, the high notes of her tapping in obvious contrast to the thudding clops of Abyssian’s pitch black hooves. Her mom’s fell somewhere in the middle, what Teak’s fifteen-year-old mind considered normal. She made a face at the chandeliers reflected in the floor, watching them slide through the stripes of black mineral that flowed through the otherwise white marble. Her hoofsteps echoed down from the vaulted ceiling in retort.

More than a few times, Teak found herself looking past her mother’s shoulders to the Vhannan ambassador. She didn’t have a good reference point for how old he was, so she settled on “dad age” to make life simpler. He was broad-shouldered just like the earth ponies back in Equestria and stood just as tall, if not taller, than the princesses. He was arguably the biggest pony she had ever seen, and yet he wore himself as if he were no more imposing than the exotic flowers growing in the gardens outside. He was, as far as Teak could fathom, a giant.

She was anything but covert about staring, and it didn’t take Abyssian long to catch her looking at the strange, whorling symbols on his flank. Four symmetrical black spirals, their tails joining around a white circle at their center to draw a thicker line that bisected them into pairs, stood out on his hip in stark contrast to his stripes. Rather than chastise her for her rudeness, Abyssian smiled broadly and regarded his own mark with no small amount of pride.

“It is called the Ram’s Horns,” he said in thickly accented ponish, answering the question she hadn’t yet asked. “Many zebras mistake its meaning for strength. It is understandable. Two rams, strong creatures to be sure, beating their heads together.” He stopped mid-stride, sat and raised his formidable hooves into the air. With a heavy thock he clapped them together, the sound echoing down the grand corridor like a gunshot. He chuckled and stood. “To a young stallion, strength can be the only thing that is important. But a ram is not all strength. It is humility as well. The biggest ram will humbly submit to slaughter if that is its destiny. One cannot be truly strong without humility, and vice versa. A good lesson, I think, considering our current circumstances.”

Teak nodded, a little absently, her eyes tracing the lines of Abyssian’s mark.

“It certainly is,” Zecora agreed, then leaned down to whisper into her daughter’s upturned ear. “You’re staring.”

Her eyes widened and shot back to the marble floor, cheeks burning so bright that she thought her own stripes would turn pink. In the reflection beneath her hooves, she could see Zecora and Abyssian exchange patient smiles that drove the heat in her face down her neck. The embarrassment of being caught by Abyssian was eclipsed by the shame of being called out by her own mother. Tail tucked with abject embarrassment, she kept her eyes planted firmly on the ground until the tour ended.

At least there was dinner to look forward to.

She had expected their meal to be served in a grand hall with replete with long, elegant tables, heaps of delicacies and servants hiding behind doors with pans and trays balanced at the ready. She was surprised then when Abyssian led them through a door that took them back outside and into the lush confines of the palace garden.

Decorative bricks sunk level with the grass edged swirling flower beds pressed to the far edges, creating a pocket of space shaded by trees she had only seen in books. Teak recognized dozens of carefully trimmed plants growing out of the chips as the same ones that her mother grew in her herb garden back in Ponyville. The memory stung and she looked away, focusing instead on the path of crushed quartz that led them to an ebony gazebo at the center of the garden. A low, circular table waited for them inside, surrounded by three simple cushions.

Teak was barely seated when a lone zebra servant appeared pushing a wheeled cart made from the same wood as her namesake. The mare nodded polite greetings to all of them as she stopped the cart just shy of the gazebo’s single step. A formidable white plate resembling a blooming rose rested on the cart. Small flutes of rolled flatbread and cheeses rested in the depressions of each petal. A black stone bowl, mounded with a deep red paste that looked suspiciously like meat flecked generously with spice, sat at the center. The handles of three silver spoons stuck out from the mound like candles on a very strange cake.

The servant slid the plate effortlessly onto the table. Abyssian was already complimenting the meal’s appearance before she could finish retrieving three glasses and a pitcher of a foamy amber beverage from the bottom of the cart, practically chasing her off with praise.

Teak noticed her mother regarding the meal with a peculiar smile. Without waiting to be asked, she unrolled one of the bits of dark flatbred onto her hoof and nipped a spoonful of red paste out of the bowl. She pressed it into the bread, replaced the spoon, and folded the bread closed with both hooves before popping it into her mouth. She lifted her head toward the sky as she chewed, her smile widening with satisfaction.

“Is it to your liking?” Abyssian asked, feigning ignorance solely to give Zecora an opportunity to pass back a compliment.

“I haven’t been able to find good kitfo for twenty plus years,” she said enthusiastically, reaching forward for another bit of flatbread. “It’s excellent!”

Abyssian glowed as he reached for a piece of flatbread, his eyes drifting from Zecora to Teak as he realized she hadn’t yet mustered the courage to try the strange dish. “I’m told carnivorism is still something of an acquired taste in Equestria,” he said, and spooned a dollop of kitfo onto the bread.

“I’ve had meat before,” Teak said sheepishly, and reached out to pick out a nib of rolled bread. It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it wasn’t exactly the truth either. Not unless Abyssian considered the freeze-dried bacon bits Sagebrush had snuck into school last year meat.

She could feel the ambassador and her mother’s eyes on her as she bit the tip of the last spoon and lifted a lump of spiced meat from the bowl, dropping it onto the unleavened bread. She would have preferred her own plate but since it wasn’t provided, she assumed it was a cultural thing that she shouldn’t ask about. She considered the concoction for a moment before mentally plugging her nose and tipping the entire thing into her mouth.

The bread was fresh - warm even - from the oven. She bit down and the intense flavor of spiced meat flooded her tongue as it melted into an impossibly smooth liqueur. It was different than anything else she had ever eaten, and it was delicious. Before she finished chewing she was already picking out another piece of flatbread to fill.

She lost herself in the meal while her mother and the ambassador chatted about safe topics. Zecora spoke more about her mother and the events in her life that led to her moving out on her own to a hut in the Everfree Forest. Abyssian shared a story about his very first job working in a tannery in the slums, exposing himself to harsh chemicals before Vhannan science had caught on to the long-term effects they had. He credited zebra magic with his continued good health, a claim that Teak had to bite her tongue on when she heard. She had never once used magic in her entire life. That was solely a skill born into unicorns and, as far as Teak knew, there were no zebra unicorns.

As the kitfo bowl emptied and the honey-sweetened beverage Abyssian called tej drew low in its pitcher, the ambassadors’ conversation began to turn toward serious matters. Teak expected her mother to ask her to give them some privacy but was surprised when she made no such move to dismiss her. Even Abyssian didn’t seem to mind her continued presence, despite his previously jovial smile hardening into a grim line. His consternation didn’t appear directed at either of them, but at the idea of the war itself.

“It is the reason I do not sleep well at night,” Abyssian admitted as they came back around to the same immovable problem they had been paired together to solve. “We have made the mistake of gambling the futures of our people on a gift which the gods clearly did not intend for us to devour so ravenously.”

Zecora nodded, her muzzle pinched with her own well-worn concerns. Teak knew enough about the war, from dinner table talks with her parents to gossip at school, to know that at the center of the bitter fighting were the Vhannan oil fields, miles still to the east. Equestria had been the first to see the potential in the black muck that bubbled from the zebra desert, and Vhanna had been happy to allow eager Equestrian companies to pour bits into harvesting said oil. Equestria experienced a technological boom over the span of several decades. Every day seemed to give birth to a new industry. Plastics, standardized machinery, newer more potent fuels rolled out of soot-coated factories at the outskirts of every major city with foundations being poured for the next great idea in Equestrian innovation.

It didn’t take long for the citizens of Vhanna to see the prosperity of the nation across the sea and compare it to their own poverty. Zebras quickly stood up to demand a change in the status quo. Their leaders listened, not blind to the growing imbalances, and soon oil began flowing in two directions, not one. Vhannan engineers travelled to Equestria, took notes, and returned home with the keys to their own ascension. Slums were paved over and glistening cities rose out of the savannah. Modern amenities previously seen as luxuries reserved for the rich were suddenly available to anyone with the ability to earn a paycheck. Vhannan industry galloped through the hoofsteps of Equestrian progress, and for a moment it seemed possible that a golden age might encompass two hemispheres.

Then the wells began to fail.

One by one, well after well, they dried up. At first it was just a hiccup. New oil fields were staked, but those dried up even more quickly. Faced with the very real possibility that the vast deposit discovered in Vhanna might not be as vast as once thought, expeditions were launched to far-flung corners of the world in search of new sources. Small pockets were found, but none large enough to sate the demands of two hungry nations. Many new sites went bust within months of starting up. It became clear, to the growing horror ponies and zebras alike, that they had churned through the majority of a precious resource with reckless abandon. With so many powerful gears spun into motion, simply stopping wasn’t just unfathomable, it was impossible. The collapse of hundreds of industries was visible on a terrible new horizon.

Historians would eventually differ on who acted first. Some would argue that Equestria had acted as an aggressor by demanding Vhanna curb its “rampant waste of resources.” Others insisted that Vhanna had tipped the first domino when their leader deployed its military to “protect” the oil fields from foreign incursion. In the end, it was clear what was happening. Both sides were moving to monopolize the last drops of crude that the deserts had to give.

Faced with the reality that one nation might prolong their collapse at the cost of the other’s immediate failure, the next step wasn’t far out of reach.

Two months after Teak turned ten, Vhanna and Equestria went to war.

Teak folded a piece of flatbread over a morsel of cheese, the kitfo bowl scraped empty, and nibbled on the edge as she listened to the adults speak.

“We’ve progressed too far to fall back into squalor,” Abyssian continued, shaking his head for emphasis. “And yet, this war threatens to consume the last of the very resource we desecrate our own soil over. If the fighting were to end today, right now, without a greater solution… it will have all been for nothing.”

Zecora nodded, her eyes on the colorful orange flowers standing in the bright sunshine. “The ponies back home are unwilling to revert back to coal in earnest. They see what it has done to the air in Manehattan and Fillydelphia and fear it will blanket their best memories of Equestria in soot.”

She rested her cheek against her hoof and sighed. “I would take an inch of ash over blood any day. It baffles me that the princesses don’t feel the same way.”

Abyssian tactfully avoided any comment on that last part. Even Teak stopped chewing for a moment, unsure whether they were allowed to speak about the princesses at all here, let alone so honestly.

“The sad fact of the matter,” he continued carefully, “is that before too long, time will make that decision for the both of us.”

Zecora nodded. They were at the same impasse they had run into several times over the course of the meal. The same roadblock that the ponies back home talked circles around ad nauseum. No amount of altruism was going to convince either side to willfully thrust their nation into a dark age so that the other had a fleeting chance of breaking their own fall. Not when so many lives had been spent between them like so much coin.

“What about solar power?” Teak chimed in.

Zecora and Abyssian looked at her as if they had forgotten she was still at the table. Her mother’s tense expression told her that she’d brooched a topic that wasn’t strictly off-limits, but closer than her casual nitpicking about the princesses. Abyssian’s face was unreadable, but something told her she had hit on something he’d been wanting to discuss all along. The silence at the table lingered a little too long, and Teak haltingly continued to relieve her discomfort in their sudden attention.

“I mean… everyone’s fighting because the oil is going to run out soon, but it’s going to run out anyway no matter if there’s a war or not.” She looked between the two of them and realized they were humoring her. Her ears grew hot. She wasn’t stupid. This wasn’t a hard problem to solve if everyone would just talk like normal ponies and not prance around the obvious answer. “If the oil runs out, the war isn’t going to end. The only reason ponies and zebras are still killing each other is because they’re afraid if they stop, the other side won’t. It’s stupid. If both sides had solar, there would be no reason to fight in the first place.”

Abyssian tipped the flat of his hoof upward with a mild shrug. “Vhanna is not unaware of the potential of harnessing the sun, but that technology is still in its infancy. To generate enough electricity capable of sustaining a nation is impossible, no?”

Teak could sense that he didn’t believe that, not entirely. He was challenging her to find a counterpoint. Making her think. She thought about it for a moment, her muzzle twisting with concentration.

“Not really,” she said cautiously, remembering a discussion she had in class not too long ago. “It takes more… factories and stuff to burn coal or oil for electricity. Solar doesn’t have to do any of that. If you need more, you just need to build more panels.”

Zecora smiled. It was a crude answer, but Abyssian had pointed her in the right direction and let her find it on her own. “It’s a matter of scale,” she clarified.

“Yeah,” Teak said.

Abyssian bowed his head, conceding victory to the young mare. “An astute point, little one. However, my country’s understanding of solar energy is many years behind your own, and your princesses have not been known for their charitable nature even before the war began. If Equestria capitalizes on solar energy and is unbound by our oil fields, I suspect few ponies would shed a tear at the sight of Vhanna collapsing into obscurity while your people vault into the future.”

Teak frowned and tried to think of something that would prove Abyssian wrong, but the seconds ticked by and all she could think about was the aftertaste of kitfo and tej in the back of her throat. She swallowed.

“And,” Abyssian continued, his tone shifting, “one does have to wonder, if Equestria does have the ability to convert to solar power, why do its princesses so publicly oppose it?”

Zecora took a slow breath and sat up a little on her cushion.

“I can’t speak for the princesses, but it is a question I would like to ask Celestia myself should I ever be granted an audience,” she said. “The ministries, however, would never allow us to trade technologies with Vhanna. War or no war. But...” she said slowly, the wheels spinning in her head.

Abyssian turned to her, his lavender eyes narrowed. “Ambassador Zecora, I have not invited you to Vhanna to tempt you into compromising your loyalty to Equestria.”

Teak could see the familiar line form along her lips when she was trying to decide whether or not to make a promise. Whether or not to say something she couldn’t take back. Abyssian could clearly see that little battle playing out on her mother’s face as well, but he didn’t know her mother like Teak did. Fluttershy didn’t choose her for this job just for her stripes.

Zecora exhaled slowly as she made up her mind. “I would not dream of betraying the Ministry of Peace’s trust,” she said, carefully sidestepping the rest of Equestria’s leadership. “You said that solar research in Vhanna is still in its infancy, and I am compelled to agree. It leaves me to wonder whether you would be further along if Equestria had ever thought to share its knowledge with certain neutral parties who have a vested interest in seeing a peaceful end to this war.”

Abyssian frowned for a moment. “You mean Griffinstone.”

Zecora nodded. “Your western neighbors and our oldest friends short of the Crystal Empire.”

“There is hardly a plateau among their aeries wide enough for even a small solar plant, let alone one large enough to be of any benefit to them.” He spoke carefully, his voice low. “The griffins are friends to both our people. Any technology given to them would likely cross the border into Vhanna within a matter of days.”

“I don’t disagree with you,” Zecora said. “It would necessitate promises of utmost secrecy from the gryphons.”

Abyssian snorted. “Secrecy. From gryphons?”

Zecora suppressed a smile. “I find that stereotype dated and baseless.”

The ambassador scratched his muzzle, staring at Zecora for a long while. The humor on his face subsided as the seriousness of what she was proposing sank in. Giving sensitive technology to an unreliable ally was negligible at best. At worst, it would be viewed as treason should the circumstances of that leak be made public.

Yet the end result might be worth the risk. Two opposing nations, strangled by their mutual need for a dwindling natural resource, suddenly in possession of the same technology. Played the right way, it could make the war obsolete. It could end it.

Abyssian shifted in his cushion. “You are placing more trust in my hooves than I expected to come from a single meeting, ambassador. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I have to wonder what you expect to receive in return.”

Teak watched her mother try to make it seem as if she had planned to ask for anything at all. She had never been one to strike bargains or make requests. She was a giver, but it was clear that Abyssian was not comfortable with receiving something for nothing. The Ram’s Horns on his hip might have symbolized strength through humility, but no one was perfect.

Zecora considered Abyssian’s words for a moment. “I do not expect anything,” she said, “but if I could make a request?”

Abyssian held his hooves out, inviting the question.

“Find a way to halt the use of blindweed on the front lines,” she said. “It is a fickle weapon that does not care whether it kills ponies or zebras. The death it promises is cruel, and I fear its continued use will make our job all the more difficult.”

A brief pause. Abyssian began to nod, and a more modest smile lifted his lip. “It is comforting to know I am not the only optimist at the table.”

“We grow fewer by the day,” Zecora said. “This idea could work, ambassador.”

“It could,” he agreed. His eyes fell to the table, little creases forming at their corners. “It is a gamble. One that you would be taking on the lion’s share of the risk by implementing. I imagine you will require time to, as you say, get the ball rolling?”

Zecora scooped up a bit of flatbread and wiped it along the inside of the kitfo bowl, cleaning off the last of what was left before the flies could find it. She popped it into her mouth whole, enjoying the last burst of spice as she thought about the logistics of such a leak. It occurred to her that she couldn’t do something like this unnoticed. She would have to walk a delicate tightrope between befriending the right sources within Fluttershy’s ministry while keeping others in the dark. The problem she had was that she didn’t have much of any clout within the Ministry of Peace beyond a title. She would need to bring Fluttershy on board, sell Applejack on the idea of sharing the Ministry of Technology’s data with their legendarily unreliable allies… Abyssian was right. It would take time.

The more she thought about it, the more the plan was growing on her. Despite the obstacles she would need to overcome, this could be the relief valve both sides of this deadlocked war needed. Short of any better ideas, it was something to aim for.

“May we meet back here in a month?” she asked. The timeframe was a shot in the dark. “It would give me enough time to determine who I can trust with this.”

“A month is a good start,” he nodded. “In the meantime, we will tell our respective leaders the expected news that we managed to accomplish little today beyond exchanging pleasantries and a delicious Vhannan meal. We will both be skewered in the papers and forgotten by lunchtime.”

Zecora sucked a smear of kitfo off the rim of her hoof. “Twilight won’t let me hear the end of it when we get back.”

“The price of power, what little of it either of us are allowed in this strange world.”

His hooves scraped against wood and he stood with a satisfied sigh that came from a full belly and a time well spent. Zecora and Teak rose as well, nudging their cushions under the table as the meeting came to an end. Somewhere in the tall hedges an unseen bird took flight, its trill fading as it departed.

Abyssian turned to Teak, his smile at odds with his sheer size. “Thank you for your inspiration, little one. I trust that you will keep what we discussed today private?”

Teak nodded jerkily. “Yes, sir.”

“I wouldn’t have brought her along if she couldn’t,” Zecora reassured him. “Though next time we’ll see about taking the overland route.”

She flushed at being reminded of her flightsickness.

“Your discontent with flying was difficult to miss when you arrived. If your mother does not object, I have prepared a small gift for you to ease your nerves on the flight home.”

Zecora tipped her head with curiosity, inviting him to proceed. Abyssian grinned and thumped his hoof against the wood floor twice, hard enough for Teak to feel the vibration in her knees. Abyssian half-turned back toward the rear of the palace and lifted his voice in his own tongue. “Temanyuni amit’u!”

He smiled at them as the same servant mare who set the table stepped out from the palace as if she had been waiting there the entire time. Clearly she had. She covered the distance at a brisk trot without a serving cart or even a tray to hinder her pace. At first glance it appeared she was bringing nothing but herself, something that strained the smile on Zecora’s face as she approached.

Teak’s eyes dropped to the mare’s chest, where two white stones clicked against one another on simple leather straps. She stopped in front of Abyssian and bowed slightly, allowing him to lift the straps over her head on the tip of his hoof. He thanked her as she turned and trotted away.

“For you,” he said, holding the first stone out to Teak.

She hesitated a moment before stepping around the table and accepting the simple ornament. Impossibly thin lines etched a dizzying pattern of symbols and designs into the alabaster that felt rough on the sole of her hoof. She bent her head through the strap and let the little stone hang against her coat.

She blinked and took a deep breath. All of a sudden she felt clearer, as if a fog she hadn’t known was there was lifting from her eyes. It was subtle but impossible to miss.

Abyssian held the second stone out to Zecora. “My mother used to call them fewisi stones, though these days zebras call them healing talismans. They are a rather useful curative for many little ailments and are popular among the fishing villages as a treatment for seasickness. Your daughter will no doubt enjoy a more comfortable flight home with the aid of hers.”

Zecora smiled recognition at the little stone and she slipped it on. “I once had a dreamer stone to help me sleep when I was little. My parents were furious when I lost it. We turned my bedroom upside down looking for it.”

“Are they expensive?” Teak asked.

Her mother began to nod, then shook her head. “These stones are carved slowly with magic. They take weeks, sometimes months to make a single stone like these and they are almost exclusively created as gifts. It would be exceedingly inappropriate to buy or sell them.”

Teak lifted the talisman on its strap, feeling the warmth it radiated. She looked from it to Abyssian, who regarded her with a gentle smile. “Thank you, sir.”

Abyssian dipped his head. “You are most welcome, little one.” He gestured toward the palace where two Wonderbolts were being led out into the garden to retrieve them. “I pray your mother will bring good news when next we meet.”

Zecora nodded, her face taking on the diplomatic mask that Twilight had spent so much time drilling into her before the trip. The last thing she wanted was for one of their Wonderbolt escorts to notice how much she had enjoyed this brief trip into Vhanna. Abyssian noticed the subtle change in the way she carried her smile and reflected it as the Equestrian stallions reached the gazebo to collect their cargo.

“Thank you for the meal, ambassador,” she said. “You were a gracious host.”

Abyssian nodded once. “And thank you for coming all this way to enjoy it. Perhaps next time we will have more to agree on besides the meal. Until next time.”

Zecora nudged Teak until she began following her toward the waiting pegasi. Their talismans swung like white coals below their necks in the bright Vhannan sun.

Aurora closed the flaps of her saddlebags a little more forcefully than she had to.

“Asshole,” she mumbled.

Roach dropped the flaps to his own with a small shrug that she would have missed, had her eyes not finally adjusted to the near impenetrable darkness of nighttime in the wasteland. The fissures in his chitinous skin glowed with dim green light as he shifted about on the uneven pavement. “Coldbrook may be that, but at least he isn’t a miser. These supplies will come in handy.”

Aurora flicked her tail at the air and sat down with an irritable sigh. “He’s a generous asshole, then,” she said sourly. “One that thinks he can buy our loyalty by flashing around a few bits.”

“Caps,” Roach gently corrected. His joins cracked as he sat down on the side of the old road with her. “And I wouldn’t bet a single one on the assumption he’s under the illusion that we’re loyal to him or his Steel Rangers.”

She allowed herself a little smirk at that and idly scratched the spot on her foreleg her Pip-Buck usually occupied. Elder Coldbrook’s calculated attempt to corner her had backfired spectacularly when he tipped his hand and revealed his ultimate goal to commandeer and strip Stable 10 down to the screws. Up until now, the Enclave had somehow managed to beat his Rangers to one opened Stable after the other, carving out as much valuable or sensitive tech as they could carry and leaving behind a hole in the ground barely more useful than the abandoned structures that speckled the wasteland. Thanks to the waypoint on her Pip-Buck, the Rangers had their first lead on a soon-to-be-retired Stable before the Enclave since the war ended.

Coldbrook had too much dignity to froth at the mouth, but he had gotten close.

And yet he had taken a different tact with Roach. Despite the Rangers’ open distaste for ghouls, Elder Coldbrook seemed genuinely appreciative of Roach’s effort to return Stable 6’s gardens to fertility again. Coldbrook hadn’t made them rich, but they were certainly better prepared now than when they left Junction City. Their saddlebags weighed a little more and their contents slopped a little less with each step. Their canteens, looted off the raiders who ambushed them days earlier, sloshed with clean water.

A modest stack of prewar granola bars that were stiff as bricks and which Roach assured them were still edible, sat in Aurora’s bag. Their silver and gold foil wrappers glinted like ingots atop her canvas tool wrap. The label Mairzy Dotes scrawled in cursive arced over the black silhouette of a nameless earth pony. It was enough food and water to last them a few days. Just long enough for them to reach Fillydelphia and the headquarters of Stable-Tec, if they hurried.

There was no point in arguing that it was a generous gift, but Aurora wasn’t anywhere near a point where she was willing to give Coldbrook credit for anything bordering on good will.

She flicked a lump of broken asphalt through a sprig of grass that had taken root in one of the cracks. It tumbled into the center of the road, coming to a stop between the faded yellow chips of what had been a painted centerline. Twin ruts in either lane pressed deep into the asphalt; lasting evidence of the traffic that once frequented this forgotten road.

The night air was refreshingly cool as it whispered its way through the tangled wall of trees that grew on either side of the narrow lane. Branches thumped and scraped against one another and the air smelled somehow fresher here than the dusty breezes that blew across the highway that had taken them to the Bluff. She drank it in as they waited, listening for the telltale crackle of twigs that would alert them to Ginger’s return from the privacy of the treeline.

A smile crept across Aurora’s muzzle in spite of herself, and she ticked another bit of asphalt into the road with the edge of her hoof. It tumbled toward the first before veering off and dropping into one of the many fissures weathered into the road’s surface.

“I like what you did with your mane.”

She watched as Roach dislodged a bit of stone with his strange, perforated hoof and gave it a gentle kick toward Aurora’s pebble. It landed surprisingly close.

“Thanks,” she said, suddenly aware of the loose white curl dangling just inside her vision. She resisted the urge to pull it back behind her ear.

A fresh breeze slid out of the woods, cooling their backs.

“Congratulations, by the way,” he rumbled, loosening another bit of debris from the roadside.

Aurora pinched a stone between her feathers and lobbed it toward the others. “For what?”

“For finding someone,” he said, watching her stone bounce to a stop next to his. “You two are a good fit.”

She looked at the trio of stones and couldn’t help but worry a little that this thing between her and Ginger lacked something. Her mind drifted to what she remembered of her parents’ relationship and the slow, confident permanence that just came assumed with it. It was established, with roots running deep and strong.

The connection she and Ginger shared had formed over the course of the last few days and burst into something tangible out of the fires of their shared traumas at Autumn’s facility. The closer Aurora inspected the fibers of their new relationship, the more fragile and superficial they seemed to be. Logically, she knew every couple went through…

“Aurora, you’re worrying too much.”

She realized she’d gone silent and tried to brush it off with a chuckle. “I’m not worried.”

What was worse than feeling Roach’s eyes burrowing through the side of her head was the fact that she could see his eyes burrowing into the side of her head. They glowed with the same gentle green light that emanated from the cracks and fissures in the changeling’s shattered carapace, and they didn’t budge.

Aurora tried to pretend not to notice by focusing her attention on dislodging a golf ball-sized chunk of pavement from the road, but it clung stubbornly like a pebble in a chipped hoof. Finally, she gave up and returned his gaze.

“How do you know I’m worried?” she asked.

Roach smiled and blew out a slow sigh. “Aurora, I spent the first forty years of my life feeding off of ponies’ emotions and the last two centuries helping to keep Blue’s from getting out of control. You’re soaking in it like Blue Blood soaked in cologne.”

Aurora felt her wings lift an inch and suddenly felt exposed. “You can smell it? Does it… let you know what I’m thinking?”

“Yes and no,” he said through a jaunty laugh and that didn’t quite put Aurora at ease. The glowing cracks at the corners of his muzzle widened as he noticed the disquiet on her face. “It’s alright. I tune it out most of the time, and no, I can’t read your mind. I can just tell you’re hung up on something and it doesn’t take a psychic to guess that it has something to do with the mare you risked your life for.”

She sucked on her lip and nodded. “Well, you guessed right.”

“Guess nothing,” he smirked. “I raised a teenager, once upon a time. I wish she had been as easy to read as you are.”

Aurora kept silent, unsure how to respond to that or whether she was allowed to even ask about Roach’s daughter. She remembered how seeing the cabin had affected him, dredging up memories of the life the bombs had stolen from him. Time might heal all wounds, but the scars always took a little longer to fade away.

For his part, Roach didn’t seem put off by the quiet. His woes weren’t at the focus of their private discussion and he carried on without skipping a beat.

“Aurora, I found Ginger on the road when she was my daughter’s age. I know her better than most,” he continued. “She’s been alone for a long time. I thought maybe she would use Junction City to get back on her hooves and move onto greener pastures, but then she opened her shop and settled in. It was never any of my business to worry about her, but once you’ve been a dad it’s kind of hard to stop. I checked in on her from time to time and each time she was still alone, reading those dusty romance novels and getting disturbingly good at imitating Rarity in her younger years as a way to draw in business.”

Aurora looked at the pavement in search of a nugget to pry loose. At the outset, Ginger’s mannerisms were almost identical to the stock footage of Rarity the residents of Stable 10 were treated to, particularly on Remembrance Day, the one day a year set aside to reflect on everything lost when the bombs fell and the Stable door closed. The footage had been clipped together by the first generation of residents, selected piece by piece from the hundreds of documentaries stored in the Stable’s archives. Several minutes of the memoriam were dedicated to each of the Elements of Harmony, their lives and accomplishments told through various interviews that had taken years to harvest and stitch into a coherent film.

Rarity had always seemed the most peculiar of the six, at least to Aurora. The way she spoke to the camera was completely alien to the world she grew up in beneath Foal Mountain. The prancing cadence of her speech was almost comical, like a caricature of itself. Meeting Ginger in her shop for the first time had been like stepping through the projector screen and into one of those old interviews.

She couldn’t help but smile. The tip of her hoof bent behind the black pebble and flicked it into the road. “I was wondering if I was the only one who noticed how often she kept calling me darling,” she said, following the pebble as it skipped over a crevasse and bounced off Roach’s rock. “She doesn’t do it as much as before, though. Not that I ever minded.”

“That’s because you’ve been drawing the real Ginger out into the open,” he said approvingly.

Aurora shrugged, unsure she deserved that much credit.

Roach elbowed her in the arm. “Hey, if you’re afraid what the two of you have is just a flash in the pan, don’t be,” he said. “That mare spent the last decade pretending to be anyone other than who she was. Now she’s walking with her marks out in the open, talking with her own voice instead of a dead Element’s. She’s doing that because she trusts you, Aurora.”

Deep in the trees, Aurora started hearing Ginger’s hoofsteps traipsing back toward the road, her impromptu trip to find a suitable patch of woods to use as a restroom finished. She swallowed her nerves and lowered her voice. “What if I mess it up?”

“Then you fix it,” Roach said, his calm tone reassuring her as he stood. “Same as every other pony who falls in love. Just don’t take it for granted.”

Aurora draped a wing over his back for support and pulled herself onto her hooves. “You’re really good at this.”

He shrugged under her feathers. “You’re not that heavy.”

She gave him a swat with them before folding her wing back to her side. “I meant at talking.”

“It comes with the territory,” he chuckled and bent his neck to see through the dense treeline. Ginger’s horn glowed nearby, lighting her way as she crunched through thickets of dead or struggling underbrush while being entirely unaware that her path was bending parallel to the road. “You’d better go help her.”

Aurora snorted. She slid into the wide ditch and clamored up the other side, into the trees, calling Ginger’s name before she could get lost.

The trees came and went as they pleased, sometimes bunched so close to the warped and fissured road that their branches netted themselves into a natural tunnel while at other times dropping so far away that Roach felt like he was standing in a black ocean looking at a distant shore.

They were walking through the heart of what used to be Equestrian farming country. He could almost recall the way the wheat fields cut perfect right angles into the surrounding trees, now rounded and rough with centuries of overgrowth. Here and there a sprig of a wheat plant or a stalk of corn would stand in solitude among their few remaining peers while wild, deformed grasses pressed into the otherwise barren fields.

Roach remembered the terror he felt when he first crossed over Equestria’s southern border, knowing that in doing so he was renouncing the Hive and its queen’s slow descent into madness. At the time, he didn’t know if it was possible for a changeling to live outside the hive for long. His existence had always been an endless cycle of depart, harvest magic, return, deposit magic, repeat. Love was always the ideal source - incontrovertibly powerful even in small doses - but he had never been picky about which emotions he tapped into. It all sated his hunger one way or the other, and he suspected more than a few other drones were cheating in the same way.

Chrysalis said she wanted love, but in reality she only wanted the magic that the hive squeezed out of it. Roach sometimes wondered if breaking that one rule was the reason he began to think beyond the scope of her demands. If there was another explanation, it was well beyond his reckoning. He remembered depositing his harvest into the capsules at the periphery of the hive, crawling back into the sunlight and flying back across a desert whose dunes and ridges he knew from a thousand trips before. Toward the hazy edge of the high cliffs that wrapped the badlands like a fortress intended to keep him trapped inside.

And then a thought occurred to him.

What if I don’t come back?

Depart, harvest, return, deposit.

Depart, harvest, return, deposit.

Depart, harvest…

The thought was forbidden. He remembered trying to shake it off, but it clung to him like a tick. He remembered ascending, his insectlike wings propelling him toward the top of the cliff wall, and catching a glimpse of the greenery that waited on the edge of the horizon. He began to wonder why. It was dangerous, but he couldn’t stop himself.

Why did ponies live the way they did? Why did they have a queen - wait, no, princesses - but not a hive? Who gave them instructions? How did they know where to go or what to do? Chrysalis always said that ponies were chaos and changelings were order like it was inherently better… but if that were true, why were ponies so much happier when Roach was so miserable?

Why am I doing this?

For the first time, he felt an emotion that wasn’t stolen but instead was his own: fear. Fear of the sudden expansion taking place in his mind. Fear of what his queen would do if he disobeyed. Fear of what the ponies would do if he was discovered.

But most of all, fear of what he had decided to do.

He spun a ring of emerald light above the tip of his jagged horn and let the spell take over the rest. The light swept over his chitinous body like a shockwave and from the other side emerged the pegasus form he always used to fly out of the badlands. Roach’s coat shimmered with the golden colors of freshly cut chaff, his mane and tail whipping behind him in vibrant green curtains like spring leaves caught in the wind.

He didn’t remember who he’d taken the form from. Up until now, it didn’t matter so long as it wasn’t compromised. Even now, walking through what used to be the breadbasket of Equestria, he wondered what kind of life that stallion had gone on to live.

A few paces behind him, he heard Aurora and Ginger chatting and giggling like school mares about lighter topics. They had been walking the flat stretch of road for nearly four hours and had only come across a small pack of mutated mongrel dogs that were scared easily a quick blast from the shotgun strapped to his foreleg. With nothing to encounter, keeping Aurora on point with him while Ginger trailed behind was, well, pointless.

He kept his eyes open as the scrubby cornfields on either side of the road were overtaken by more forest. It was hard to imagine at the time that anything would survive the bombs, but here they all were. Roach, preserved against his will by the strange radiation given off by the balefire explosions. Ginger, born into a society of slavers descended from the ponies who crawled out of the rubble and stubbornly clung to life long enough to rebuild. Aurora, a pegasus raised in the same Stable he and so many others had been denied entry so many decades ago. Even the flora found ways to make it through the other side of the apocalypse. Living trees deformed by cancerous knots or clinging to their dead neighbors for support waited patiently for the rains that rarely ever came. He suspected that they had adapted to throw roots deep into the soil, tapping into some hidden aquifer far below their hooves. How the grasses survived, however, was a mystery even to him.

He half-listened to their conversation as their hooves clicked over the uneven road. Aurora was telling a story about someone name Carbide, a stallion who had made repeated unsuccessful attempts at either courting or bedding her. He was the same stallion who was now expected to design a containment system for Stable 10’s active talisman once they were ready to swap it out. From what Roach could tell, Aurora had a complicated professional and unprofessional relationship with the stallion at one time, and Ginger was infatuated with squeezing her for more details.

The emotions streaming off the two mares was like wading through an ebbing tide that sucked at his hooves. Joy, love, lust, unease, a low buzz of nervousness and a myriad of other flavors tried and failed to draw the attention of his baser instincts. These days he was able to brush off the temptation to feed with little effort. One of the first things he learned about himself after leaving the hive was that he didn’t need to siphon magic nearly as often or as greedily as Chrysalis led them to believe. Taking too much was its own punishment. Watching someone collapse, seeing the fear in their eyes as they struggled to understand what was wrong with them was a violation. A trauma that lingered long after that pony recovered.

He learned to pace himself. To sip instead of shovel.

It surprised him how much he missed this. For a little while, it was like he was back home in Canterlot again, sitting on his favorite bench in the park while he watched ponies live their lives in a way he once never thought possible. For the first time in a long time, he was able to relax.

“I smell smoke,” Aurora said.

Roach blinked, his daydreaming interrupted. He sniffed at the air out of habit, but his sense of smell had gone as rotten as his magic over the last two hundred years. He looked back to the two mares, their conversation cut short.

Ginger lifted her nose to the air and nodded. “So do I. Burning wood. We’re close to a camp.”

The breeze was subtle, but it was wafting in from the wood-shrouded road ahead. Roach slowed enough to rejoin the two mares, sidling up along Aurora’s right side as he slowly scanned the trees. He could see better and farther at night than either of them but even he couldn’t see any firelight to tell him where the smoke might be rolling in from. It could be miles away or it could be minutes. He became keenly aware of the noise their bare hooves were making on the pavement.

“Let’s get into the grass,” he said, indicating the narrow strip of scrub grass that rode the shoulder. “Single file. Aurora, you’re on point. Switch your safety off. Ginger, take center. I’ll cover the rear.”

This time there were no chuckles to his last point. They filed off the pavement and into the grass. The road was empty but Roach could tell by Aurora and Ginger’s sniffing that the odor of smoke was getting stronger. Aurora had her wing hooked under her rifle’s braces, the barrel aimed low and her feather curled through the trigger guard.

“Aurora,” Roach whispered. “Get off the trigger.”

He saw her ears flatten with embarrassment and her feather slipped out and settled against the side of the trigger guard like he’d taught her. If they could get past whoever’s camp they had come across without being noticed, all the better. It would be a more difficult task if Aurora accidentally sank a bullet into the dirt for every raider in the area to hear.

The road followed a gentle curve as it navigated the outskirts of what might have grown into a bluff had millions of years of geology panned out differently. Instead, the mound was just that.

Roach spotted the wagon well before Aurora or Ginger had a chance to make out its silhouette in the darkness. “Stop,” he whispered. Mercifully, he didn’t have to repeat himself. Aurora slowed and Ginger followed suit, both looking back at him for an explanation. “Wagon ahead,” he said.

The tide of emotions pouring off them was vastly different now. Fear, chief among them, came off Aurora in waves. He couldn’t blame her, though he checked her feathers again to make sure none had found their way back to the trigger. They hadn’t yet.

He made his way past Ginger, his hooves rustling the grass. “Aurora, hold still, I need your scope.”

She instinctively began shrugging her wing out of the rifle’s bracing and he had to put a hoof against her feathers to stop her. “I can’t hold it near either of you,” he said.

He saw the realization dawn on her face as she shut her eyes and gave her head a quick shake. “Sorry. Forgot.”

The lingering effects of the bombs hadn’t just corrupted his body. His magic, the very tool by which he once interacted with the world around him, had been tainted as well. Aurora had borne the brunt of that reality once already and the radiation had nearly killed her.

“No problem,” he said. He stepped next to her wing and guided it and the rifle it bore into the air with his hoof, aimed roughly at the wagon at the far side of the bend. It was awkward and Aurora’s nerves made the view through the scope bob and slide, but the dark shape of the wagon eventually came into focus.

It was a simple construction. An all-wood chuck wagon with the exception of iron bands nailed to the rim of each wheel. The front wheels lay canted into the road along with a central beam used to harness a team of two for pulling. To Roach, it looked as if the owners had been trying to turn around but were stopped during the attempt.

“I don’t see anyone,” he said. “Looks abandoned.”

“Raiders?” Ginger whispered.

He nodded. “That’s my bet.”

The longer the crosshairs drifted over the wagon, the more details he could make out. The back hitch hung open like a dead brahmin’s tongue, giving him a clear view inside. A couple repurposed crates and one barrel, all tucked to the front, all standing open and most likely empty of anything valuable. His first thought was that it was a trader wagon. Someone trying a different route to avoid the new dangers brought by F&F Mercantile’s plodding collapse. A pair of pillows and a cluster of what looked to be carved foal’s blocks suggested otherwise.

Along the central beam, two sets of harnesses lay in tatters on the pavement.

He let go of Aurora’s wing and pulled back from the scope with a tightness in his gut that hadn’t been there before. “I don’t like it. Let’s backtrack a mile or two and take the woods until we’re past whoever…”

“Evenin’, folks!”

The three of them jumped. Roach found himself struggling for balance as Aurora’s feathers slapped across his muzzle, her rifle leveled in the rough direction of the intruder’s voice. Ginger’s horn crackled, and a translucent amber half-dome flashed into existence between them and the trees.

The speed of their reactions left Roach dumbstruck for a moment, but he quickly recovered when he spotted the figure standing across the ditch a few yards into the trees. He gave his foreleg a quick jerk and the shotgun fitted to it slid forward on its custom rail, giving his hoof access to the long hook of steel that served as its trigger. Aurora spotted him as well, the barrel of her rifle jerking toward him and holding there. There was no time to ask Ginger if her shield spell was bulletproof, though Aurora insisted it was what saved her from Autumn’s deranged attempt at an execution. At the very least, it had gotten the attention of the stallion that had caught them off guard.

The gaunt visitor was half-hidden behind the trunk of an ironwood tree, his single visible eye wide at the sight of Ginger’s shield. What Roach could see of his sunken face suggested he could hide behind a sapling and still go unnoticed. Whoever he was, he didn’t seem particularly afraid of them. Even the way he stared at Ginger’s magic - something once thought impossible since the fall of Equestria - had an air of calculation.

“Sorry,” the stallion laughed, his cheerful tone at odds with the weapons pointed at him. “Best way to get a feel for a pony is by seeing what they do when you put a good scare into ‘em.”

Roach kept his shotgun leveled at the intruder, his hoof pointed both with accusation and necessity. “It’s also a fantastic way to get yourself shot,” he rumbled.

That seemed to amuse their prowler. His deep green coat pulled taut around his face as he broke into a short tittering fit. The high, scraping sound of it bounced between the trees. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Aurora’s feather slip into her trigger guard.

“Say, you’re a ghoul!” the stallion declared in an Appleoosan twang that might have been charming outside of their present circumstances. He giggled again. “So am I! O-or I will be, soon.”

Roach’s frown changed slightly and he narrowed his eyes at him. The signs were so subtle, he might not have recognized them at all. The deep-set eye, the sunken cheek. The way his thinning coat seemed deep green because the skin beneath it was pepper-black. The stallion was at the middle of his inexorable journey towards becoming a ghoul, whether he wanted it or not. A deep sense of pity loosened the knot in Roach’s gut. The process was already playing havoc with his mind. Roach had seen it before. At some point in the near future, months or even another year from now, he would lose himself completely and become feral.

“That’s…” Roach hesitated. “That’s very interesting.”

The skin around the stallion’s eyes pinched with a smile. He stepped out a little, enough for the three of them to see the dented laser pistol seated in the holster on his right foreleg. The modified bite trigger looked thoroughly chewed, but he made no move to reach for it. “Thank you. Never met a ghoul all cracked up like you are. My name is Gallow. What’s yours?”

He carefully adjusted the barrel of his shotgun toward the pistol. At this range, the spread wouldn’t be enough to drop him if he went for his weapon, but it would still hurt like a bitch. “I’m Roach,” he said carefully. “Can I ask you what you’re doing out here?”

Gallow smiled wide, displaying a row of deeply yellowed teeth. “I was going to ask you the same thing, Roach!” He gestured through the trees, toward the abandoned wagon up the road. “My ma and I got robbed today. Ain’t the first time it happened to us, but these ones were meaner. Thought it’d be funny to cut up our harnesses so we couldn’t take the wagon with us.”

Roach nodded. That would explain some of what he’d seen through Aurora’s riflescope. “That doesn’t sound very funny at all,” he said, earning another decayed smile from Gallow. “Where’s your mother?”

“She’s back at camp making dinner,” he said. Then he hesitantly added, “I guess you’re not raiders then, are you?”

Roach let himself exhale and shook his head. “No, just travelers passing through.” He let his shotgun drop a few inches, watching Gallow for any twitch that might suggest he was waiting for an opening. He didn’t seem to be paying attention to his weapon at all, his attention still absorbed by Ginger’s shield spell.

He gave his foreleg a little flick and the shotgun retracted along its rail with a soft click. “Sorry to hear about the trouble with your wagon,” he said.

“Aw, it’s nothing too bad. We ain’t dead, so...” Gallow trailed off and began picking his way through the brush toward them, seemingly oblivious to the one remaining rifle that tracked his approach.

He slid down into the ditch, his saddlebags jangling when he stumbled at the bottom, and then climbed up the other side until the amber glow of Ginger’s shield lit his face entirely. Barely three feet away, the thick odor of rot and cook smoke wafted off him and through the barrier like an unwanted guest. Roach noticed that the right side of Gallow’s face was completely slack, as if the muscles beneath the skin had been severed. Tufts of green hair clung to his slackened cheek in sparse patches. At first glance, a pony might think he had mange, but to Roach the signs of radiation damage were impossible to miss this close to the stranger.

Gallow didn’t seem to care that they were staring. His grey eyes were lifted to the magic barrier between them, his muzzle split wide with wonder. He lifted a hoof and pressed it against the shield. Light rippled outward from where he touched it.

“I knew a unicorn down in Dodge City who used to be able to teleport,” he said, and brought his other hoof up against shield to give it a harder push. Roach glanced at Ginger who was, unsurprisingly, less than comfortable with the sudden attention. The shield shimmered under his weight and he laughed, dropping back to the ground as if satisfied with his test. “It was nuts. One second he was right there, the next, poof! Gone!”

Ginger lifted one of her eyebrows and, slowly, lowered the shield.

“Aw,” Gallow complained, but his eyes flashed wide when he felt a tug from his holster. “Wh… hey!”

Roach would have been lying if he said he didn’t sympathize with the young stallion a little. As Ginger’s shield dissolved, a gentle glow wrapped Gallow’s pistol and lifted it from its holster. Hovering well out of his reach, Gallow could only watch with dismay as Ginger’s magic ejected the yellow energy cell from the side of the weapon. That done, she slipped the cell into Gallow’s holster, followed by the pistol atop it. If the earth pony had any thoughts of shooting them in the back, he would have to waste precious seconds dumping out his holster to do it.

Her harmless deception finished, Ginger allowed the amber light to fade. “It never hurts to be safe,” she said.

Gallow regarded his pistol like a foal who had bitten into a stick of black licorice, expecting red. “I suppose that’s fair.” He sulked for a moment more before his wry smile stretched his cracked lips once again. “Say... ma likes to make more stew than I can eat by myself, and y’all look like you could eat…”

He turned at the sound of Aurora shrugging out of her rifle, his eyes fixed on her wings. A new source of intrigue.

“Sorry, but we already ate,” Aurora said flatly. Then to Roach, “We should get going.”

“W-well hold on now!” Gallow said, earning a mild glare from Aurora. “Maybe you’re not hungry, but it’s all we really have to pay you with.”

Roach frowned. “Pay us?”

It took a visible effort from Gallow to pry his attention away from Aurora’s wings. “Well, sure. I was gonna ask if you could help us out,” he said, his eyes dropping to his hooves. He scraped one sheepishly through the dirt. “Y’know, with our cart and all.”

He heard Aurora stifling a groan. He nearly let one escape his perpetually ragged throat himself. On his other side, Ginger made no qualms about wearing her suspicion on her sleeve. The corners of her eyes were pinched as if trying to suss out the real reason behind this young stallion’s neurotic approach to such a simple question.

Roach sighed and tried his best to look disappointed. “Look, we’d like to help, but we don’t have the materials to fix a harness. Might be best to leave the wagon behind and come back for it later.”

He turned and stepped back up onto the asphalt, a little sorry to leave the kid in a lurch but not enough to lose sleep over. He wasn’t alone and he was armed with a decent weapon. If they stopped to help everyone who wanted it, they would never…

“Ma and I have the materials, though!” Gallow called after him.

Roach stopped walking and breathed a curse. He definitely seemed like the type to take the long road on the way to anywhere. “You do, do you?”

“Sure do!” he said with the same lopsided grin. “I think, anyway. Ma always keeps a sewing kit even if she can’t use it on account of her teeth gone bad. Raiders didn’t have much use for it neither so they let us keep it.”

The dental problems in Gallow’s family were evidently hereditary. Roach had a feeling that Gallow would just as soon swallow a sewing needle before completing his first stitch. He didn’t even want to think of the logistics of what it took to sew with one’s teeth. The idea of biting a needle made him shudder.

He looked to Ginger, who was dutifully avoiding any and all eye contact with the rest of them. She knew what was coming next and was already trying to think of a way out of it.

“What do you think?” he asked.

She glanced at him, then at the dark stretch of road beyond. “We’re on a deadline.”

Roach waited.

Ginger eventually relented. “One, maybe two hours, depending on their materials and the way their harnesses were cut.”

There it was. He winked at her and caught the edge of a smile lift the corner of her muzzle as he turned to Aurora. “Sound alright to you?”

Aurora’s eyes lingered on Gallow with the same reservations that he and Ginger felt, but it was clear that none of them could think of a decent reason not to help beyond the simple fact that this was a detour none of them particularly wanted to take. Roach knew time was of the essence, but the reality was that he felt bad for the kid. He had to wonder whether Gallows could sense that he was destined to become one of the monsters that hunted from the forgotten shadows, or if he was clinging onto the thin hope that he might be one of the “lucky” few to exist as a sentient corpse.

To his relief, Aurora nodded. “A couple hours can’t hurt.”

Roach grinned wide enough to show his own dimly glowing gums.

“That settles it,” Roach said, turning to Gallow. “Lead the way.”

Rather than follow the road, Gallow followed the wavering scent of smoke into the trees. The underbrush clung to their legs as the four of them navigated the maze of living trees and fallen deadwood. A thick matte of dead leaves trapped between tufts of weeds made more noise underhoof than a herd of buffalo, though Roach suspected none of the others would understand the analogy. He ducked beneath a low branch, following close behind Gallow with Ginger and Aurora in tow.

“So where are you from?” Roach asked, though he already suspected he knew the answer judging by Gallow’s accent.

“Oh,” he said cheerfully. “Noplace you’d know.”

Roach tipped his head, accepting the challenge. “I’ve gotten around. Try me.”

He couldn’t see Gallow’s face from where he stood, but he saw the little shrug play out across his shoulders all the same. “Weaver Farm,” he said. “It’s a few days west of Appleoosa.”

The kid was right, he hadn’t heard of it. “Well, I’ve been through Appleoosa plenty of times. Never had a chance to head west from there,” he said. The town had been teetering on the edge of city status by the time he abandoned his hive. Back then, nobody thought twice about the odd traveller wandering into town from parts unknown, and the peculiar accent its residents brandished wasn’t too hard for a changeling to mimic with a little practice.

It still surprised him to hear the country lilt going strong so many years later. Gallow didn’t lay it on as thick as some ponies were known to do, and it lent a bit of charm to his odder mannerisms.

He was certainly going out of his way to ingratiate himself to the group, trotting forward along what appeared to be some sort of a trail to hoist up a low-hanging branch for them to pass under and then crashing through the underbrush alongside them to make up the ground like a dog eager to please its new companions. Roach couldn’t help but be impressed by Gallow. It was like he knew these woods by heart.

Not long after leaving the road, Gallow found himself standing atop the trunk of a fallen tree with his hoof outstretched. He was insistent that he help them over the thing and he didn’t seem keen on taking no for an answer. The trio relented and he hoisted them up one by one, finishing with Ginger. He hopped down alongside her and matched her gait for several quiet seconds.

“So,” he said nervously. “You never did answer my question.”

Ginger arched an eyebrow. “I don’t recall you having asked one.”

Gallow frowned and was quiet again, as if replaying the last ten minutes in his head. “Oh, I suppose I didn’t. I was going to ask if you’d ever done it before.” he said. Seeing her expression, he flushed and he quickly added, “Teleportation, I mean. Not… that.”

Roach glanced back at Ginger and saw the polite smile affixed to her muzzle that she reserved for anyone who required a little extra patience. Gallow was either unaware or didn’t care much about personal space. Behind them, Aurora narrowed her eyes at the newcomer.

“I don’t know the first thing about it,” Ginger admitted while subtly putting a few inches of extra space between them. “You said you knew a unicorn who could?”

Gallow nodded vigorously. “Sure did! Called himself Orlov the Outrageous. He used to put on magic shows a while back. A lot of it was just hocus pocus and mirrors. Cutting mares in half, sleight of hoof, that kind of thing, but he was really good at it and it always drew a crowd. At the end of every show he would say, ‘Sim Saddle Bim!’ and poof! He’d disappear!”

Roach snorted. Of all the signature lines, this Orlov wasn’t afraid to use a lemon.

“It certainly sounds like an impressive trick,” Ginger said, plainly suspicious of Gallow’s claim. “But teleportation? Even before the war, performing a spell like that was exceedingly difficult even for the most talented unicorns. I mean no offense, but I don’t see why a unicorn would go through the trouble of mastering something so difficult only to use it in a travelling magic show.”

“None taken, ma’am. I was just curious whether you could do it, is all.” Gallow offered a smile, then shrugged. “And I wouldn’t say he mastered it or nothing, but I can promise you it was real. I was there for Orlov’s last show. He ended up teleporting himself right into the middle of the stage wall by accident. Cut himself clear in two. Hard to fake that.”

Ginger made a disgusted noise. “That’s horrible.”

“Sure was. Waste of a good pony, if you ask me. The unicorns in town took it harder than anyone else. He went and got their hopes up that the old magic might be coming back.” His eyes lingered on her horn for a moment and he grinned. “Guess they were wrong about that.”

Roach could see Ginger’s smile growing uncomfortable and he loudly cleared his throat, not that it changed the gravelly quality of his voice. “Hey, Gallow? Why don’t you come up here and show us where to go before I get us lost.”

Gallow’s ears perked up and he widened his gait until he caught up with Roach. His sheepish smile was even more apparent as he scanned the woods and turned them toward a thinner stand of trees. “Sorry, I can get distracted sometimes. It’s been a while since I’ve met folks I could just talk to, you know?”

He wasn’t shy about making up for lost time. Roach nodded, mainly because Gallow was looking at him to see if he agreed. “It can be a lonely world. Mind if I ask how old you are?”

The question seemed to catch Gallow off guard. He blinked several times and frowned as if he weren’t sure. Probably because he wasn’t. Seconds passed while he worked his tongue along the inside of his gaunt cheek, deep in thought. Roach was intimately familiar with the slow, sinking dread that settled into his gut whenever he realized he had forgotten something important. Sometimes with enough concentration he could grab the wayward memory by its tail and drag it back to the surface. Sometimes he couldn’t. He could only assume the descent into ferality was even more aggressive and he felt a twinge of guilt for asking the question.

“I…” Gallow began, hesitantly. “I think I’m sixteen?”

The cheery glint in his eye was gone, replaced with worry and uncertainty. He blinked again, rapid fire. Some sort of nervous tick or perhaps an artifact of his transformation.

“Yeah,” he said, more confidently. “Sixteen sounds right. How old are you?”

Roach surprised himself by laughing. He tamped it down before he could offend Gallow. “Older than sixteen,” he chuckled. “That’s a good age to be, by the way. I bet you’re all kinds of trouble for your mother.”

“Not really,” he said. His ears drooped. “I do all the hunting for us ever since dad died. Used to be I just did the butchering but now I gotta do both. Ain’t any time to do anything worth doing when I’m stuck doing all the work.”

Once again, he had seemingly stumbled onto a sore topic, though he wasn’t entirely surprised by Gallow’s reaction. At his age, the subject of family tended to draw out strong emotions from all ends of the spectrum, seemingly at random.

Gallow’s ears perked before Roach could stitch together anything amounting to meaningful advice. He watched the young ghoul as he trotted ahead, the excited curiosity sliding off his face and replaced by a tension that didn’t quite sit right.

The stallion’s eyes flicked toward them, then back to the trees ahead.

Roach followed his gaze. The path ahead was as dark as ever. Then he looked up and saw them. Tiny motes of embers lifted into the trees on a barely perceptible pillar of oily gray smoke that would have been invisible were he anything but what he was. Two hundred years of living in the darkened tunnel outside Stable 10 had given his eyes plenty of time to learn how to see through the veil of night. Gallow hadn’t been so gifted and was navigating purely by scent and memory.

“Everything alright?” Roach asked.

“Huh?” Gallow was looking higher now, having finally sighted the embers twirling in the distant branches. “Oh yeah, no, everything’s fine. Ma likes to shield the fire so folks can’t see it from the road, is all. Makes it tricky to find her unless you got a good nose.”

His tone had changed. He was nervous about something. A cloud of sparks appeared between the boughs maybe a couple hundred feet ahead of them. Behind him, Aurora and Ginger took notice as well.

The trees parted only slightly as they came to what had once been a larger clearing that was in the late stages of being completely reclaimed by the surrounding forest. The remains of a small house, charred down to the foundation with the exception of the two furthest walls, one of which clung weakly to the remains of a broken chimney, sat at the top of a shallow knoll at the center of the old property. A ways downhill toward the far treeline stood a rusted aluminum shed. Its pitched roof bowed inward like a pouted lip.

Tall grasses swayed lazily in the clearing, broken only by a ribbon of asphalt that rolled out of what might have been a connected garage and into a gap in the trees that Roach suspected led back to the road. Smoke, thick enough to see against the dark night sky, rolled up from what was left of the chimney. Roach eyed the exposed fireplace as they approached the foundation, his brow knitting as Gallow climbed three cinderblock steps to the main floor. Broken bricks lay stacked neatly in the hearth, sealing it off. More smoke slithered out through the gaps between them.

“Hey Ma!” Gallow shouted, startling a curse out of Aurora. “I’m back!”

Roach stopped short of following him onto the charred floorboards, too blackened by heat for him to know what kind of wood they were. Gallow didn’t seem to notice or care, the flats of his hooves turning black as he stepped over the ribs of what had once been the studs of an interior wall.

Below the floor, the unmistakable sound of a skillet being dropped onto a stove caught Roach’s ear. A basement door peeled on old hinges and a shaft of orange firelight spilled out from a stairwell that Roach had mistaken for a cave-in.

“You’ve been gone less than an hour,” an irritable mare’s voice came from the stairs. “I’m not feeding you if you’re going to be lazy about your hunting.”

“Ma,” Gallow hissed down the stairwell through his clenched smile. “I brought friends.”

A long pause. “You brought friends.”

Hooves clicked on the steps until the eyes of a moss-tinted mare appeared above the burnt floor, reminding Roach of the prairie dogs that once lived out west. She lowered her eyebrows at him in particular. “What do you want?”

“They’re here to help us fix up our wagon,” Gallow said.

His mother gave him a blank look.

“The one we left on the road,” he prompted.

“Ah,” his mother said, her eyes passing over her son’s holster and the obvious lack of an energy cell present in his pistol. She took a slow breath. “The one you couldn’t deal with on your own.”

Gallow stole a look over to the three ponies standing in the grass, then back to his mother and nodded. “Yeah.”

Roach felt something tighten in his gut that he didn’t like. He turned to cough, eyeing Aurora and Ginger in the process. Their expressions had darkened in equal measure. Imperceptibly, Aurora’s wing had begun sliding into the hooks of her rifle.

“Well, the three of you are mighty kind,” the older mare said, her muzzle slowly dipping below the threshold of the floor. “Helphing my shon and all.”

Roach frowned at the change in the mare’s speech, as if her mouth was full. She stared at him without blinking, the top of her head growing perfectly still. Then the realization hit him. Gallow’s pistol had a bite trigger. His eyes went wide.

She was aiming.

Several things happened at once.

Gallow scrambled over the far edge of the foundation. A lance of crimson energy carved through the floorboards toward Roach. The shot, aimed at the center of his chest, deflected through the old wood just enough to save him the trouble of dying. The beam went high and wide, carving a shallow trough into the left side of his neck. He staggered backward and fell.

Aurora’s rifle cracked the air. The round sailed over the older mare’s ear, missing her by a scant few inches and forcing her back into the basement. Ginger’s shield came down hard enough to throw a wide circle of soil into the air, forming the same amber dome that had saved Aurora’s life a little more than a day earlier.

No sooner had the shield appeared, a second beam of light erupted from one of the basement windows. The lick of energy rebounded off Ginger’s magic and splayed harmlessly into the night sky.

“The fuck is that?!” the mare barked from her shelter. “Gallow you stupid little shit, why didn’t you tell me they had shield tech?!”

Gallow’s voice bleated from the far side of the house. “It ain’t tech, it’s that unicorn! She knows a spell!”

Another two bolts of energy stabbed toward Ginger, whose head was bent low in concentration. Crimson light fanned off its surface with little effect. “Celestia’s tits, you knew that and you still brought them here?”

“I didn’t know what else to do!”

As they argued, Roach lifted himself off the grass with Aurora’s help. He was distantly aware that she was trying to get his attention but the amount of pain seething through his neck took the bulk of what little attention he could muster. He tried to push her away but she was having none of it, her emerald eyes wide with fear as she caught a glimpse of his wound.

He lifted his hoof to his neck. It came back smeared with opaque green blood. He grimaced. “Fuck.”

Seeing Aurora’s reaction, he tried to soften his expression. “I’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded, wincing at the jags of pain from the seeping wound. Ghouls weren’t known to bleed to death, and he ventured that Aurora would have reacted differently if he were gushing blood. The one benefit of being hit by an energy weapon was their tendency to cauterize the wounds they created. For Aurora or Ginger, it wouldn’t matter. The gash across his neck would be fatal with or without a set of burns to go with it. For a ghoul… well, ghouls tended to cling to life a little more stubbornly.

Red light lashed the side of Ginger’s shield, drawing his attention back to the stairwell. Gallow’s mother stood at the top of the steps, her eyes tracking the ripple that traced the circumference of the dome in search of a weakness.

Roach flicked his foreleg forward, feeling the familiar clack of his shotgun as it slid forward on his homemade rail. He leveled the weapon at the mare who regarded him briefly before turning her aim back to Ginger.

She squeezed off another shot, seemingly for the simple pleasure of it, and started crossing the charred floorboards toward them.

“Ma,” Gallow said, peeking over the far side of the foundation. “Be careful.”

She rolled her eyes and silently mimed her son’s warning, smirking at Ginger as if they were sharing an inside joke. “Sho how long until thish bubble popsh?”

Roach walked to the edge of the shield and adjusted his aim, tracking her approach. “Aurora, cover the kid.”

The mare watched Aurora take a few steps to Roach’s left and heft her rifle toward Gallow. He ducked behind the foundation until only his grey eyes were visible. She sighed and shifted the bite plate to the side of her mouth, gripping it with her molars like a cheap cigar. “Look,” she said a bit more clearly, “It's not my fault that you’re here, but now that you are… I can’t exactly let you go.”

“That’s not a problem,” Roach growled. “You’re outnumbered.”

The mare descended the cinderblock steps in front of him and sat down on the last one, adjusting the muzzle of her pistol toward his head. “Judging by how worried that dustwing looked a minute ago, I’d say it’s a problem for at least one of you.”

Aurora snorted.

The mare ignored her. “I’ll make you a deal, ghoul. Put down your weapons and have the unicorn drop the shield. The two of you can go off to wherever you were going before my idiot son brought you here, and the mouthy one with the wings gets to stay here.”

“Sorry, no,” Aurora said. “We’re not doing the sacrificial lamb thing.”

“I don’t see what choice you have,” she replied coolly. “We can all either sit here and wait for your unicorn’s magic to give out, at which point several of us will needlessly die, or you can accept my offer and only you die.”

“Or,” Roach said, “we all walk away and nobody dies.”

The mare shook her head and smiled. “You’re not in a position to make demands any more than I’m in a position to allow a delicacy to just fly away.”

A stone fell into the pit of Roach’s gut. “Ah, great. You’re an Epicurean, aren’t you.”

“Did she call me a delicacy?”

The mare laughed, and for a moment the pistol in her mouth dipped. “No, no. We wouldn’t be living here if we had the caps to join up with the Epicureans. At least, not yet.” Her silver eyes walked their way across Aurora’s frame. “My son and I are more… enthusiasts, by necessity.”

“You’re cannibals,” Roach growled.

She offered a mild shrug in response. “And you’re edibles. Welcome to the wasteland.”

Roach had to resist the urge to pull the trigger. The last thing he needed was a faceful of buckshot ricocheting off Ginger’s shield. “That wagon back on the road,” he said dryly. “That wasn’t yours, was it?”

She chuckled. “I wouldn’t know anything about it. Gallow’s the one that does all the hunting. I just cook.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then turned his attention to the half-ghoul hiding behind the house.

Gallow’s ears went flat, but he didn’t disappear entirely. The silence stretched. Finally, he piped up. “I-I make sure they don’t suffer,” he admitted. “We ain’t monsters.”

Roach’s eyes settled on the young stallion like lead weights. “You live less than a day’s walk from a fucking city, Gallow.”

“The food they got there ain’t the same,” he complained.

“Roach,” Ginger said, her voice unsteady. “Speed this up, please.”

Roach tore his eyes from Gallow and looked at Ginger. She was breathing hard from exertion, sweat trickling off her nose as she struggled to maintain the spell. The narrow filament of magic that fed the dome above them was widening into a dim cone. A hole the size of a carriage wheel had open in the dome’s roof and was slowly widening.

Gallow’s mother looked up at the hole and narrowed her eyes with a curious smile. “Gallow, go downstairs and get me my grenade.”

“Alright,” he said, and climbed up from the grass onto the charred floor. He hesitated at the top of the stairs and looked at Roach, shamefaced. “We ain’t monsters.”

His piece said, he disappeared down the steps.

“Clock’s ticking,” the mare said. “You have until my son comes back to make your choice. Put down your weapons and I’ll let you and the unicorn leave. Or don’t. I’m not above salvaging bruised meat.”

Down below, Gallow could be heard rummaging through containers.

Roach stared into the mare’s eyes, searching for some kind of bluff. There wasn’t one.

He heaved a sigh. “Alright. Just know you did this to yourself.”

The mare quirked an eyebrow at him as he lowered his weapon and shrugged his saddlebags off his hips. He turned away from her and flipped open one of the flaps with the tip of his fissured horn, his eyes scanning the contents for what he wanted. The brown bottle lay beneath the binoculars they had scavenged off the raiders who made the mistake of attacking them in the field. He picked up the bottle between his teeth and flung it to Aurora, who caught it in her free wing.

“Both of you take two of those,” he said, then looked to Ginger. “Be ready to drop the shield.”

He watched Aurora twist off the cap and shake two doses of Rad-X into her feathers. She tipped them into Ginger’s mouth before taking two herself, wincing at the bitter flavor as she chewed them dry. When they were done, he turned to face the cannibal still perched on the makeshift stairs.

She tipped the muzzle of her pistol toward his head with a calm smile. He pressed the barrel of his shotgun against the shield toward hers.

“Found it!” Gallow announced from the basement.

Her smile widened. “Time’s up.”

He nodded. “Yep.”

Green light swept around Roach’s horn and surrounded the pistol clutched in the mare’s jaw. The Pip-Buck bound to Ginger’s foreleg chattered excitedly as waste radiation generated by his corrupted magic spilled into the dome like an invisible plague.

Gallow’s mother frowned and bit down on the pistol, squeezing off an errant beam that flung off the failing shield and into the night sky. Roach yanked hard at the weapon, lifting the mare to her hooves as she fought to keep it.

She flailed like a trout on a hook, refusing to let go despite the metallic taste flooding her mouth. Roach pivoted the shotgun against the shield, tracking her as she struggled against his magic.

“Leh go!” she shrieked.

He wrinkled his nose and gave the pistol a final, violent jerk. It tore loose with an audible scrape and tumbled into the grass. She howled as two of her teeth followed close behind.

“Ginger!” he yelled.

Behind him, Ginger released the spell with a gasp of relief.

Disarmed, Gallow’s mother watched with dawning horror as the shield standing between them spilled away. “Don’t-”

Roach pulled the trigger.

Her head snapped sideways in a cloud of bloody pulp. What remained of the mare lurched over the front stairs and slumped off the side in a graceless, twitching heap.

“MA!!”

The raw anguish in Gallow’s scream made Roach freeze in place. The stallion stood at the top of the basement steps, the grenade he’d been sent to fetch wobbling on the charred floorboards like a dropped toy, forgotten and, mercifully, with its pin still threaded through the handle.

Gallow stared, disbelieving, at the crumpled body of his mother. He walked toward the edge of the house where she lay, his eyes swimming as the undeniable truth of what he just witnessed began to sink in.

“No…” he croaked. His mouth twisted with grief. “Mama…”

It occurred to Roach that for the first time in a long while, he didn’t know what to do.

He stared at the mare’s still form for a moment before blinking at the ground, his brow furrowed. This wasn’t his first time killing. Far from it. Raiders were commonplace outside the routes once protected by F&F Mercantile and a pony had to be willing to defend themselves to any extent necessary if they expected to survive. The mare lying at his hooves would have killed all three of them had she gotten hold of that grenade. He did the only thing he could do to keep him and his companions safe.

So why do I feel like the villain?

Gallow lifted his hoof toward the first step and stopped when he saw the spray of blood coating the cinder blocks. His lips peeled away from his stained teeth and a gutteral sob shook his chest. He stood there, shaken by grief, cut off from his mother by her own blood.

“I had to do it,” Roach said quietly.

Gallow looked at him, tears standing in his eyes, his mouth bent by a withering sneer.

“You murdered my mama,” he whispered. Then he screamed.

“You murdered my mama!”

Roach cursed as the stallion leapt off the stairs, sending himself crashing squarely into Roach’s chest. Almost immediately, he could tell why Gallow had been able to sneak up on them through the woods virtually undetected. He barely weighed anything at all. Roach stumbled backward, leading Gallow away from his mother’s cooling body even as one of his frantic jabs glanced across the fresh scorch wound across his neck. He grimaced and continued to back away until his hooves scraped over the cracked asphalt of the driveway. It was far enough.

With a single motion, Roach ducked low and swept his hind leg through the tangle of Gallow’s hooves. The half-ghoul spilled onto his side hard enough to steal the wind from his lungs. His pistol clattered out of its holster across the asphalt.

Roach pressed a hoof against Gallow’s shoulder and settled his weight into it, pinning him like a stone on a page of newspaper. It was as non-threatening a gesture as he could offer. Despite knowing what he was, Roach didn’t think he could bring himself to kill the kid.

“Are you done?” he asked.

Gallow sniffed loudly and stared forward, his jaw clenched. “Let me up and you’ll find out,” he petulantly murmured.

Roach sighed. He looked to Aurora and Ginger who had kept their distance during the scuffle and were now tracing their way through the grass towards them. Aurora watched Gallow with fresh mistrust. Ginger looked too exhausted to do much else except pant as she followed.

He looked down at Gallow. “I’m sorry for what she made me do. I truly am. You seemed like a good kid but…” he shook his head, his lip twisting with anger. “What happened here? This is your fault, Gallow. You brought us here because you wanted her to kill us. That’s on you.”

Gallow lifted his head off the ground and glared at Ginger, teeth bared as flecks of asphalt fell from his cheek. “If she hadn’t conjured that fucking shield back on the road, I wouldn’t have had to bring you here in the first place! This is her fault.”

Ginger narrowed her eyes at him. “So sorry.”

He ignored her. “It isn’t fair,” he said. “It’s my job to do the hunting. I forage for the herbs. I carve the meat. Ma cooks. That was her only job!”

Aurora came to a stop at Roach’s side. “You murder ponies and eat them,” she said dryly.

“We didn’t have a choice the first time! Ma didn’t have no caps and neither of us were any good at hunting. We were starving!” Gallow saw Aurora’s flat expression and dropped his head back to the asphalt, frustrated tears coating his eyes. “We… I was desperate.”

He was telling the truth. Roach could see it there on Gallow’s sunken face, in eyes that had once been filled with a disarmingly cheerful energy. Roach wondered whether some of that had been real, and if only part of it had been used as a ploy to get them to follow him into the woods in the first place.

“Ma got so weak she couldn’t get up anymore. Nobody would help us. The F&F wagoneers accused us of being bait and everyone else just pretended we weren’t there.” Gallow wrinkled his nose and sniffed. “Raider scout caught me out on the highway. Threatened to kill ma n’ me if we didn’t pay ‘em. Said a hundred wasn’t enough, so I killed him instead. He didn’t have any food on him, just a gun.

“I kept thinking I should have let him kill us because at least then we wouldn’t be starving anymore,” he continued, his eyes distant. “Then ma told me to carry him into the woods and build a fire, so I did. She told me to string him up and dress him like a stag, so I did. Ponies… we look so much like livestock once you peel the skin away, it’s scary. I kept thinking that I was going to get caught. Someone would see the fire and come looking and see me quartering that raider like he was a brahmin. But nobody found out, and ma and I survived.”

Aurora swallowed thickly, shook her head and walked away. Roach could see the revulsion crawling its way up her throat and didn’t object when she left.

Gallow didn’t seem to notice. “It’s addicting,” he said. “You don’t know you’re hooked until you run out of meat and realize you’re back to square one. Only when that happened, we had two choices instead of the one. We chose not to starve.”

Roach watched Gallow with a mixture of grotesque fascination and outright disgust. Cannibals were, despite wishing it weren’t true, not particularly rare in the wasteland. However, it was rare for one to speak so candidly about the dark reality of their diet, let alone admit to the circumstances that drove them to taking that first low step to Tartarus in the first place.

The Epicureans, the wasteland’s predominant and most exclusive faction of high decorum cannibals, prided themselves on maintaining an air of secrecy around exactly what it was that made cannibalism their modus operandi. They believed that the mystery of the act would serve to bring like-minded ponies to their table, one way or another, and it was considered a faux pas of the greatest magnitude to paint their culinary choice with anything except a refined brush.

Despite his mother’s allusion to seeking out a place of her own in that exclusive club, Gallow had made it clear that he would never make that particular cut.

“You’re going to shoot me, aren’t you,” he said, his voice almost too quiet to hear. His eyes fixed on the shotgun strapped to Roach’s foreleg.

Roach looked up at the dark shroud of clouds overhead. They reminded him of the thunderheads he used to watch the pegasi herd over Canterlot when rain was scheduled. He hadn’t thought about that in decades.

He sighed.

“That depends on you, Gallow.” He looked down at the half-ghoul and watched hope and mistrust play out on his face. Then he turned his head to the ruined house, past the body of Gallow’s mother and to the grenade that lay abandoned on the burned floor.

Gallow blinked confusion. “Are… are you robbing me?”

Roach took his hoof off Gallow’s shoulder and stepped away. “I’m giving you a choice,” he said. “Take a walk and cool your head. By the time the sun comes up, we’ll be gone. Or you can stay here, continue being a threat and see how far it takes you.”

Hesitantly, Gallow pushed himself to his hooves, his body tensed as if expecting to be shot at any moment. He made a visible effort to keep from looking behind him to where his mother lay.

His eyes flicked to the pistol lying in the grass.

“Don’t,” Roach warned.

“I’m not going to. But…” Gallow hesitated. “Can you leave it here? When you go?”

Roach didn’t like the idea of leaving a weapon behind for Gallow to take up when he returned, but there was something in the way he avoided Roach’s gaze that made him understand what the young stallion was asking.

He nodded. “We’ll put it up by the house where you can find it.”

Gallow let that sink in for a moment. Then his hooves scraped across the driveway as he turned and began walking away.

It was all the thanks Roach expected to get.

Gallow didn’t look back. Defeated, disarmed and completely alone, he followed the broken strip of asphalt into the trees and faded into the night.

Aurora made a face as she watched him go. The wild grass swept across her legs as she wandered the empty yard, her eyes turning back to the dark perimeter of encroaching forest.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” she asked.

“Probably not,” Roach admitted. “But killing him seemed like the least terrible option. We did enough to him.”

“Who? The cannibal?” Aurora shook her head. The reality of ponies like Gallow and his mother existing in Equestria refused to mesh with any of the evils she could imagine on her own. “I’m not sure I care whether or not we ruined his night.”

“He’s just a kid, Aurora.”

She rolled her eyes. They settled on the dark shape of the wood shed at the far end of the clearing. “They wanted to eat us, Roach.”

Ginger thumped her hoof into the dirt. “Stop it. Both of you.”

An awkward silence settled over the clearing. Aurora looked over her shoulder to see Roach quietly placing Gallow’s pistol on the corner of the foundation, turn, and begin searching for the missing energy cell. Ginger stood a few feet away, glaring at both of them like an exhausted parent.

“Sorry,” Aurora said.

He waved her off. “Don’t be.”

It wasn’t exactly the me too she was expecting, but she got the impression that maybe she had poked at a wound of his that ran a little deeper than she expected. She sighed and decided to let it go. Her shoulders were already starting to tremble as she came down the other side of her adrenaline high. No sense in risking saying something she couldn’t take back while she was jumpy.

Her ears twitched at the sound of Ginger mounting the house steps. “I’m going to check the basement before we go.”

“Alright. I’ll keep watch,” Roach said. “Keep an eye out for ammo. I’m low.”

“Mmhm, twelve gauge for you and .308 for Aurora. I know.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and there’ll be an ignition talisman down there,” Aurora added.

Ginger’s expression softened slightly, but the attempt at levity didn’t relieve all the tension. She sucked the corner of her lip as she watched Ginger levitate the unused grenade back to Roach before descending beneath the blackened floorboards.

Aurora self-consciously shuffled her wings and turned her attention toward the rusting shed.

The deep gray structure lay sat slumped at the far edge of the clearing, its roof bent inward along the spine as rust and time chewed away at its bones. She plodded her way toward it, the tall grass snatching at her hooves in spots where it had been trampled into a matted tangle, probably by Gallow or his homicidal mother. A dim buzzing tickled her ears.

As she drew closer, dark shapes began to form inside the tree line around the shed. A tingle of fear shot down her spine for a brief moment, her brain instinctively thinking deathclaws when in reality the night-shaded silhouettes were ringing familiar bells for a different reason.

Wagons, she realized. Dozens of them, some perfectly intact and many others in the process of falling apart from neglect, their wooden wheels cracked and sinking into the underbrush like shipwrecks on a sunken reef.

Then the smell hit her and her unprepared gut lurched. She coughed to clear the stench from her nose but that made it even worse. Now she could taste it. It took everything she had to keep from retching. Any pony who attended a funeral in the Gardens knew that smell. It was impossible to forget. Like a physical thing, the thickly sweet scent of decay clawed its way up her nose and down her throat. It was thick as soup.

A fly buzzed just outside her ear and she jerked away, startled. It meandered around her before bobbing towards a gap between the locked door and the frame where something had struck it hard enough to leave a dent. Aurora squinted after it and realized the dim buzz was getting louder the further she got from the ruined house.

It was coming from the shed.

Through watering eyes, she saw the dark smears in the grass outside the dented aluminum door. Black specks, too small for her to properly see in the moonless night, flitted in and out of the locked door. In lieu of a padlock, the latch was held shut with a simple worn strip of leather.

Her stomach twisted as she approached the door. Every inch of her wanted to turn around. To get away from the smell, this shed and the lost wagons behind it. She already knew what was on the other side. She didn’t need to see it. She could turn around, walk away and never speak a word of it.

But a part of her refused to let her. As she wrapped a feather around the strip of leather and pulled it away, she kept thinking about the wagon back on the road and the harnesses that hadn’t been cut apart by raiders but by Gallow.

It’s my job to do the hunting. I carve the meat.

Only maybe he hadn’t finished. Maybe his most recent victims were still alive.

Maybe.

She let the strap fall to the matted grass, slipped her feathers through the gap in the door and pulled.

Fat, black flies poured through the doorway like a swarm of hornets, so thick in the air that they practically bounced into one another in the escape. Aurora did the only reasonable thing she could think of and screamed in panic as insects swarmed past her. She reared back and tried to turn away but her hooves tangled and she fell to the stained grass in a heap.

She started to push herself back up, but then she looked into the shed’s gaping maw and stopped. Back at the house, Roach and Ginger were shouting to know if she was alright, but she couldn’t answer. Her tongue refused to form the mollified words being birthed in her skull. She could only stare, silently, at the nightmares dangling mere feet from her hooves.

Four bodies hung upside-down from ugly metal hooks bolted to the roof. The curves of iron looped under thick ropes that bound their rear ankles together, their forelegs pointing to pools of clotted blood below them as if they were all frozen mid-dive. Muscle, sinew and bone glistened inside the gaping chasms of their opened chests, their innards scraped out and replaced by a glittering dusting of salt, their mouths craning open in silent screams.

“For Luna’s sake, Aurora, answer me!” Ginger’s voice came from behind. “Are you… oh my goddess.”

Aurora’s eyes didn’t leave the butchered bodies as she rose unsteadily to her hooves. She felt the familiar urge to scream, to sob, to break down and try to claw the memory of what she was seeing out of her head before it could take root. But she felt something else, too.

Roach appeared beside her and put his hoof on her wing, trying to lead her away from the open door. “Come on. Let’s go.”

She shrugged him away, breathing hard. Her eyes had settled on the last body hanging against the back wall, smaller than the rest. She stepped past Roach, walking forward until she was at the very threshold of Gallow’s shed. The putrid stench of offal assaulted her senses to the point where she couldn’t tell whether the tears staining her cheeks were from odor or grief.

The little colt couldn’t have been more than four years old.

Aurora spun around, ran past Roach and vomited into the grass. Everything came up. Her body convulsed until only bile ran past her teeth. She could see Ginger’s legs out of the corner of her eye and was vaguely aware of her mane being pulled away from her face so she wouldn’t soil it. Somewhere behind her, Roach closed up the shed.

She spat, trying to get the taste of death out of her mouth, but it wouldn’t go away. None of it would. She could feel the image of the foal burning itself into her memory like a brand. A sob shook her chest, but the next one evaporated as it slid past the glowing hot anger that rose in her throat like a scream.

Gallow did this.

She started to walk.

“Aurora,” Ginger said, trotting to catch up, “tell me you’re okay.”

“I’m fine.” She lifted Desperate Times by its hooks with her right wing and used the left to pull back the bolt with a metallic clack. The empty brass from the shot she fired at the start of their encounter spiraled away into the grass, leaving a fresh round glinting in its place. She shoved the bolt shut, chambering the round.

Roach appeared on her other side, his eyes on her weapon. “That doesn’t tell me you’re fine.”

Aurora ignored him, slid her wing free of the rifle and broke into a canter towards the driveway.

“Where are you going?” he called after her.

She could already feel him trying to think up a way to get her to reconsider what she was about to do. Her jaw tensed. That wasn’t going to happen.

“I’m fixing a problem,” she said.

Before he had a chance to answer, she threw down her wings and flung herself into the air. The wind quickly filled her ears, drowning out the voices that chased her across the clearing.

She lined herself up with the dark strip of the driveway and slid through the gap between the trees, her eyes scouring the asphalt for Gallow. The cracked strip bent left and she banked with it, branches reaching out to her on both sides, some coming dangerously close to swatting her out of the air. He couldn’t have gotten far.

It occurred to her that he might have veered off into the woods. He’d been living here with his mother, resetting this trap over and over again long enough for him to learn the terrain. Worry began to settle in. What if he had gone back into the woods? What if he was making his way back to the clearing?

The driveway bent left and abruptly ended where it intersected with another road. Aurora recognized it as the same road the three of them had been walking. She billowed her wings and swung her hind legs forward, stopping short of running into the trees lining the far ditch. Her hooves crunched on the weathered pavement, her head on a swivel searching for Gallow.

To her right, an empty stretch of road.

To her left, the same thing with the exception of the abandoned chuck wagon a quarter mile away. This time, however, she was looking at it from the front.

She lifted her rifle and peered down the scope.

On the side of the road, between her and the wagon, sat Gallow.

Her heart pounded as she dropped her saddlebags off her hips and crouched behind them, laying flat on the cool tarmac with the barrel of her rifle propped over one of the satchels. Even though he was well out of earshot, she moved slowly and deliberately to avoid making noise. She scooted the butt against her shoulder and slid her feathers against the trigger guard.

Gallow sat roughly the same distance away that the raiders had during their ill-fated ambush. She pressed her cheek behind the sight and worked on slowing her breathing. His gaunt form wobbled past the crosshair for several aggravating seconds before slowly, finally her wings grew steady around the rifle.

The half-ghoul didn’t appear to even notice her. For several seconds she watched him. He appeared close enough that she could see his lips moving, speaking to some unseen ghost known only to him. He stared at the ground, his hoof going through the same motion of digging up and flicking broken bits of asphalt across the fissures that she and Roach had done. It almost made him seem normal.

Then she remembered the bodies in his shed. The foal he had butchered. A family, maybe. Or part of one. She would never know for sure.

She could ask him, she realized. Sneak up on him, pin him down at gunpoint and demand answers. Make him tell her who they were. Where they were travelling to before he dragged them off to be carved up like cattle.

Her wings began to shake again and she forced herself to focus on her breathing. In, out.

In, out.

In, out.

Gallow remained where he was, content to flip rocks onto the road until the sun came up and it was safe for him to go home. Safe to eat his fill, reset the trap and wait for the next victims to get too close.

Aurora exhaled and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle bucked against her shoulder with an explosion that split the night air. The shot’s echo was still on its way by the time she got back behind the scope.

Gallow lay sprawled on his side, his legs scraping aimlessly at the pavement. His distant screams reached her ears seconds later. She swore. The bullet had gone low and bore through his hip, likely shattering against his pelvis. The noises he made were like cold water to her anger.

She swore again, but this time she couldn’t stop her wings from shaking. This wasn’t what she wanted. She pulled the trigger again, forgetting to breathe, and the round skipped against the road behind him.

“Fuck!” she yelled and leaned hard into her weapon, willing it to stay still as she tried to get Gallow behind the crosshair. She yanked the trigger and a bolt of pain shot through her shoulder as the gun kicked back.

Gallow kept screaming, and Aurora saw that the round had caught him through one of his hooves, turning the nail into shrapnel. He curled around what was left of it and tried to roll over, but the damage to his hips tore a fresh cry of pain from his ragged lungs.

She stared through the scope, horrified. With a shuddering breath, she tried to get herself under control. The crosshair wobbled over Gallow before settling on him again. If there was a Tartatus, she would end up there someday. Maybe then she could apologize to Gallow for making such a mess of his death.

She let the crosshair drift a notch above his head and squeezed the trigger.

He jerked one last time before falling still, his screams silenced.

It was several minutes before she finally stood, and only then because she could hear Ginger and Roach’s hooves galloping toward her from the driveway. She lifted her saddlebags over her hips leaving the rifle where it lay on the ground. Ginger was first to reach her, with Roach not far behind.

“Luna’s grace, you’re okay!” Ginger’s hooves wrapped around Aurora’s neck like a vice before she had time to open her mouth. “Don’t do that to me!”

She lifted a hoof around Ginger’s shoulder and returned the hug, her throat too thick to speak. Then she let go, hoping the shame on her face would be enough of an apology.

Behind her, Roach picked the rifle off the road and frowned toward the dark lump laying next to the wagon. Aurora reached out with her wing to stop him but he already had the scope up to his eye. She could see the muscles in his jaw slacken when he saw Gallow, and what she had done to him.

He lowered her rifle and gently shook his head. “What a mess,” he sighed.

There was no accusation in his voice. No anger. Only disappointment. Her Pip-Buck chattered on Ginger’s foreleg as he held the rifle out to her in his tainted magic, his gaze still fixed on the spot where Gallow lay.

“Take it,” he said.

She could taste metal on the back of her tongue. “I don’t want it,” she said quietly.

He turned his head and looked her in the eyes. “Take your weapon, Aurora. You’re soaking up rads.”

She snatched it out of the air with her wing and threw the strap over her shoulder, turning away from him as she jerked the bolt back and cleared the chamber of the last unspent round. With the magazine empty, she slapped the bolt forward, hefted the muzzle toward the trees and pulled the trigger. When it clicked, she set her jaw and stared at the pavement, waiting for the inevitable lecture.

Roach just stood in silence, watching her.

Her ears flattened under his quiet gaze. She made a face and turned to him. “Stop looking at me like that.”

He frowned. “Like what?”

“Like,” she swallowed to clear her throat. “Like I’m some kind of fuck-up.”

“I never said you’re...”

“But you’re looking at me like I’m one!” she snapped, cutting him off. “You keep looking at me like I’m a helpless idiot who can’t handle herself!”

His face hardened. He gestured to where Gallow lay. “Aurora, you’ve already proven that you’re not helpless, but you mangled him. Why?”

“Who cares why!” she yelled, stabbing a wing back up the empty driveway. “Fuck, I missed, okay? He didn’t deserve a clean shot! You saw what he did! He butchered an entire family. Literally butchered them! I… there were so many wagons in the woods, Roach. Did you even see them?”

She looked to Ginger for support, angry tears brimming in her vision. “That was a kid in there,” she said.

Ginger set a hoof on her shoulder to calm her. “We all saw, dear.”

“Then why are you two acting so fucking calm?” Her voice broke on the last word, and she felt the blood rush up her neck. She bit her lip, hard, trying to stay composed, and glared at Roach. “He was a monster. Why did you let him go?”

Roach looked at her for a moment, then blinked and turned away. “I let him walk because I thought killing his mother was punishment enough.” He glanced down the road. “When he left, he asked me to leave his pistol where he could find it. I know that look, Aurora. He was going to kill himself.”

She followed his gaze, the weight of Ginger’s hoof like a balm on a wound she didn’t know she had. “Well, now we don’t have to worry about it,” she said bitterly.

Roach pursed his lips as if deciding something. He took a slow breath, gave the pavement two quick taps with the edge of his hoof and looked at her. “Ginger and I didn’t know which one of you was screaming,” he said.

She blinked confusion. He waited, and slowly the realization of what he was implying dawned on her. The chilling noises that Gallow made in his last moments still echoed in her head. Pure agony distilled into a single, repeating soundtrack that cut off with a final gunshot. Her friends, the only ponies she let get close to her, had listened to Gallow scream and a part of them couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t the one making those noises.

They had believed on some level they were listening to her dying.

The last embers of her fury went cold. She bowed her head, hoping to hide the mortification that bloomed across her face.

Ginger gave her neck a gentle squeeze.

“Look,” Roach said, his voice softening. “Gallow earned what you gave him. Nobody’s arguing that. But it was sloppy, Aurora. If he had gotten the jump on you and not the other way around, we wouldn’t have been able to help you. I don’t ever want to be in that situation again.”

She nodded, wincing at the pain in his admission. When she was forced to leave him behind at the Bluff while she went to save Ginger, she hadn’t considered what it had been like to wait for her, not knowing if either of them would ever come back.

Her ears twitched at the sound of him approaching.

“So,” he said, dipping a hoof under her chin until she lifted her head. “New rule. We don’t run off without telling each other where we’re going, and we don’t get into fights without backup. We stick together. Sound fair?”

She smiled a little, despite how miserable she felt. “Yeah,” she said.

He returned the expression and clapped her on the shoulder. “You’re stuck with us, Pinfeathers. Like it or not.”

Aurora swallowed the lump in her throat. “Okay.”

As luck would have it, the double dose of Rad-X had done the trick. After each taking turns wearing Aurora’s Pip-Buck, they confirmed that the lion’s share of his errant radiation had been taken up by the chems. The immediate area around the body of Gallow’s mother, however, had become a hotspot.

Aurora and Ginger rested in the grass next to the driveway at the edge of the clearing, the former using a damp clump of bandaging cloth to scrub the radiation from her rifle while the latter tinkered with the Pip-Buck’s menus.

Their exposure had been minimal. Not enough to send them rushing back to Blinder’s Bluff in search of Rad-Away, but enough for Roach to feel chastened all the same for putting them at risk.

As Ginger so eloquently put it, “It’ll be a few decades before we start sprouting tumors.”

He glanced over at the shed as he climbed up onto the ruined floor of what must have been a beautiful home back when he was still… him. The thought crossed his mind to burn the shed, to spare any other wayward travelers the trauma of discovering what waited here, but the smoke would only serve as a beacon. Burying them seemed the better option, but even then he worried that anyone who might come looking for them would be forced to dig them back up only to see what had been done to them. It would only bring more grief.

In the end, the only option he could stomach was to leave them where they were. Let someone else decide what to do.

The stairs leading into the basement were little more than rough cut strips of lumber that flexed under his hooves. One step at a time, the space that Gallow and his mother had called home came into view.

It was a disaster.

Junk of every variety lined the basement walls in drooping heaps like they were there to reinforce them. Yellowed bottles of Abraxo mingled with a mound of telephone parts, the resulting reaction forming a thick paste of rust where the bare gears lay exposed. Crates of what looked to be crystalware filled one corner, the F&F Mercantile stamp on the bottommost container split apart by the weight as the rest slumped against what might have been clothing at one time but had been reduced to a dense, brown heap of rags. The basement was choked to the rafters with years’ worth of stolen goods.

To a scrap seller, it was a treasure trove. Thousands of caps worth of salvage all in one place, and within spitting distance of the very wagons that had carried them this far.

All Roach could see was the lives Gallow and his mother destroyed.

He descended the last step and came to a stop on a layer of damp manila folders. The hoofprint of the house was easily several hundred square feet, yet the livable space down here had been reduced to nearly zero. Narrow troughs in the sea of garbage served as walkways between semi-organized heaps. How Gallow had found anything down here was beyond his reckoning. Some ponies just had a good memory, he guessed.

As he sifted forward through the garbage, keeping his eye out for anything that might help them on the next leg of their journey, he couldn’t help but notice the thick scent of smoke that permeated the basement. Pushing past a mixed pile of hot plates and half-crushed desk fans, he found the source of the odor budged up against a far wall.

A genuine cast iron wood stove, an antique even before the bombs, stood beneath what had once been the upstairs fireplace’s ash chute. The bottom half of the brick column had been demolished to make room for the stove and a hodgepodge of office ductwork and adhesive tape had been used to connect the flue to the remaining section of ash chute above. A cast iron skillet still rested on one of the burners, the charred strip of meat inside already cooling in a puddle of its own grease. Whether a miracle or a miscarriage of justice, Gallow’s mother had managed to create a kitchen in this mess without immolating her and her son in the process. There was nothing for it, now. He pressed forward.

Halfway through the basement, the path abruptly ended where a ceiling-high stack of books, old magazines and even a few prewar newspapers had buckled, pouring paper into the walkway like an avalanche. A narrow section of the wall had been pulled away to make room for something amounting to safe passage, evidenced by the dirty hoofprints staining and overlapping each other across the open pages. Peeking out from the toppled hill, a faded green book binding caught his eye. He recognized it immediately.

He lit his horn, confident there was more than enough junk here to absorb the minor amounts of radiation his magic generated, and pulled the book out by its spine.

Roach never considered himself much of a reader. Even at the height of the war with Vhanna, he rarely so much as picked up a newspaper. Anything he needed to know about the world at large would inevitably find its way to him via his husband. Left to his own devices, Bluegrass would turn anything in the news into an object lesson on pony history. It didn’t help that their daughter, Violet, encouraged him at every step. It drove him crazy.

It had taken him decades to come to terms with the reality that he had lost something so perfect.

He turned the book over and smiled. Daring Do and the Quest for the Sapphire Stone. Violet, like so many ponies her age, had been swept up in the series’ renewed popularity after the release of the movie bearing the same title. The centuries had stolen countless memories from him, but one thing he recalled with clarity was the day he gave Violet her first copy of the series. She had thanked him with that dubious teenage uncertainty fillies her age were want to use when their fathers bought them something that was “cool,” but that night the house was oddly quiet. No stereo, no muffled phone conversations with young stallions he had yet to meet. Just silence. Bluegrass had been the one to finally get up and check on her, and when he came back downstairs he told Roach that he might need to start looking for the second installment sooner than he thought.

He would have bought the entire series the next day if he had known how little time they had left.

Roach started to put the book down, but he hesitated. He stared at the worn cover and the worn graphic of the main character, the grey-maned heroine Violet adored so long ago swinging from a vine over a pit of voracious crocodiles, and quirked his cheek. He lifted the flap of his saddlebag and carefully secured the book inside.

He stepped up onto the mound of literature, following the layers of grime that trailed over it from who knew how many months of travel, and spotted the far wall of the basement through the gap. Pressed against the wall, he could see what looked to be a pair of browned mattresses laying on a patch of bare concrete that somehow managed not to be absorbed by the junk heaps surrounding them. Sitting between the mattresses was a medium-sized footlocker. A bright brass padlock stood perched on the lid, its shackle unlatched.

With a grunt, he wriggled through the narrow gap left by the fallen reading material and stumbled down the slope on the other side.

He entered the shared bedroom space, his eyes on the locker, and reflexively wrinkled his nose. Radiation didn’t exactly have a scent, but ever since his transformation Roach had become especially sensitive to its presence. He could feel his throat drying out as he approached one of the hills to the left of the two mattresses, the familiar scratch that felt like a cold setting in that told him he was standing dangerously close to a stream of gamma particles. Well, dangerous for anyone else.

He coughed from old habit, trying to clear his throat of phlegm that wasn’t there. The mound was smaller than the others, standing only a few inches above chest height. Gun barrels bristled from open crates marked SALVAGE like a rosebush that had decided to favor thorns over flowers. The majority of the weapons were thick with rust, bent or damaged by failed attempts to modify them, almost guaranteeing that any round they fired would cause more damage to the owner than the intended target.

He coughed again when he spotted a vein of ammo cans running through the pile, the twin white and black silhouettes of the old princesses still visible on some of them. Pinned beneath one of the boxes lay the dented bowl of what looked like a kitchen colander. He frowned and nudged the edge of the steel bowl with his hoof, catching a glimpse of what looked to be the body of a homemade pistol attached to the back of it. The exposed flesh between his chitin glowed a little brighter in its presence, happy to absorb the radiation like a sponge.

Roach set his hoof back down and looked at the mattress directly behind him. The dark depression was significantly longer than the one on the other side of the locker. How long had Gallow slept there, unaware that the hoard he and his mother slept in was slowly poisoning him? How much longer did he have until the last fragments of who he was disintegrated. Until his mother awoke one day with a feral ghoul standing over her, driven by a hunger even she couldn’t understand?

He took some solace in knowing that, at the very least, he and Aurora had spared Gallow and his mother a worse fate.

His eyes wandered the stockpile of weapons. If he had Aurora’s Pip-Buck with him, its built-in radiation meter would be popping away right now. Whatever that strange dish-gun was, it had spoiled the entire stockpile.

Disappointedly, he turned and stepped over Gallow’s mattress to inspect the locker. He flipped the unlocked lid, the padlock sliding off onto the elder mare’s bed, and peered inside.

It was mostly empty, save for a stack of Sword Mare comics, a hardcover copy of The Pleasure of Cooking and a small leather pouch tied shut with a bit of twine. Roach lifted the pouch out with his pale magic and undid the knot.

Two neat stacks of bottlecaps, pressed tight into slugs of fifty, lay alongside a pair of energy cells. He tucked the pouch into his saddlebag and sighed. It was barely enough caps to last most ponies a week, and yet they were surrounded by a fortune in stolen scrap. They could have sold a tenth of it, moved anywhere they wanted and lived in relative comfort. Instead they lived… here.

Roach doubted he would ever understand it.

With nothing else catching his eye, he wriggled his way back onto the main path and picked his way up the basement steps. Aurora and Ginger still waited at the edge of the clearing, their faces lit by the glow of Aurora’s Pip-Buck.

Ginger looked up as he dropped off the foundation into the grass, scooping up Gallow’s pistol and dropping it in his saddlebag on the way. No sense in leaving it out here for the weather to chew up, especially now that they had a bit of ammo for it.

“I was afraid you got lost!” she called.

He shrugged. “I’m amazed they didn’t manage to burn the place down a second time. They had a working stove down there.”

“I told you it was a mess,” she said. “Find anything good?”

Roach nodded as he slowed, then smirked when he noticed Aurora holding Ginger’s foreleg captive in her lap, her eyes pouring over a block of green text on the Pip-Buck. “I’m guessing whatever’s on that screen is more interesting than a few caps.”

Aurora looked up long enough for Roach to see the tentative smile in her eyes. She nodded. “Sledge wrote back,” she said, and turned back to the screen, her eyes scanning the text.

Roach waited for her to elaborate, but it didn’t seem like she would be coming up for air anytime soon. He glanced at Ginger who sat patiently while Aurora claimed temporary ownership of her leg.

Ginger rolled her eyes at him and smiled.

“Don’t worry. It’s good news.”

October 15th, 1075

“You sure we all hafta be here?” Applejack whispered.

Twilight shot her a withering glare. Behind the six of them, a flashbulb went off. Someone in the press pool clearly trying to snap a shot of something other than the ministry mares standing in one spot, staring stoically into the blue sky.

Applejack stood next to her, unphased. They had known each other since the day Twilight arrived in Ponyville in the same chariot that they were all standing here waiting for now. Before the strange potion that gifted her wings, and the alicorn power that came with them. She was taller now, sure, but Applejack had spent her entire life working around Big Mac. If Twilight was counting on a couple feet and a few feathers to spook her into silence, she had another thing coming.

“I’m serious, Twi,” she insisted while dutifully keeping her nose pointed over the ledge of the castle terrace. “I’ve got spec sheets for our new power armor prototype on my desk right now, and that project’s already months behind schedule. Don’t you think this might be, y’know, a little low on the totem pole?”

She watched Twilight out of the corner of her eye, taking a small amount of pleasure out of seeing her old friend struggling to conjure up some other way to shut her up. It wouldn’t work, but she waited for the attempt anyway. More and more these days, Twilight needed to be reminded that they were equals in this endeavor. Alicorn or not, if she expected her friends to bow to her, then she shouldn’t have rejected Celestia’s offer to be crowned princess.

“This is the first time an Equestrian diplomat has returned from Vhanna,” Twilight said, reciting the same line she’d been feeding the press for the past several hours. “We should all be here for it.”

To her right, Applejack heard Rarity make a noise of approval. She glanced at the alabaster mare, careful not to be seen looking away from the pastoral panorama stretched in front of her, and cocked an eyebrow.

“She’s absolutely right,” Rarity chirped. Her lavender curls swayed across her neck in the warm autumn breeze. “Today is a milestone, after all.”

“So is the tech I’m working on,” she answered back. “We all have work we should be doing instead of standing here so a gaggle of press ponies can snap pictures of our asses.”

“Applejack,” Twilight hissed through a practiced smile. “Knock it off. Now.”

She could feel the muscles in her shoulders tensing up. Were it not for the press standing yards away, she would have given Twilight a piece of her mind. As it stood, that option wasn’t remotely close to being on the table.

“Fine,” she growled, flicking the air with her tail.

A half dozen cameras strobed. She smiled a little more broadly, her eye on Twilight.

“Rarity,” Twilight said.

“I’ll have the photos confiscated,” she answered dryly. “Applejack, darling, we all have things we should be doing right now. Personally, I would appreciate it if I didn’t have to spend another one of my evenings preventing an entire nation from seeing photos of your country.”

Applejack snorted, nearly losing her composure. “Heh.”

Rarity bit the inside of her cheek to stop her own smile from spreading too far. Jokes had never been a notable part of her repertoire, but every once in awhile she still managed to surprise them with an unexpected line. It helped reassure Applejack that despite this shadow they found themselves living under, her friends were still there. Sometimes she just needed to pull away a few layers to help them find themselves.

Standing on Rarity’s other side, Rainbow Dash watched the skies with a broad grin. Her chest shook as she worked hard to stifle a case of her own giggles. She noticed Applejack staring and silently mouthed, Nice one.

She gave Rainbow a wink in reply. Rainbow, as brash and headstrong as she was, had made an undeniable impression on her over the many years of their friendship. As the blue pegasus would say, she had learned to lighten up a little. She found her eyes drifting to Rainbow’s neck where the gold edges of the necklace which held her Element glinted behind the collar of her flight jacket. Applejack couldn’t remember the last time she saw Rainbow without both of them on, even after the rest of them had found different reasons to take theirs off.

Her smile faded a little.

“Here they come,” Twilight said.

Applejack squinted into the afternoon sky. Sure as shooting, she spotted an organized line of dark specks approached the terrace from the western horizon. In the middle of the formation, sunlight glinted off Zecora’s chariot.

Shutters began snapping as the press pool took notice, capturing stills and recording footage of the ambassador’s return. Applejack snuck another glance at Rainbow Dash who was watching the formation approach with rapt attention, her eyes locked on the Wonderbolt contingent as they carefully maneuvered into position for the choreographed approach. Two in front wearing formal harnesses, two on either side and one trailing for protection. Their plate armor, purely decorative aluminum given the weapons of the age, shone with an acceptable amount of polish that belied the woven vests hidden underneath.

Applejack allowed herself a tiny smile. It had been a challenge to develop armor strong enough to stop a bullet, but with a little advice from the design team in Rarity’s ministry, the tightly spun plastic fibers had passed testing with flying colors.

The formation banked, sliding off to their collective right side before turning again, this time with the widest length of the terrace lined up in front of them. They watched with practiced smiles as the chariot slipped past the empty balcony and touched down on the polished stone practically on top of the tiny black speck of tape laid out for them.

“Nice,” she heard Rainbow whisper.

A smattering of hooves from the press pool thumped against the flagstones behind them while those in charge of the cameras lit the terrace with a frenzy of flashes. Applejack felt a little sorry for Zecora’s kid who squinted away from the barrage. She didn’t know much about Teak other than that she apparently didn’t have a stomach built for flying and had emptied it across half of Equestria on their way toward the ocean. That surprised her, given how calm she looked seated next to Zecora.

When the ambassador stood, the six of them took their cue and stepped forward. She felt silly doing it, but it was what was expected at this point. They might not be royalty, but as ministry mares Rarity had made sure they looked as close the part as she could reasonably manage.

Teak watched them approaching with wide eyes, briefly frozen in front of the chariot’s open door. Most of them had met the kid already, sure. Fluttershy had made a point of taking them to every corner of The Pillar that their clearance would allow. But this was her first time meeting Twilight Sparkle. She locked eyes with the alicorn and froze, blocking Zecora from stepping out in the process. It was a missed cue. Something Rarity would have to encourage the media to forget about, on top of Applejack’s earlier display.

A moment passed where Applejack was afraid Twilight might snap at the kid to get her moving. The way her wings were tensing up, the words were already forming on her tongue.

“Teak!” Rainbow whispered, catching the young mare’s ear. “Come stand by me.”

The little nudge pulled her back to reality, and with a little hesitation she hopped out of the chariot and trotted to Rainbow’s side.

As she passed by, Applejack couldn’t help but notice the white pendant bobbing against Teak’s chest. She had to work to keep the concern from reaching her eyes as she looked to Zecora and saw an identical necklace strung across her stripes. Some kind of stone, by the looks of it, or ivory assuming the Vhannans were still active in the trade.

She stole a look at Twilight and saw her friend’s eyes locked around Zecora’s neck, sighting an identical stone, but her pleasant smile didn’t betray any interest in it beyond being something novel to look at. Applejack knew her well enough to know just how many alarm bells were going off in her head.

“Welcome home, Ambassador,” Twilight said, her eyes tracking Zecora as she stepped out of her chariot. “How was the flight?”

“It was wonderful,” Zecora said, reciting her lines loudly enough for the press to take notes. “I have never seen Equestria laid out with such splendor than from her skies.”

“It’s quite an experience,” Twilight chuckled knowingly. “I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it myself.”

It took a physical effort for Applejack not to groan.

With the exception of Teak’s moment frozen in the literal spotlight, the pleasantries went off without so much as a hiccup. Conversation was limited between Twilight and Zecora while the rest of them stood where they were instructed, smiling as they practiced and listening to five minutes of happy discussions about nothing of substance. In other words, it was perfect.

At the end of the brief reception, Rarity bowed out of the group and picked up her usual duties of wrangling the press back into the castle where food, refreshments and some impossibly polite members of her staff waited to collect their film for review.

That gave Fluttershy a few minutes to chat with Zecora about how she really felt the trip had gone, which seemed to align pretty much the same with the scripted conversation with Twilight. By the sound of it, little if any progress had actually been made beyond a tour of the Vhannan palace and a shared meal with their ambassador, but Zecora suggested that the Vhannans might be considering suspending their use of blindweed as a gesture of goodwill.

Applejack wasn’t about to bet her last barrel of cider on that happening, but it was better than Zecora coming home with nothing.

“Hey, Twilight?”

Pinkie Pie spoke so softly that she nearly mistook her for Fluttershy. She stood off to the side, barely moving from her mark even after the gathering had begun to dissolve.

“Can I go?” she asked.

Twilight looked at her for a moment before nodding. “Sure, Pinkie.”

“Thanks,” she said, half-turned, then looked at Fluttershy. “Talk to you when you’re done.”

Quietly as she had made herself known, Pinkie Pie walked back to the castle, carefully avoiding the windows where the press typically lounged during post-event screenings. Applejack watched her go, knowing there wasn’t a whole lot she could do for her that Fluttershy wasn’t doing already these days. Out of all the roles the princesses had deemed worthy of their own ministry, she would have never guessed that the Ministry of Morale could turn on its leader with such ruthless efficiency.

Tasked with the responsibility of keeping Equestria’s spirits high in the face of the bloodiest war in its history, Pinkie had begun struggling from the outset. She took every criticism a little more personally than the rest of them. Held herself responsible when a messaging campaign was derided for being tone-deaf. It was part of the reason Rarity devoted so much of her own ministry toward censoring the press. Pinkie was falling into a depression that none of them knew how to pull her back from. Every redacted article that painted anything but a picture of Equestria at its finest was one less step for her to descend.

Applejack nudged Fluttershy’s wing. “You think she’d mind a visit from me after you two finish talking?”

Fluttershy stared at the ornately carved door she had disappeared into. “Maybe. I’ll let you know how she’s feeling, after.”

“Applejack, I need you to look at this.”

Not surprisingly, Twilight had already moved onto the next thing. She mouthed “thanks” to Fluttershy before turning to see what the alicorn was looking at.

Floating in a haze of lavender magic was one of the curious white pendants Zecora and Teak had brought back from Vhanna. Twilight was squinting at the little stone, turning it this way and that with a growing frown. Zecora waited patiently, her neck bare. Teak looked after her mother with worry painted plainly across her face. She looked to Rainbow and whispered into her ear, likely an explanation she was too afraid to provide the alicorn currently inspecting her mother’s stone.

Rainbow frowned, then rolled her eyes and casually draped a wing across Teak, her go-to gesture to let the fans know they were cool enough to be considered one of her buddies. It seemed like a strange thing to do in the moment, even for Rainbow. As Applejack approached Twilight, she noticed a blue feather curl under the band around Teak’s neck and subtly ferry the pendant into the cup of her wing. Teak clearly noticed but didn’t seem to object as Rainbow settled her wing back against her side, their apparent photo-op moment ended.

Rainbow noticed Applejack looking and gave her a stare that said, “Trust me.”

She sent one of her own back that said, “We’ll talk about that later.”

Applejack stopped midway between Twilight and Zecora, her eyes lifted to the alabaster stone hovering a few inches above the brim of her hat. “Looks like a rock,” she said, careful not to dismiss the object outright. She looked at Zecora. “What’s it signify?”

“The possibility of peace, I hope,” Zecora said, her own tone strained because of Twilight’s impromptu inspection. “It is a healing talisman. A token gift given to me by Ambassador Abyssian.”

Twilight lowered the talisman into Applejack’s waiting hoof. At first glance, it looked like a simple spiral had been carved into its surface resembling something like the top of a sweet roll, but as she squinted at the seams between each whorl, she could almost swear she could see even smaller etchwork lining the larger impressions.

She muttered a barely audible, “Huh.” Already, she began to feel different. Her eyes felt a little less tired. The dull throb in her right temple softened. Even her hind legs, beaten and worn down by decades of bucking apples, felt a little less sore. If it was truly a spell, it wasn’t a strong one. It worked quickly but stopped well short of curing everything that ailed her.

“I didn’t think the zebras had the tech to manufacture something this detailed,” she said. “Does it do anything else?”

Zecora shook her head. “It is carved with magic, not manufactured. A talisman is only capable of performing a single action. I assure you, Applejack, it is safe.”

“Since when can zebras do magic?” she asked, offering the talisman back.

Zecora lifted her hoof to take it, but Twilight’s magic quickly swept it back into the air where she could continue inspecting it. “Zebras can’t do magic,” Twilight corrected. “They can only tap into minor natural forces of the world around them.”

“Sounds like magic to me,” Applejack shrugged.

“It isn’t,” Twilight said more firmly. “If they could, they would have evolved a variant of unicorn by now. Only ponies are capable of creating magic. Zebras… just use what’s left over.”

Zecora took the unintended jab in stride, smiling a little more tightly than she usually did. “Twilight is referring to a philosophical debate. One which I particularly hate.”

Twilight frowned. “Don’t break out the rhyming with me. I wasn’t trying to insult you, I’m just pointing out a well-documented fact.”

“Documented solely by unicorn researchers in unicorn universities, I’m sure,” Zecora countered.

Twilight blinked. The lavender aura around the talisman turned bright fuchsia.

Applejack took a deep breath and stood on her hind legs to pluck the talisman out of Twilight’s surprisingly weak grip. She couldn’t remember the last time she saw Twilight embarrassed enough for her own magic to blush.

“Alright, y’all,” she said, pouring on her accent a little thicker to pull the two mares’ attention away from one another. “Break it up before I hog-tie the both of you, and don’t you think I can’t do it. Zecora, I’m going to need to borrow this talisman of yours for a little bit until my people can verify that it’s harmless. I trust your judgment and all, but I’d sleep a little better knowing that this pebble isn’t some kind of time-bomb.”

Zecora reluctantly nodded. “That is fair.”

“Twilight,” she said, “that’s what you wanted me to do in the first place, wasn’t it?”

Twilight narrowed her eyes at Applejack but didn’t answer. When she finally spoke, it wasn’t directed to either of them. “Fluttershy, you should get started debriefing the ambassador.”

There was a brief pause before Fluttershy realized she was being addressed. Her ears flitted backward with understanding and she trotted to Zecora with her wing outstretched, guiding her back to the castle.

“Shouldn’t I go, too?” Teak piped up, a little trace of offense in her voice.

Twilight looked at Teak as if she were a lost foal that had somehow wandered onto the terrace on her own. She glanced back at Zecora, then shook her head. “Rainbow Dash can take you home.”

“Twi, that debriefing is going to take a while,” Applejack whispered.

“So?” she whispered back.

“So, she’s a teenager that just got back from a foreign country who you’re sending home alone for the next few hours. How long do you think it’ll take her to get bored and start telling every friend she has about that adventure?”

Twilight chewed her lip, either stuck on the actual question or the simple fact that it had been a while since she had ever been asked to relate to a pony Teak’s age.

A small smile tugged at Applejack’s muzzle. Sweet Celestia, she might have honestly given Twilight her first taste of a midlife crisis.

“Hey Dash,” Applejack spoke, saving Twilight from any further embarrassment. “It’s going to be a few hours until Zecora’s off the clock. Why don’t you take Teak out for a late lunch?”

Almost immediately, Rainbow’s expression shifted from conspiratorial mischief to a noncommittal frown. Applejack could see the gears spinning in her head as she tried to come up with a way to get out of it.

“Or I’d be happy to do it,” she offered, her gaze dipping to the curl of feathers at the tip of her wing. “Provided you’re okay with taking Zecora’s talisman down to my people for me.”

Her people included her personal security, which were diligent in ensuring that anyone entering or leaving the Ministry of Technology passed through a full body x-ray. No exceptions.

Rainbow didn’t need to have it spelled out to her to recognize the warning. If she wanted to pull one over on Twilight, she could do it on her own time. If she tried to walk into Applejack’s ministry while doing it, she would have to explain where she found a second talisman.

“Yeah, I think I’m going to let you handle the paperwork, AJ,” she chuckled, nudging Teak with her wing. “Whaddya think? Lunch on me? There’s this little place on the north side of Canterlot that makes curry so hot I thought my feathers would fall out!”

Teak glanced at Applejack, Twilight, then back to Rainbow Dash. “Is that good?”

“I have no idea!” she laughed, throwing her wing over Teak’s back. She nodded at Applejack before leading the young mare away. “I tell you what. We start at the Tasty Treat and if you’re not a fan, we try something else.”

The young zebra picked up a little bounce in her stride. It reminded Applejack of the days when Rainbow would tour Scootaloo around Ponyville. Another fan latching onto an idol. She smiled after them, then stole a look up at Twilight.

She almost looked happy.

“Deal,” Teak said.

“That’s what I like to hear.” Rainbow gave Teak an encouraging shake as they trotted away. “If you can survive Saffron’s curry, you can survive anything. If you want proof, just look at me!”

Teak did.

Rainbow grinned.

“The way things are going, I’m going to live forever.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 17: Worlds Collide (Part One) Estimated time remaining: 63 Hours, 29 Minutes