“What was it like to realise you had friends?”

Nothing like I could ever have imagined.

From the beginning of my life, even with the care of my mother, I had never been a part of any group of friends. Sure, I'd heard of the concept here and there, but generally all I experienced was a group telling me what to do, rather than an individual. 'Friendship', to me, was not a state I had any reason to be in, for my eternal born duty was to stay away from the groups and merely wait till they decided what they wanted from me.

I’d had a lifetime of things like being chained to a post out in the soaking wet weather and shivering from the cold as I only got to watch others laughing and sharing drinks around an indoors fire. I’d had endless nights of seeing other slaves huddled together for warmth, sharing food between themselves but roughly bucking me away from them if I tried to join their little herd. Just so many repeated incidents featuring friends arguing over how many caps I was worth at the slave markets.

Those sorts of things eventually drove me to simply stop wondering about friendship. It all seemed to be about being equals. I wasn't an equal. I wasn't born to be one, and as far as I knew I wasn't meant to be one.

The concept of friendship though, it soured in my mind. It became nothing more than a designation of groups that I was never meant to be a part of. I didn't believe it was a bad thing; I knew ponies could be nice to one another. I had just never expected that such a group could ever include me. Who in Equestria would want to be friends with a skinny little pegasus slave so incompetent he can't even do what his cutie mark denoted his talent as? What good pony would ever take the time to want to get to know somepony who cried at the drop of a pin and whose body was so messed up he couldn't even fly or live more than a day in there without RadAway? Why would any master ever want to be friends with his slave?

Even after meeting ponies like the mysterious mare in Fillydelphia, I don't think it really clicked. She was an oddity, somepony I had been blessed to meet amidst the long slow life I had been leading. But she was not a friend, not then.

“So, what changed?”

I suddenly felt that connection. Or link, or spark, or something! I couldn't tell exactly what it was, but all of a sudden something had changed how I looked at it. I had found two ponies who had not abandoned me, abused me, or taken advantage of me. Even Brimstone Blitz, the Great Raider Warlord, seemed content for me to hang around them, if under extreme warnings. But Glimmerlight...

Sorry, this is going to sound pretty terrible, but she really was a little glimmer of hope for me. From the moment I met her, she had been nothing but a positive influence and a determined optimist. I had only known her for perhaps six hours and yet she treated me like a friend she'd known for years. Perhaps she was right; ponies under such extreme circumstances had to bond together to take what support they could. Even just knowing Glimmerlight was there, that she had reminded me of one good reason to keep trying, that she had promised to come and find me...it stimulated me into going on just that little bit further.

That bit further into the dark.

My mother once told me that friendship was the single greatest achievement of Equestria before the war. It had bound everypony together in a unified purpose and wondrous peace. Sitting curled up beside her while listening, I had just been a skinny little colt sketching in a journal about the same size as himself. The idea had seemed nice, but at the time, all I had wondered was that if everypony worked together, who decided which ponies had to...had to be the slaves…

I...wait, sorry, just...it’s hard to think back on her then.

“Do you want to stop?”

No, sorry, I...I'm fine. Just—

Right, right, I’m good.

I grew up seeing slavery as the only way of life. Can you imagine how awful that feels? To look back on the first however many years of your life and realise what you spent it believing? To be such an indoctrinated slave, that even when you want to be free, you can't quite stop doing what you're told?

Well, all I know is, the mare was the first one to make me realise that ponies could stand as equals. She’d treated me as one, and showed me we could care. Littlepip showed me we could be free. But it was Glimmer who showed me that helping one another under stress, and working together to find a way through it is the way ponies are supposed to act. Even if I didn't properly understand friendship or what it entailed, it was her that made the difference at the critical point. She showed all it could offer in one simple little moment to help me push on. Be it for my mother, for freedom or now to want to return to ponies who had called me a friend, I had that reason to hope.

That was what friendship quickly came to mean to me.

I was injured, terrified, and about to face all my fears alone, but she gave me hope to keep going, survive, and find the path to freedom once again.

A long time ago, my master in Manehattan had told me a story while drunk. A librarian by trade, he sought to bring books back to the ponies of today. It would have been idealistic if he were not a raging paranoid alcoholic. Sipping his liquor and flamboyantly stumbling around his collection of pre-war books, he had proudly proclaimed that 'the dark of the past would only be repeated if we didn't learn from it!' I hadn't paid him much attention while attempting to clean the room up behind him. That, and I’d been trying to get past him having forgotten to feed me in four days. His distracted rants were my time to steal from his kitchen.

Screaming to the clouds above, he had erupted in a frenzied tale of Princess Luna being banished to the dark side of the moon where she could no longer see the world that she had hurt. She had been ‘trapped in eternal darkness for a thousand years’ and bereft of the sun or the sky. He told how the ordeal left her a crushed vessel of evil, ready to wreak havoc upon Equestria. I still remembered how he had dropped his glass, grabbed my little face painfully hard, and whispered in hushed, disturbingly psychotic tones. He told me that the pegasi were trying to do the same to all of us on the surface. That after two hundred years, the cracks were starting to show. That trapped in the darkness, we would show the worst qualities we had.

The story had passed from my mind as simply a hatred of my wings. But now in the present day, I wished I had paid him more heed.

Stood within the darkest hole Equestria could ever build.

There was no power down here for the lights. The Stable was in pitch darkness. I’d once tried turning off my light, and I hadn’t even seen my hoof in front of my face.

I might as well have been Princess Luna on the moon, like my old master had said. Like her, I was isolated and surrounded by the unknown; in my case with only a malfunctioning and pitifully small PipBuck light to see by. Even my natural eyesight in the dark failed to help me much. With absolutely no ambient light to see by, and the PipBuck’s one too unstable, I couldn’t focus at all. With courage as highly strung as one overstretched wire on a musical instrument, I had trotted through dead corridors and black voids. Maze-like, they endlessly winded around. Every ten feet the pattern repeated in the modular design, a lazy effort by my artistic eye, but right now it only helped to give me the impression that I could be going in circles and not even know it.

The sense of claustrophobia was rapidly settling in. Walls I couldn’t see felt closer than ever. Once already I had lost my way, and I couldn’t have found my way back to the office if I tried.

Not that anything was helped by a dead ringing in one ear. The blast of white noise in the office had, I thought, destroyed my sensitive hearing somehow. Burst ear drum? Biological shutdown? I didn't know enough about ears or pony bodies to know. All I knew was that it hurt badly, and the hearing from my right ear was substantially worse than it once had been.

Every single step had been an effort. Sweat was clinging to my body from the stuffy underground heat. There was no movement of air. Just a humid and musty aura that stunk of chemicals and oil. (How had Stable ponies gotten used to this?) Sometimes, I would randomly gasp as I felt the air pressure change, before screaming in terror and galloping backwards. After a few heartstopping moments of terror, I eventually realised that this area was not reacting to me. Perhaps the ventilation ducts were blocked or broken? There were strange currents in the air, like some impossible breeze or air pressure zone. It was better than my other theory, that the entire corridor had once initiated its deadly purging of life long ago and was still showing the side effects.

Sighing, I settled down against the wall and curled up on the damp floor. Clutching my ear gently, I silently willed the sound to return. I prayed deeply to the Goddesses, I didn't want to go deaf. Don't leave me with this now!

Pressing my head against the wall and whimpering, I eventually realised that there were little streaks of water from above ran down the edges through cracks and breaches,dripping over my goggles. It didn't help to keep my mind off other bodily problems I was having.

My throat was dry and swollen. The temptation to gulp down my RadAway to quench my neglected thirst was overwhelming, held back only by the knowledge that that was my only lifeline should I stumble upon a magically contaminated area. Stomach churning, I felt the ache as hunger threatened to become a more immediate threat. I'd spent so long on adrenaline and fear that mere sustenance requirements were forgotten too easily. Now I was paying the price.

If it weren't for the horrific concept of being left down here, I might have just wanted to curl up and cry at the entire situation. Instead, I rather pathetically turned and attempted to lap what water I could dripping from the walls, praying with all my heart it wasn't contaminated. A sharp taste of iron entered my mouth but the liquid at least stopped the burning feeling on each breath. Now to just...

Turning, my eyes peered through the thick goggles and saw only three feet of blank corridor before everything turned into the void once more.

That looming, intimidating sight set my heart racing, as I felt my body scream at me to follow one simple, logical command. Get out of here.

Blank corridors, endless darkness, horrible things waiting in it, lethal ponies stalking its halls, and only two friends out there looking for me. Even as I tried to grasp the horror all around me, the light on my PipBuck sparked brighter before beginning to fade away briefly between bursts. Feeling my legs tremble, the darkness seemed to creep closer on every flicker of my PipBuck. I tried to force myself to move; to get active before the shadows crept close enough to take me forever in this metal prison of the past. I tapped my PipBuck, shaking it to try and get the light to work better.

“Come on...please!”

A little jostling later and Sundial's PipBuck brought light back to my world; at least, two feet of light.

Keep going. Just keep moving, don't stop and think. Tramping further, I felt each step with my hoof before placing weight down. Panels shifted uneasily on rusted connections, and I felt some of them bend under me. The continual water damage had, over two hundred years, given the construction of this level a noticeably fragile state. The thought of it breaking open and dropping me into an eternal darkness below was fresh in my mind while I crept further forward. It was so silent down here, insulated away from the raiders' temporary camp above.

As much as I hated to allow my mind to think on the past, the endless monotony and directionless journey was setting my mind to lazily wander against all of my best efforts. I tried to keep thinking about Glimmerlight. In six hours, I'd gained a closer 'friend' than I'd had in my entire life. But something was still unnerving me about her. Something I had noticed but not dwelt on.

Both Glimmer and I had been through hellish lives. However, while mine was a tragic monotony and inevitability of a sad end, hers was one of depressing loss and crushing pain. She had left against her parents’ wishes, lost all of her friends to rampaging raiders who, in turn, had sold her on to slavery. Having been on the receiving end of a few raiders for less than five minutes, the idea of being properly caught by them chilled me to the bone.

That was the problem, however. Her attitude was too carefree for all of that. I knew ponies could get over some harsh stuff, but something felt different about hers. She seemed effortlessly happy and whimsical. Glimmerlight smiled in Fillydelphia, joked with a raider, teased slavers, and carried a positive attitude with boundless humour.

Were Brimstone's words that she was simply somepony truly special all there was to it? Really? Even by my weak standards, I couldn't imagine anypony going through all that and being so unaffected. Even if it was sheer strength, something had to keep her going, and honestly, I was pretty interested to find out how she did it. I could probably use that sort of help.

The light flickered again. Dying for a few seconds. I felt my breathing quicken, and the darkness began to close in, until I could only see a scant few feet to any side of me.

“Oh come on. Please don't, please don't! I...I can't see anything!”

Suddenly, the sound of rending, shrieking metal tore through the cramped environment. Screaming, I hurled myself away from the sound before crying out and clutching my ear. Wailing from the pain spearing through the right side of my head, I felt my balance disappearing, leaving me to stumble and fall until the disorientation disappeared.

Quivering in a heap, I tried to hold the ear as closed as was possible. It had been a door. A door I hadn’t even seen coming or moving in the darkness. Its rusted shriek on opening beside me had almost immobilised me by sound alone, never mind the sudden shock. What was wrong with my ear?

The door jammed, before continuing to rise. That was something I hadn't encountered yet. Perhaps somewhere inside it I could simply hide under a bed and try with my better ear to listen for Brimstone's big thumping gait?

Looking around the doorframe into the black void inside, I-

Eyes stared back at me from a faint outline of somepony reaching forward through the door. The darkness itself was convulsing and forming into something unclear. Almost choking on my cry, I fell backwards, hiding my face and beginning to wail as I hid my vision from the ghostly presence! Its faint eyes having been staring directly at me, moving forward.

“NO! No no no! Please, DON'T!”

...nothing happened.

Trembling so hard that I could scarcely control my own body, I risked opening my eyes again to see nothing but the dull green illumination of my PipBuck that had restarted itself. There was nothing there. What was…

I didn’t understand.

Reeling from dizziness, I pulled my tired and sore body to my hooves and trotted toward the dark room, holding up my PipBuck out in front of me as though the light would ward things off. There was...nothing.

Instead, I trotted carefully inside, turning back and watching behind me as I retreated into the room. What the hell had that been? Was it just my imagination taking over? Was this Stable haunted? Were ghosts driving the horrors being inflicted on raider after slave after helpless pony above?

“H-hello?” I hadn't whispered fearfully for more than half a second before I facehoofed at myself. Of course no pony was down here. What was going to happen? Were the ghosts going to leap up and respond?

Alright, no more attempts at sarcasm, because they were clearly helping.

I tried to shake myself out of it. I had to have courage! ‘Courage, Murky!’, I told myself. I had to think! It was just, uh, just an odd reflection of my PipBuck's light on something in the room! No! The PipBuck hadn't been on! Maybe just a thick smoke in the air? Was there still any? This was too dark. Where was I? The roof was the same, but the room opened up a lot. Almost squeaking in fear, I saw three other points of light until realising it was the reflection of my PipBuck in three long, horizontal windows around each wall, looking out into the corridor I had just been in as it wound around the room instead. I had been inside a room looking out on the hallway I’d just exited, and I hadn’t even noticed in the dark.

Waving the PipBuck back and forth, it became more apparent this was some sort of kitchen. Or a canteen? Was that what they called it?

A boxy, metallic counter ran across one third of the room, the rest being taken up with permanently positioned industrial tables and thickly padded seats in a dark red. Small scraps littered the floor. I saw magazines still open upon the tabletops with rotten food left from spilled plates. Everything was metal, from the cutlery and plates to even the glasses, and were those metal straws?

I glanced behind me at that door again, just to be sure. I could only imagine myself seeing that figure again. Had it been a reflection? I couldn’t have been! It had followed me out the door!

Momentarily dragging my mind back from panic, I realised something. This was a canteen. Canteens had food, right? Could any have been preserved?

Faster than I thought I could confidently move, I crawled onto a table to hop onto the kitchen counter. It had been too high to hop up on from the floor for me. Seriously, height considerations, Stable builders. Think of the little bucks and mares. How did Littlepip manage in her own Stable? That counter would have given even a normal sized stallion trouble.

Trotting past perspex displays and more strewn plates, I hopped down to the far side of the kitchen surface and began shoving the store room door. With a painfully loud noise, it squeaked and squealed open on rusty hinges to release the most foul stench I had ever encountered. I had hidden in a pile of corpses, but it was nothing compared to the stale, rotten, contained reek of an entire stockpile of food rotting for two hundred years in a sealed compartment. Whatever ponies back then had used to preserve food, it had only slowed the decomposition process to leave this mess behind it.

Sickly and sweet, my stomach rebelled, making me retch and dry heave before I could hold my breath and force myself to go in. Shelf after shelf of mangy, often furry and melted-looking food that had broken through degraded packaging littered the room on all sides. My hooves squelched and squished as they trod on things I didn't even want to look down at. Cramped and disorganised, the food storage was nothing more than a deadzone. Hope emerged as I spotted three fridges at the far end, and with a little work to pull them open, I got a look inside.

The first two were only repeats of the general storage. But finally, the mare of luck threw me a bone or, in this case, a small sealed tin of...well, I couldn't exactly read what it was. But a quick examination of the picture revealed what looked like little small things in a red or orange sauce.

Shoving the can into a pocket, I quickly retreated from the foul stock room before I felt the need to breathe again. A quick scouring of the cutlery drawers revealed a can opener. Glancing around once again, I sat down and tried my best to turn it in my mouth. Clearly, the chef had been a unicorn.

With a sudden jerk, I felt my mouth slip off the handle and knock against my loose tooth. Holding a hoof over my mouth, I tried to stifle the frustrated shout in anger before thumping the cupboards with my other hoof instead.

Taking up the tin, I bit the handle more carefully and managed to pry most of the lid off. The smell was like the one life line I had been waiting for. It was fresh tomato sauce around the...huh?

What were they? Beans? If they were, they were some pretty oddly shaped beans. Sighing, I still managed to smile and almost nuzzle the tin at the thought of food. While settling it upright, I spotted a host of small cupboards near the end of the kitchen counter's locked gate. There was a big safe sitting below the cutlery. Something to investigate after I'd had my food.

Really, I didn't know what drove me. But before chowing down, I found myself climbing back over the counter to settle down on one of the musty old padded seats and place the food on an empty plate I wiped as clean as was possible. It felt wrong to just devour the scrap of food in this place. Not when ponies had once dined here properly.

It must have made me an interesting sight. Sitting there, chewing some sort of near tasteless beans from a plate, while lone in a dark and abandoned Stable lit only by one damaged PipBuck and surrounded by the aftermath of an event that likely killed everypony here. Like a ghost of the past, I simply sat and ate, feeling my stomach finally settle down from the small meal. Really, I couldn't help but smile. The tomato sauce was satisfyingly tangy and rich, and the beans gratefully soft and easy to chew to go down my swollen throat.

Actual sustaining food going down was a feeling I could not understate at this time. For one brief moment of calm clarity, it let me forget about the dark. About the pain throbbing in my right ear and the dry breathing from sick lungs. To pay no heed to my terror of real ghosts appearing before me, or the suspicion that my rather active imagination was just beginning to send me off the edge of sanity.

No, I just sat there and ate my beans like a good little Stable Dweller, waiting to go back to his place of work and continue the monotony of being enslaved to an underground world. Just for one moment, I wanted to pretend this was my home. That I didn't have to go back to Fillydelphia. That I was simply having my daily meal before I went back to whatever I worked as. The place would need a clean, but those broken plates could be undented right? That fork still embedded in its food and dropped hastily would just need a little clean.

Those balloons with some numbers on them would just need to be inflated again...

Around me lay the remains of this Stable's past. A quiet and forgotten place where ponies had once laughed and eaten, drank and sung, wished well and...partied...

Feeling myself welling up, I put my head down on the table, my hooves crossed around it, and shook terribly, trying to forget I’d ever thought about it.

I was not alone. Without a doubt, I could feel something around here. Even as I trotted as quietly as possible, it was becoming more apparent that there was something lurking in the darkness down here. Sitting in the canteen had only been hurting me. Something about the evidence of pony life but absolutely no remains was just downright freaky. That, and I kept anticipating to look up and see faces staring in through the windows. I couldn’t stay here, not if anything knew where I was, and so I’d decided to keep moving. The more I looked, the higher the chances of finding stairs leading to a higher level.

Up, always up, towards the surface...towards the sky.

But right now, the Stable seemed intent to reveal none of its staircases. Instead a growing fear of being locked down here forever with the drifting ghosts of the past was setting in. My mane itched and my skin crawled. Stopping in the middle of...of...where was I? Was the canteen back a corner and down the hall? Or, wait, was it to the left or right back there?

My heart was pumping hard enough to actually be a dull thumping to my one good ear. Every flicker of the PipBuck threatened to illuminate somepony's eerie form in the darkness ahead of me. I spun to look behind me on every other step, quickly turning again to check the way I'd come from. I did this multiple times if I heard something; a gurgle or tapping from nearby. Sometimes, I turned so often and so fast, I forgot which way I was meant to be looking in the first place.

A humming picked up from above me, vibrating the entire endless corridor before wisps of white noise and static drifted down the hallways. I heard distant voices, unidentifiable and warped. Part of my mind tried to scream that it was just some poor slave activating the Stable's killswitch again above me, but somehow it didn't quite stick hard enough to let the fear clenching my heart unwind. A PA system loudspeaker on the wall hissed dimly as I passed, like a broken gramophone spinning. Two steps later, it cut for no apparent reason, plunging me once again dead silence.

Squeaking when my hoof almost tripped over something, I cantered to the side, my PipBuck held out in one shaky hoof at the—

A red scooter, abandoned in the hallway, tipped on its side. As rusty as the walls, it looked to have almost fallen apart on the minor impact with my PipBuck leg. Glancing around for anything else, I found nothing but a fallen bell from the scooter. Not designed for hooves to pick up, its small size had almost fallen between two floor panels. Without really knowing why, I leant down and bit it, storing it in one small leg pocket.

Okay, perhaps I tried it once...

Bing bing!

Packing it away safely, I lifted my head up again.

This corridor really did just go on forever.

Turn after turn...

The same modular ten feet every...single...time...

A glint in the darkness made me perk up. I might have been fearful, but anything in this void was a thankful respite. Breaking into what kind of a slow gallop I could, I aimed for it, seeing my PipBuck light reflected in thick murky glass. Sloshing through some low water running down the hallway and kicking aside little metal cylinders on the floor, I threw myself against the glass, staring in. What was it? A way out!?

It was a canteen with a dirty plate covered red tomato sauce, sitting on a familiar table in front of me.

Every muscle seemed to wither and die as I slumped against the glass, banging my head on it at the sheer fruitlessness of my efforts to make progress down in the dark. Cramped corridors and thick air muddied my perception. Had I really just spent the last, uh, hour? Was it an hour? Oh Goddesses...

Thumping my hoof on the glass, I muttered nothings to myself. I wanted a direction. I'd always had one, however vague it had become. But down here, it was just endless trotting in a state of quickly fading trust for Glimmerlight to find me.

Nopony had ever stuck to their word with me; why would this be any different? I hadn't even properly been struck with anxiety over the dead past in here, other than my sadness at the canteen, and already I was cracking.

Guess friends weren't the big help that I'd hoped they might be.

My head bumped once again on the glass. Sighing, I opened my eyes to stare inside. Maybe I could just hide under a table.

There was a shape behind the counter.

Every muscle and litre of blood in my entire body froze on the spot. Like in some stupid reaction to freeze and hope I wasn't spotted. I didn't even blink as fearful tears burned my eyes.

Movement, not a defined form. Just occasional edges and shifting silhouettes as something moved around.

Sound floated through the door around the corner that led into the canteen.

“...get into the lower levels, they're down there! Put anypony who can't fight in their rooms safely! Get out the canteen, everypony! Get out! GET OUT! THEY'RE TRYING TO-”

It was interspersed by a hazed static and electronic screaming at a low volume behind the words. The shape flowed lazily back and forth, before a distinctly pony shaped head finally turned toward me, and then darted into thicker shadow, before disappearing entirely. The sounds clicked and fell silent.

What...the...hell?

Eventually, my muscles stiffly regained the power of movement. I wanted to run. To hide. But where!? I could run for hours down here and just, well, who knew what I'd find?

Turning, I quickly cantered inside the canteen again. If that thing left it, then at least it was the one place I knew it wasn't. But I just couldn’t scrub the the sight of that head turning slowly toward me from my mind. It had been featureless, just a shade in the shadows.

I couldn't help it, I dived under the tables and curled into a ball. Fear stopped me from even whimpering out of a deadly thought of it returning. My eyes wouldn't close. What if I opened them and it was right there in front of me? Simply staring at the floor counters before me, the unceasing darkness hid everything not two feet from my head, and the utterly silent ambience, other than the occasional creepy vibration passing through, was just...getting to me. The thought of the Mall was like a homecoming. I wanted my pigsty with all the stupid Pinkie music in the air to remind me that she was still watching me forever. I even wished, not for the first time, that I were back in Slit's factory. Even the toxic atmosphere in there was preferable to the suffocating lack of space down here. But no, I couldn't get back to them. I'd tried to trot off and just ended back here. I was just going to curl into a ball and be as unnoticeable as possible until somepony came around, hopefully before I died of hunger.

Dying of hunger while lying pathetically on the floor of a canteen, dozens of feet underground in the pitch dark of a place meant to sustain ponies. Sometimes there was no end to the irony of my life.

Staring for longer still, something caught my eye.

On the ground was an audio recorder. I knew that hadn't been there before! Crawling out, I grabbed it. To hell with being afraid of the past; I needed sound. Something! Anything! Some source of sensory input to stop my mind becoming as enclosed as the Stable around me before it drove me insane! Who knew, perhaps they would be telling where to go?

Jamming it into my PipBuck, I noticed the only remaining button was the play button. The stop button lay nearby on the ground, broken and unusable. If I started this playback, there was no stopping it.

I hesitated for a few seconds, before pushing it.

The static pierced into my ears, echoing around off the metal walls. Squirming and yelping out loud, I clutched my ear as the recorder's volume setting spiked. Eyes watering, I tried to hold my right ear shut and protected it as best I could until the stabbing pains went away from my head.

“...right, it's running. You ready Runner Bean? This is it.”

“Sure thing Sculpy. We got the weapons from the armoury all here. They won't have anything so...hopefully this'll be pretty easy. Just gallop in, point a few guns, get them to stop all the weapon making, right?”

“Yeah...no blood. But we don't have a choice.”

There was an unnatural pause.

“The audio log can't hear you if you nod, Bean. We need this stored. We need the proof for future generations in here, to prove we did this right. That we didn't kill anypony. They have gone too far, taking all the damn Stable apart to 'fix' things that didn't need fixing. The PA system glitches and the draining of inordinate amounts of power that we need for hot water and lighting are just too much! They’re doing something. The Overmare keeps telling us not to worry, but they wouldn't keep it secret if it weren't anything big. We have a right to know, and we need to find out.”

“You gonna narrate this entire thing?”

“Context, my friend. Context. People must know why we did this as much as what happened. We must survive down here and secrets do not permit that, not when it is something that could endanger our Stable. Our children need this of us, their keepers, to ensure their survival. That is what the Stables were for, why we in StableTec built them. Now these Ministry of Arcane Science lot come in, usurp our authority and seek to ruin the safety with their meddling and research. This record is that future Stable generations will understand.”

“Hey, Sculpy, the others are waiting. Everypony on the top levels is heading down to their rooms below, out of the way. We need to move. Now.”

“Alright, I'll be two seconds.”

His voice became lower. Clutching the recorder closely, my ear ringing and feeling swollen inside, I glanced around me at the quiet canteen. Just what had those Ministry Scientists done to the Stable to cause all this? How messed up were those ponies to make such technology?

“One of the foals managed to creep through an air duct last week, a filly called Snowy Gust. She got into the science areas on a whim somehow. Only thing is, when they sent her back out, she couldn't remember a damn thing. Why would you need to wipe the memory of a child? That little filly would never have understood any of that stuff. They need to be stopped. I can't watch the foals I teach go through this sort of...horror. You don't mess with memories. It never works.”

“Hey! Sculpy, dude, come on!”

I heard a scuffling, a click of some weapons, and the sound of Sandy Sculpt trotting.

“Right, thank you all for meeting here so quick. They watch the atrium, but this canteen should be pretty safe till we get close enough. We don't need them locking us out.”

Wait, the canteen!

“Well, you lead the way Sandy. You're the one recording this for whatever reasons. We'll get down there, and get back up as soon as we can to the atrium to negotiate once we've made sure it's made safe. Lead on.”

My heart leapt. If I just paid careful attention to their sounds, perhaps I could follow the recording by listening for turns? I needed to get out of this void black area of the Stable; they could be my only hope. Overcoming my fears had to be done. I needed to do it sometime, to be able to stand up strong if I were to ever escape.

“Alright, everypony ready? No stopping now, it's make or break for us.”

“Right!”

“We're in!”

“Let's do this!”

“YEEEEAH!”

“With you!”

“Right behind you.”

“Okay, bucks and mares! We're going to head down the main hallway, see if we can get some distance covered before they spot us. Move it!”

Pushing my exhaustion to the back of my mind, I galloped toward the largest corridor again. The sounds of hooves clattering on the ground through the audio recorder sounded like they surrounded me, only faded and hissing with poor sound quality. The darkness ahead parted as my PipBuck's light reached it, creating a little island of visibility around me that provided the only warning of any obstacles.

“Hey everypony, don't activate your eyes forward sparkle! They'll pick it up on their security terminals if you do. We'll just navigate manually. Left!”

The rushing sounds shifted, harder strikes as the dozen ponies rounded. Without even thinking I copied them, finding myself darting round a sharp bend of the Stable layout. This could work!

“And remember to— YARGH!”

I tripped, falling head over hooves as something collided with my front legs.

“Urgh...who the hell left a scooter here. Hey, Tulip Bloom! What do you think you're doing riding around here?”

“I'm sorry, sir...”

“Just-argh, go back to your room, quickly. No! Don't stop for your scooter, just leave it, go now! Keep going, everypony!”

Wanting to nurse my bruised leg, instead I fought to get back on my hooves and gallop onwards into the dark once again. Corridors passed on either side, was I hearing it properly? Had they turned?

“Right!”

But there was no right!

The dull rattling of metal gears shook the corridor, before that tortured grinding that every single door in here made picked up. Almost invisible on the grey walls, the door slid open as I ran directly at the wall, before slamming shut behind me. I was definitely in new territory now. This place seemed cleaner, more preserved. Perhaps the water hadn't leaked in here?

“Come on, everypony! Keep up!”

A thick clang sounded in the recording. A few seconds later, my own hoof struck a loose panel that made an identical sound. I was falling behind! Praying to my hooves to move faster, I sprinted as fast as I possibly could to catch up!

“Sculpy! Are we doing the right thing?”

“We're not going to hurt anypony! But they won't listen to reason anymore. We have to intimidate them somehow into telling us what they're up to! Parts of the Stable are starting to act weird after they get involved! Left!”

There was a left ten feet back the way. Had I overshot it?

“Right!”

No no no! They were getting ahead!

“WAIT FOR ME!” I screamed as I turned and galloped back and around the corner. There were three or four right hand turns to choose from that I could run past! Was I lost?

“Crap, Sculpy! Gloomy's fallen behind, that battle saddle's weighing him down!”

“Oh for— we're down the second right, Gloomy! Hurry up!”

“I'm coming!” I shouted in response.

Without hesitation, I dove into the corridor and immediately fell down a short flight of steps. Shouting out in pain as I struck the ground, I tumbled and rolled into the next corner's wall, below a window, curling up before the bone rattling impact. Staggering and woozy, my balance was utterly shot from the impact. The darkness seemed to blur and shift in my dizzied vision. Shapes moved and flowed back and forth like...like the group of ponies I was following. A clammy sweat broke over me as I realised I couldn't remember the way back up from here. I was entirely at the mercy and direction of the past.

“Hey, what are you lot doing?!” A new voice, educated and refined.

“Shit! Grab him!”

“Wait, what? Get off me! GET OFF!”

The sound of cans and tins crashing to the floor rattled around the Stable. They skidded across the floor away from my hooves as I trotted unsteadily into some sort of medical bay. Dented trays were strewn around my feet, my own hooves clattering through them even as the same sounds echoed from the recorder.

“He might warn them! Gloomy! Take out that camera before they spot us! Somepony grab him! Hold him down!”

A gunshot rang out, and I covered my ear as the sudden boost in volume and static made it ache. Above me, I spotted a broken camera hanging by a wire from the wall.

“Lock him in the storage unit. We'll come and set him free later on, don't panic, but we can't risk you doing-”

“You have guns! What are you DOING!? We-we aren't dangerous!”

“That's all we want to check, sir. Now please, get in and we'll come back for you!”

A thick metal door stood locked ahead of me. Placing my hooves on it, I felt how securely it was rusted into place.

“Please! I-I don't like confined spaces! NO! Noooo!”

The lock descended with a stark clunking sound. Even as I felt the orange and browned lock, it occurred to me they never had been able to get back to him.

Whatever killed the Stable was likely on this recording.

“Let's keep going. We'll head to the Memorial Room and cut through the back passage. The cameras they installed don't cover that way until right at the end.”

There was only one way to go. I waited for the group to move off before joining them. It took me a few seconds to realise that I'd drawn my empty BB pistol in my mouth without even knowing, as though I was with them.

Running with the ghosts of the past to try and save the Stable that had already died long ago.

More voices broke into the recording. No, lots! Around me, the Stable opened out into a giant room, much like the atrium. I couldn’t help but wonder in awe; how large was this place if I hadn't even found the science levels yet? Looming giants towered in the dark ahead of me, massively thick and tall pillars reflecting only a vague light from their distinctly non-metallic surfaces. The green of my PipBuck revealed them on all sides.

“Everypony! Stop working and get to your rooms! Just stay down and quiet until we give the all clear!”

Shouts and stamping in all directions echoed off the walls from my PipBuck, giving the sensation of the noise existing in all areas of the room. Tramping across the oddly soft floor, it finally occurred to me what the tall objects were.

Trees.

Giant indoor trees, thick with frozen sap and rotted wood from years of neglect and starvation in the dark. The ground below me was thick with dirt, loose and dry like the crater. Small round and rotten objects bumped against my hooves or squished with a thick gooey green substance if I stood on one. Apples.

This was where they had grown food. An underground...what were they called? Oar Chart? Or Chand? Sounds from the recording drifted between the trees and off walls as I heard ponies dropping the baskets that lay around me. Hard bucks to grab what they could shook the area. Momentarily curious, I gave one tree a half buck, before screaming as my hoof became trapped in the rotten wood. Pulling desperately, I fell out of it atop a basket full of rotten apples, catapulting it up to land right on top of me. Feeling something runny and bits of goopy apple collapse all around my head, I was suddenly very appreciative of my goggles. Shaking off the revulsion, I threw it off, almost slipping on the residue all over the loose dirt. Shivering with the slimy rot and mould covering my body and head, I staggered back against a tree, shaking myself clean or rubbing myself against it to clean the worst of it off.

“Alright, Sculpt! I think that's everypony out of here. Why did you send them away if we aren't going to actually shoot, anyway? Hell, I don't think I even grabbed ammo.”

“We don't know what those scientists have cooked up, Runner Bean. I just want everypony to be safe.”

“That StableTec mantra still going, eh?”

“Always.”

I might have felt proud of Sculpt to have such a noble intention. But really, I was spending most of my time trying not to throw up. Now that I had something in me to throw up, it seemed to be relishing the opportunity after the vile apples had coated my body. Even that was just trying to distract me from these giant crooked dead husks that once were trees. Standing in the middle of the wide room, I realised that the walls were too far away to see in the dark.

For all I knew, I was standing in a dark haunted forest outside. The feeling of displacement grew, an oddly open space within an enclosed area. Conflicting thoughts of being outside were mangled with the reminders that this dark place was still under...how much of a mountain now? Shaking my head and whimpering, I immediately ran forward to catch up with the recording. For a horrifying few seconds, no walls appeared. Only more trees. I had been in a Stable, but now I was in a forest at night! Was I even going the right way?

“There's the Memorial Room, the far end! Let's go, I don't think we have much time left before word gets out!”

“Wait! The living areas are just beyond it. If we rush right in we'll be trying to get to the staircases with every Stable resident in the way. Give them some time. Take out any cameras near the main exit, make them think we're going that way, if they've even realised. Then get into the Memorial Room and bunker down for a few minutes.”

“You're the boss.”

“No, I'm just a concerned pony. This will turn out right, Bean, I promise. Now everypony, rest a minute or two, but don't make much noise. We don't know who may overhear. I'm gonna go check on everypony.”

The recording seemed to pause, but I could still hear ambient noises in the background of ponies settling down on the dirt, chomping on apples. I ceased my galloping, as a lack of direction took over. I didn’t want to run off before they moved on. Wandering back and forth, I discovered there were actually multiple orchards in this underground forest, divided by large and rectangular openings. Around the edges were overgrown walls and the occasional jammed door. They were barely visible, only if I were right under it and shining my PipBuck upwards.

Settling down next to a tree on all fours, I sighed; I'd lost my direction again. Hopefully my perception of ‘the far end’ was the same as the recording. I tried to imagine all the concerned ponies around me, clutching their weapons as they grabbed the occasional apple. I could hear a couple murmuring to one another nearby, the thump of somepony bucking apples from trees, and occasional, nervous clicks of weapons. Part of me wished I could see them, see my ghostly companions on the quest to discover just what was going on in this Stable.

The thought stopped me. When had I become interested in finding out about the past? It always scared me. So why was there this strange feeling of—

Something cantered between the trees.

Hiding behind the tree in a heartbeat, I fought to stop myself whimpering and I poked my goggled eyes around to watch.

It was in the trees, in the same room as me. It was right here.

Moving and grazing, the blurry shape drifted between trees and flowed around bends. All sound seemed to deaden. The recording lost volume, gradually being replaced by a warping static that drowned out the normal audio. The closer it came, the greater the distortion. Like black wind, it wisped around and to each tree in turn. Never a single clear shape, bouncing from the darkness and blending in as though it was a living shadow.

Then it disappeared. Had it really? Where was it now?

Every part of my mind screamed otherwise. It had to still be here. I moved out from the tree, glancing to either side and shining my PipBuck's light. Each one of my legs was shaking so hard I could feel my whipcord-tied PipBuck sliding down to my hoof. Drips of sweat from an oddly humid atmosphere poured off of me.

The ‘thnk’ of something striking wood reached my ears.

“Aiiee!”

Squeaking, I dove behind another tree, crouching behind the thick roots, as a sudden, wooden sound clopped down through the forest. Ahead of me, a tree swung lightly back and forth.

It was there...

Like a dark smudge on my goggles, it circled the tree. That pony shaped head reared up, looking around.

‘Run, Murky.’ My mind was bucking my own brain to obey. ‘Turn off your light!’ But I couldn't move my hoof.

The shape drifted closer to the ground, moving to another tree. I was in clear view.

‘Murky, run!’ But I was frozen in place.

Moving steadily closer, the head turned, watching me across the forest. There were no eyes just the silhouette of a pony against the lesser black around it.

Gradually, almost anticlimactically, it drifted further away and disappeared through another rectangular door to the next apple tree facility. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the doorway. I worried that if I blinked, it would suddenly come back. What if it came up behind me when I moved on? Gradually, tree to tree, I shuffled and scooted forward, using every ounce of ability to sneak that I knew to get close to the door it had gone through. I needed to see that it had properly disappeared. Peeking around the edge, there was nothing but another rotten grouping of the trees a few feet into the next section. There was such pitch darkness that I simply couldn’t see any further past the first few feet.

My world was nothing but a small radius around me. The feeling of vulnerability was really beginning to set in. The PipBuck was still flickering too. Sometimes I felt like it was my only source of life to—

The PipBuck died briefly.

It flew past me back into my room. So close, that all I saw was a shifting of darkness so subtle only my fear ridden nerves spotted it.

I screamed. Falling back, my hooves flew up to try and ward it away. At my cry, it rounded off, a pony's vague shape appearing, eyes staring for the brief second before my own closed. The PipBuck screamed in static. Hooves flailing to try and get a purchase, I bumped and fell for a few more feet.

I lay there and watched it go. With another ‘thnk’, a second tree shook...then another further away...and two more in the distance, beyond my vision.

Then silence.

I had to pull my goggles off to rub my eyes dry. Even as the static from the PipBuck gradually died down, I just kept shaking and shivering against the wall, even as some more sounds of faded tree hits echoed lightly through the orchard, before dying off completely again.

“Kzzssshh...right, we ready? Far side, we're off. Let's get to the Memorial Room and move on from there.”

I didn't want to move.

“Hey, Gloomy? What's wrong?”

The sound washed in faded static at the response. I didn't want to move. So scared...I was so scared.

“We're all scared, Gloomy, but we're all here for you. We'll find out what's down there and then we'll go back to a better life. Just stay with me, okay?”

Getting to my hooves, something about Sculpt's voice was reassuring. A teacher by trade, his words held great poise. Almost fatherly. Something I'd never known.

“One step after another, Gloomy. That's all any of us can do.”

Warily glancing around at dead trees and black mist, I began to trot towards the far end of the forest.

“That's it. Now let's go.”

The Memorial Room was never going to be good. The past looking upon the past? That was, well, double bad. Or did it cancel itself out? I was never very good at maths. As a colt, I used to say ‘one, two, three, lots!’

As I approached the doorway, I stopped briefly, despite the cantering in my recorder still playing. What number had lots been? Four. What came after it? Ah...'loads!' If only cynically, it settled my nerves to concentrate on the idiotic dumbness I'd been plagued with on my youth without a proper education. Well, that implied I wasn't still an idiot. What pony my age couldn't read anyway?

That precise lack of skill was being shown in my trust of the recording, for the room ahead of me held an elaborate sign above it. Unable to read the words, I was wandering into the unknown.

Inside was a low ceiling. The vague shapes of furniture around it stood out to me, but I stuck to the wall nearest the door for now. I still had no idea what was in here. To my surprise, though, someone had glued wooden decor to the steel walls, giving this room a very low budget version of an antiqued look..

“Alright everypony, settle here a minute. I'm going to try and see if I can tap into the cameras, make sure everypony else is settled before we go. If we're being forced to go into the living areas to reach the science level's doorways, I do not want anypony caught in a worst-case scenario crossfire. Bean, can you get that terminal going?”

“Sure thing, bo— I mean, Sculpt.”

“Right. Once you're logged in, use my clearance to synchronise all the PipBucks of the residents. Not the scientists, we don't want to warn them.”

“Um, why?”

“If we're all synced up, it means that we all have access to each other to send warnings or an all clear. But more crucially, it means that anypony can be tracked at any time on the same PipBuck transmit signal.”

“Again, why?”

“Proof, Bean! I don't want any rumours floating. The residents can watch our positions on their Eyes Forward Sparkles and know we didn't do any killing or anything, they'll have our records on their PipBucks.”

“Fine, fine. It'll be faster if I just make every PipBuck that enters signal range do it.”

“Whatever it takes, Bean. Thank you.”

Casting my PipBuck light around, I could see the terminal he had used. A brief inspection (banging my hoof on the casing) revealed it to be long dead. I pilfered the drawers below it, finding little but a few old books and massive folders of papers. A multi-tool sat at the back end. I'd seen one before, for working with nuts, bolts, and washers. Grabbing it in my mouth, I added it to my saddlebag before, without really thinking, adding the two books as well.We were still trying to loot things after all, and it was Protégé we had to please.

Taking the time to hunt around, my PipBuck cast illumination over a few classroom tables. I wondered if foals came here to learn about the world they had left; perhaps a Stable version of a field trip? Through the forest, into the past? The thought was oddly alike with how this two year job with Fillydelphia worked. Out of the slave pits and across the wastes before being thrown into a Stable. Yet somehow, I didn't feel like I had left Fillydelphia at all. The slavers were still there, always watching the only way out, to get us back in the wagons.

The ponies on my recording continued to mutter about who was where and how safe they were. Yet. as I trotted into this ‘memorial’, my light shone off of various glass objects in, casting a glow over the wall to my right. With this, I witnessed something entirely new.

Art.

For the first time in my life, I witnessed art.

Arrayed along the walls; framed paintings, pictures, photos, sketches...

With my mouth agape, every sense seemed to deaden as I trotted down the wall. Contrasted against the horrid grey and darkness, I now saw colour, shape, and form! Ponies, drawn beautifully with a myriad of expressions, clustered in groups of lavishly detailed singular portraits. This was one place of beauty within the void, and I realised that these had been drawn by ponies before the balefire. One held green fields that glittered in the sun, and pegasi roamed freely beside earth ponies and unicorns. It had a small town made of thatchwork roofs and white constructs sprung up in a valley between hills. A huge circular town hall marked the centre. Without even having to think, I knew that if I were alive then, I would want to live there. In that place of meadows, rivers, and beautiful multicoloured tents that made up-what was it? A market? I doubted I'd be very good at haggling. Ponies only ever told me what I was to give them, not the other way around.

There were other huge vistas of cities. One was obviously Manehattan, another Fillydelphia, and the last, shifting to nature, displayed a dark forest. Trotting from each to each, it made the artist in me envious. Dragging my sketchbook from my saddlebag, I flicked through images that paled in comparison to these masterworks. I'd never encountered anypony else's proper drawings before.

Maddeningly trying to work out how they'd gotten the light to look like that or how they got such consistent shapes, my eyes flicked from painting to drawing to even photo. Even beside my fear of the Stable, while clutching my little scrawled journal close, I felt a little fear that I'd never be as good as all this.

Everything I drew came from the heart, but it just felt like what I imagined in my mind was never what really came out. Did they feel the same way at a higher level? Was I the only pony artist who felt that way? I wanted to meet them, ask them a thousand questions on how their art was so beautiful, so well formed so...

...free.

But despite my envy, I could not hide a small smile creeping across my face as I witnessed the work they had left behind for ponies like me to find. One had the Goddesses, Celestia and Luna, arcing around one another in the twilight sky. The next, multiple pegasi wearing identical blue and yellow costumes, soaring in perfect formation around cloud buildings. Even through my fleece, I felt a little twitch on either side of my torso at the wondrous sensation of limitless freedom before me. So much so that I almost tripped over a display case.

Its glass was long dusty, but utterly preserved. About half a dozen of them filled the middle of the room. Regaining my posture, I wiped the dust away with a hoof, staring inside. Lots of little cards filled with tiny writing taunted me, but there were racks of medallions and colourful ribbons, like amulets. They were perfectly preserved, glinting in my PipBuck's light as I saw gold encrusted battleponies embedded on them. One particularly fancy one had the Sun and Moon symbol while a great many bore the symbol of a giant apple, carved from jade crystal and bound with red ribbon.

Standing up with my front hooves pressed against the glass, I could not deny a part of me wanted them. They were so pretty. That blue one would go really nice for Glimmer to thank her! Oh, and that one with the ruby, I was sure the mare would enjoy it. I could get little ones for all of the ponies who had helped me! These things were jewellery right?

Unfortunately, the glass was too thick for my weedy front hooves to lift or move. Banging my BB gun against it, I realised, would break my teeth long before it shattered. A small lock was at the side, but I had nothing to deal with it. Returning to the desk, I hunted around the back of its cupboard door, but found nothing much. Just some old stained mane gel, a bunch of bobby pins to hold up one’s mane, and a screwdriver for no apparent reason.

Wait...

Grinning, things finally clicked in my head, like a lock coming open. Bending forward, I picked up the screwdriver. I knew what to do with it to get it open!

“Letsh she hat lock!”

Approximately forty five seconds of efforts later, I realised that banging the screwdriver's handle off the lock was not going to work. Nor was trying to lever the length through the arched metal of the padlock. These things were useless!

Yet even as I fumbled, there came yet another ‘thnk!’ from behind me in the orchard.

My voice's pitch broke, and I dove behind the memorial case with yelp. Whipping my head around to the doorway, I saw a blackened shape standing in it; the tree behind it shaking. Whimpering, I tried to just simply hide with my back to the case, hooves pressed to either side of me to be as flat against the case as I could. It made no sound, no smell, no presence. Yet somehow I knew it was coming into the room.

My hooves skittered on my PipBuck, trying to turn off the light, but instead it began to project furious static, blocking the recording! The closer it came, the louder the static got. It was louder than it had ever been, shrieking and rasping no matter how hard I buried the speaker to my belly to deaden it.

I heard the lock of the case I was hiding behind clink, as though somepony were testing it to make sure it were closed. My PipBuck light finally died, plunging me into pitch black where I couldn't even see my own body beneath me.

A background ambience, like an unsettling a feeling in the air, got thicker, as though the atmosphere itself was moving and condensing as the static got louder. It had to be coming around the case! Willing my terrified and frozen limbs to function, I scooted away down the other side of the long case, past the back door of the room and rolled into the next line of displays. I just managed to stifle my whimper, as my wings ached at the ground contact from the roll. The electronic drone from my PipBuck dropped a little as I put distance between me and...and that. Only now did I feel the wetness from my eyes dripping all over my face. Wiping my eyes with a hoof, I curled up under the case as best I could.

It must have been only a minute, but it felt like hours as the warped sound grew and faded intermittently along with the occasional sound of something in the room moving or being adjusted. I risked a look out.

There it was, by the desk. Pony shaped, but indistinct, more like a gap in the darkness in the shape of one. I couldn't focus on the outline this time; it was as though my vision slid right off it.

Without so much as another sound, it simply seemed to fade. A moment later, I heard the trees being struck again, then nothing.

It took me a good five minutes to build the courage to even step outside from under the case again. Limping back across, feeling every ache I’d been carrying, I rubbed my tender back and looked around before one thing caught my eye. Or rather, an absence did.

Every single one of the medallions was gone.

Very easily, it struck me. It had heard me attempting to steal them, so it had taken them. To protect them from the would be thief. I had offended the past; now it was trying to stop me doing more! My mind raced, was it coming back? When it got its valuables to safety would it return to deal with me?

A whole new respect for care of the past in here overtook me. I couldn't take anything. Back in the canteen, I had stolen from the food locker. I'd found it looking around there. In the forest room, I'd disturbed the apples it must have believed were still in the basket, so it had begun bucking trees and searching for me. Now it was protecting the jewellery...

Never in my life, not even in the moment of realisation that I had failed in my run for the Wall. Not even under The Master. Not even when I had been locked in the rad-chamber by the Magister. Not ever had my heart felt so cold and tight with anxiety and fear.

I wanted out.

Unwilling to spend my time near the door, I moved deeper into the Memorial Room. The far wall would do for now, yes, nice and safe away from where that monster had gone. Artwork softened my terror as I passed a portrait of six mares, the same six I'd seen everywhere. Wait, if they were there, that meant...

Yup. She was too. Grinning like a mad pony off of the portrait at me. If I ever learned to colour pictures, one thing I knew was there would never be any pink in them.

Sorry, Glimmer, some things are just that important.

I watched her eyes carefully as I made my way past from the right, confirming that they didn’t move. Perhaps I could finally begin to believe she wasn't out to get me. Pinkie had her front two hooves on the front of the painting, as though she was standing up on something. In fact, she was in front of the painting. Staggering backwards into the case, my eyes locked on her as Pinkie emerged from out of the painting like a lifelike pony!

Only after I saw she wasn't moving did I see some joker had continued the painting of her front hooves over the frame. Well, I didn't find it funny.

Turning away from her (mostly, I checked a couple of times more, just to be sure) I continued to move toward the far end. Slowly being revealed by my PipBuck, I found the magnum opus of the room.

The Memorial Wall.

I didn't need to be a historian to know it. Long dead wreaths lay across the floor before a marble shrine. Candles sat unused on tall bronze sticks, while upon the shrine itself was everything that mattered.

Old toys, pieces of jewellery, crude foal drawings, and even small clocks. But more than anything, photographs. Layers and layers of them all across the wall. Each held a scrawled message on the wall or over the photo itself. I felt so small before this monumental image of what the Stable residents had lost. Beautiful mares laughing with their bucks. Little “baby's first photo” images. Military snapshots. Personal photos. Pictures that were simply awful but obviously used because they were all that was left. Even pets. I saw a dog, rabbit, and even a red coloured balefire phoenix. Had they normally been red before the war? For some, there were only written notes, many with a little cutie mark sketched on them. A photo frame, three little sparks of magic, clouds, a chocolate bar...

Ponies back then had such nice cutie marks.

I felt my hind quarters bump onto the floor. The shrine rose easily four times my height, maybe more, right to the top of the room and covering the entire end wall. Individual candles had once been lit here in little holders all across the marble steps leading up to the wall itself. Every square inch was covered in something between the embedded marble pillars upon the smooth rock wall.

Everypony upon this wall had died in the balefire.

Little tears began dripping. I tried wiping them, but it was no use. They just kept coming. I didn’t feel horror, no. Instead, there was just a slow, haunting, and lingering sense of tragedy at seeing the personal impact of the event I had to live in the aftermath of. Two hundred years later, and we were still feeling the shockwaves.

It only felt right. Digging into a pocket, I placed the little bell from the scooter on one of the marble steps beside a pretty looking red candle, similar to the scooter. I hoped the foal would appreciate it. That, and the thing that was haunting this place on its own agenda. Part of me hoped that this one little act might relieve some of the guilt of having tried to steal their most valued possessions.

Hearing the recorder remain silent but for the ambience of their break and meaningless chatter, I just sat there for a while, staring at each picture in turn trying to guess their names. Trying to not think that every single one of them had died in the baleful fire that consumed their world, while these lucky few were trapped down here safely.

“I'm so sorry...”

“OH SHIT!”

Jumping almost my entire height off the ground in shock at the recorder restarting, my legs whirled uselessly, trying to run in mid air before I collapsed to the ground in a heap.

“Bean! Get everypony moving!”

“What's wr—”

“FUCKING MOVE!”

Masses of sounds were erupting from the Memorial Room. Ponies were shouting, swearing and screaming in panic. Guns were being loaded. I heard safeties click and hooves clatter.

“They- I can't believe it!”

“What are they doing!?”

“Keep moving, get out before—”

An electronic voice crackled through the recording.

“PipBuck signal detected. Depressurisation routine active.”

Screaming of my own right, I hurled myself towards the back door, seeing it open normally. Recorder or not, those words were too fresh in my mind.

“EVERYPONY RUN!”

I could only assume they had rushed for the back door by the way their hooves kept clattering on metal and not dirt. The horrifying sound of the door slamming shut behind them echoed loud enough to send me careening into a wall. My head slammed on a metal pillar, sending white spots all over my vision, my balance reeling from my damage ear.

“Everypony got out?”

“Just! Princesses fucking backsides. Sculpt, what was that?!”

“I don't know! Keep moving! I saw on the terminal, that's activated everywhere! They're trying to kill us! I...I don't know, but—”

“BUT WHAT!?”

“It's Stable wide! Everywhere but the science levels, if we use our PipBucks it locks down and kills us!”

“No, Sculpt! We sent all the residents to their rooms!”

“Oh no...what have they done?”

I pushed myself further from the door into the dark corridor as their galloping took on a pace I could never match. It wasn't needed. Suddenly the floor wasn't there, and I roughjy fell down the next flight of stairs. My knees and head got scuffed and banged, but through some minor miracle I landed at the bottom in such a way that I could unsteadily gallop on. Panic drove me. I could hear it in my ghostly companions' voices. Screams for families were audible as it became a mad rush for the living quarters. Half-falling dizzily and half-leaping and galloping, I descended to the next level and rushed out into a massive set of corridors. Dozens of rooms passed by me, undoubtedly the living areas. Each had a window and one hard closed door.

The screaming started.

I had found the residents.

“Sweet Celestia, they're trapped!”

“Get them out! GET THEM OUT!”

“The doors are jammed! Oh fuck, I'm sorry!”

“PipBuck signals detected. Depressurisation routine...active.”

“HELP! TH-THE AIR!”

“NO!!”

They were in their rooms, every one of them, their huddled amongst crumbled jumpsuits. Frozen in time, and held by motionless environments, they were lying upon their beds or collapsed neat windows. As I saw them, I heard the banging of dozens of ponies on glass through the PipBuck. I galloped madly forward, tripping over masses of bags, trolleys and laundry dropped and overturned in the blind panic.

“MY SONS ARE IN THERE!”

“PipBuck signals detected. Depressurisation routine...active.”

“Somepony do something! Fuck, DO SOMETHING!”

Three gunshots rang out sudden and loud.

A windowpane before me bore three bullet-marks on it. The glass hadn't broken. Behind it lay one small skeleton near a cot, with a larger one nearer the window, it's dented PipBuck was still sparking blue light over them both.

“Nopony use your PipBucks! Take them off!”

“We can't! They took all the tools!”

“PipBuck signals detected. Depressurisation routine...active.”

Every skeleton had a thick PipBuck around their hoof. I saw a giant bench bent and strewn across the corridor.

“Everypony, grab that bench! Ready? Three, two, one, HIT!”

A dull thunk set a wash of static in the recording.

“Again! Three, two, one, HIT!”

Another one, louder, accompanied by the screaming of somepony nearby.

Then finally, the sound of glass cracking.

The window had been indented and bore a long crack, but the bench had also broken at one end. Stumbling over it, I kept going down the long corridor, window after window bearing the horrors within. The screaming never stopped as pony after pony banged on the windows and hollered. Many of the team I was following were crying as they shouted back. Shouts of love or regret. An entire Stable dying around me, yet, here in the far flung future, I was powerless to help them.

“I'm sorry!”

“PipBuck signals detected. Depressurisation routine...active.”

Above the chorus of agony through the PipBuck, I screamed.

“I'M SORRY!”

Tears fell from my face as I turned entirely around, seeing nothing but over a dozen unbreakable windows on either side with the murdered ponies within. What had those idiots done? What was worth so much that it was worth killing so many innocents over? Filled with an anger I never could have imagined, I galloped onward, even as I heard Sculpt.

“Those bastards! They're going to pay! They're going to fucking pay! I'm going in there!”

My own hooves matched Sculpts step for step as we both hurdled the same wreckage and slid under the same fallen beams. We heard the same mare on our right, her skeleton still oddly propped on the window. We both saw the buck on our left relentlessly hammering at the window with his shotgun to save his wife. His skeleton lay around the weapon on the floor. We galloped together, past and future, to discover the same truth. To discover why.

Within the recording, I heard the door at the end of the corridor closing, as the voice droned once more.

“PipBuck signals detected. Depressurisation routine...active.”

Sculpt's gasp of fear matched my own in shock, realisation of why the armed team were dead in this corridor too. The recording became hazy, distorted, and warped. Sculpt's breathing was all I heard as sound died out, as we both ran through the door that led to the science areas, and I staggered through the door he had been running to get below before it closed.

His ragged breath was filled with barely contained fury, before there came the sound of him collapsing on the floor. Of him crying. I lay down, wishing I could somehow help the poor buck having just witnessed everything he had tried to save fall out from under him.

“This won't go unpaid. To any who hear this in the future, this was our failure. The moment we became lost in the dark. My family and friends lie dead not feet away from me. But know this! I will not let what they have done go without incident. Whatever they were doing, it ends now, even if it kills me. Justification be damned. Secrets and lies were never what ponies were meant to have. The Ministries brought these dark days upon us even before the bombs dropped. I’ve lost...I’ve lost everyone.”

His composure broke, before his voice took a steely, savage turn.

“They will pay...”

The recording clicked...

...and ended.

I lay beside the door for some time, just trying to calm down. It wasn't entirely possible, as my chest heaved and my dry breath stuttered under sniffles. My chest was burning, enough that I downed my RadAway as a precaution. Mercifully, yet horribly, the burning feeling died down. How long had I been down here that my irradiated lungs were acting up again on their own with no radiation?

Now ahead of me lay more stairs, angling down ever deeper. What was this, a fifth floor? I felt a million miles from anypony else, from Fillydelphia and from the clouds. Trotting steadily and slowly, I moved into the last depths of the Stable. There was light here, but not from any panels above. Terminals littered every room that I passed by, each active as they cast little islands of green light in either small rooms or the bigger, widened hallway that I was entering. Smashed chalkboards and broken vats had smothered the floor in shards of ceramic or almost solid, but still sticky, liquids. Feeling my hooves needing tugged up from some of it to the floor in places, I prayed this wasn't anything toxic.

Clearly, these were the science levels. All my imaginations of some giant mad laboratory were broken as I found little more than offices and shared work tables, haphazardly fitted into a Stable not originally intended to fit a science team. This might have once been extra living areas. The larger room up ahead may have been a storage area, perhaps? Cantering from green light to green light, I hopped between illuminated islands as I made my way in.

I wasn't even at the main room up ahead when I began finding the corpses.

Strewn over tables or collapsed in doorways, each dusty skeleton was surrounded by clear bullet-holes. Whimpering, I staggered away from them into a side room, only to find one that had hid behind her desk. An image of a foal in a picture frame lay on its side, scarred by a passing round. The terminal flickered loyally, awaiting input that I could never give. I took a long and slow breath, trying not to get overwhelmed, before cantering out into the hallway again. Little brass shells at my hooves pinged and skittered away when I moved past. I quickly galloped on, closing my eyes as I saw more and more; an unending cycle of remains, all of them trying to move the same way I had done before being brought down.

Reaching the main room, I finally opened my eyes and—

My hooves thankfully got to my mouth before the scream emerged.

It was in there, moving idly between desks in front of a series of odd machines and copper constructs. Unable to focus, I could only see the vague presence of the haunting spectre floating around and over the middle of the room. The 'head' cast itself around to each glow of green light before making its way toward me.

I had nowhere to go.

Crouching behind one of the desks, apologising constantly under my breath as I was forced to move a skeleton out of the place it too had tried to hide in, I shivered at its passing. The static had stopped once the recording ceased, mercifully giving me silence to hide.

Unfortunately, it meant I had no way to track it. Unable to constrain my curiosity, my head, goggles firmly on, peeked out. Was it coming any close-YES IT WAS!

I pulled myself back sharply, it had only been a few feet away, that head turning quickly as I'd made my move. A low dirging ambience began to soundlessly make my head stuffy and my ear ache as I felt it wash over the desk above me. My goggles were steaming up. The urge to scream, to holler and beg for mercy was becoming too much.

Finally, it was over. The pressure in the air seemed to pass away. Shaking so much my loose tooth was chattering painfully, I raised my head over the desk. How had it not seen me? Did it just not care?

It was moving away. Down another passageway, I saw the contrails of darkness shifting ever darker through a terminal's distant glow. But upon the desk was something new.

Another recorder.

It was different, more modern (as best as I could identify, which pretty much involved how shiny it was) and bore the same connections for my PipBuck. Ejecting the last one, I placed it within my saddlebag and clicked the next into place. I was beginning to suspect it wanted me to hear these. Was I the little future ghost sneaking around to its perception as much as it was to me? How did ghosts see? Was it as afraid of me as I was of it?

Click!

“Personal journal of Lead Arcane Scientist Night Breeze, starting day one. I, apologise, if this is a little breathless. We just—”

A dull thoom echoed in the background, ponies screamed and a great amount of commotion sounded in the recording. Wandering from my hiding spot, I entered the main room, surrounded by the clustered groups of pony remains.

“Well, that was Fillydelphia. It's gone now. We barely got in here on time. Technically we didn't have a pass, but we rushed up and the Overmare let us in. A kind soul if there ever was one. Now we've got to start developing ways that this Stable could support us all.”

She paused. Her voice sounded authoritative, even if terrified; the air of somepony used to getting her way was obvious. If she'd told me to do something, I'd probably have leapt to it.

“Sorry, this is just- I'm trying to give myself things to do. Trying not to think about what's going on outside. The very thing we tried to prevent. I tried to get Ministry Hub Leader Aurora Star down here, but we couldn't find her! I...I think she was still in the city. But right now we need to get set up in here and get back to work. She left very explicit instructions in the event we got separated. I am to make this Stable into a place of hope however I can. Create arcane technologies that we could reconstruct the world when we open. Aurora's theory of stored memory will be my first aim, as will the continuation of my own research into giving greater natural immunity. We will be ready for when the time comes to confront the wastes in a hundred years. I should go.”

The recording seemed to end, yet the PipBuck kept playing.

I heard something, vaguely, like a pitter patter of hooves. Squeaking, I whirled, expecting to look right into dead eyes. But all I saw was an empty science chamber around me. Perhaps just that thing moving around again? I wasn't disturbing anything!

Cantering further in to get more cover, I moved amongst the workbenches in the high room. Little orbs rested on them, most grey and dead. A few shone dimly of all colours in the spectrum. Occasionally, some glowed as bright as my PipBuck with incandescent swirling power within. I didn't dare touch them. I didn't need any more ghostly visits. My mind seemed settled, but I could feel I was on a knife edge. That all it would take was one thing to push me over the edge into a blind horror of what was going on around me. Skeletons: dead places, ponies killing ponies over something I didn't know. I was one realisation away from something awful, that I knew for sure. Without the thought of Glimmer and Brim searching amongst these levels somewhere, I may have been lost to the darkness some time ago.

“Right, day seven, I think. I've had to make some adjustments in this place. For one, I'm now the Overmare. A regrettable decision, but frankly I had to. She was lovely, but incompetent. Allocated the wrong resources, and made shifts so inefficient that the Stable would barely last twenty years, never mind a century. What was Scootaloo thinking when she sent the Overmare invite to her? We held a vote, with the greater scientists and many of the more intelligent Stable residents voting for me. Some may say it was a rigged vote. I just call it a confident one. I've taken control of the Stable systems and transferred PipBuck control to the scientists. We helped invent the things before some of us moved to the Ministry, so why not? The theories we brought are adapting well. So long as those residents don't get in our way we'll be ready to combat the wastes decades ahead of schedule, it’ll give us time to get used to using this stuff. Got to go.”

The audio seemed to cut again. Presumably she kept her diaries all on one recorder.

While listening, I trotted over to the walls, looking in on experiments set up in adjoining rooms through interior windows. The overall shape of the Stable was beginning to form in my mind. Multiple levels, each with one big room and a ton of adjoined spaces surrounded by corridors and peripheral facilities. The top level had the atrium, next was the schoolhouse, then the apple trees, and now this.

Where was Glimmer? She would understand what all of this was. I just wanted to find her and get out. Get back to Filly, start planning the escape. All this was just a distraction, a meaningless job that would never change my life other than to terrify me. At most, I wondered if anything in here might help us escape. Perhaps there was some sort of invisibility spell? Something to sneak by the guards into the wastes with no problems!

Yet around me there was no such immediately obvious thing. The giant machine I trotted past seemed to hold little trays meant for cupcakes, like a baking tray? Was that what my old master called them? A quick size comparison told me that they were the same shape as the orbs I had just seen.

“Week three. Research continues well. The memory transference process is becoming a little tough. No doubt this is the problem Aurora spoke of. Apparently Twilight Sparkle herself proclaimed it to be impossible without an external power source large enough to...well, I don't know. I'm finding the same problem. We can create loops temporarily, even residual talent, but nothing like what Aurora proposed last year. But I will make this work. Memories have power. That's what it all revolves around. The past can teach us and empower us as we remember the important times and elements of it. That's what she told us, over and over. Memories. Hold. Power. What is it that drives a pony forward? What makes you who you are? It’s the experiences you had. But what if we could play around with that? Ergh, I'm having to withhold the information from the residents. Simple reason, really. Chief Aurora Star told me that the Ministry had found evidence of a Zebra informer amongst the Ministry of Wartime Technology in Fillydelphia, and many of the Stable residents worked there. As such, all research is now withheld only to those ponies working on it and myself. Regardless of what the residents think, I'm not going to release information. Aurora Star died trying to protect our work. I won't disobey her last request to me before we parted. All the same, those residents are getting restless. That paranoid moron, Sculpt, he wants a recorded meeting about all this. I won't endanger our way of life to satisfy pointless curiosity. This is sensitive work. We don't need ponies without our intentions seeing it. Who knows what they might make of what we're doing here?”

The ‘Clink’ of something touching metal came from behind me.

Spinning on the spot, I whirled to look behind me. Behind the tabled, I saw a wheeled terminal trolley gently rolled to a stop. My blood froze, and I looked around; I could see nothing. No static came from the PipBuck.

This wasn't good. Cantering nearer to the wall, I slid behind the huge machine. A way out. I needed a way out of this room! Glancing out and around, my eyes fell on a scaffold staircase haphazardly built to the balcony, lit in the pitch black by three nearby terminals. It led to another room at the far end up one level, also only visible from the terminal inside it, casting a haze through the window. If I could only get in there, it had less ways to have to look for anything coming. I could bunker down for a bit.

Lowering to the ground, I felt a sensation that I was not only being watched. My head flicked around at the drifting movement I sensed. No, definitely more than watched.

I was being hunted.

Calling on every ounce of stealth I had, I cancelled the recording and turned off my light before doubling back. If they had seen my light (and of course they would have) then they may not expect me to move backwards. Did ghosts think like that?

Heart in my mouth, I began the slow creep forward in the dark. Only little islands of light guided my way, beacons that I could not enter for fear of being noticed. I had to stay in the dark. The same dark that was slowly scaring me witless. Gently pushing a seat aside, sneaking below a desk and crawling between the struts of a scaffold construct, I gingerly made my way to the stairs from the other side. Checking every angle, I saw nothing. I cursed my ear, if only I could hear properly!

Hoof by hoof, I began to move up the stairs, hoping against hope that none of them would creak or flex. My eyes scanned the room below as I moved up and out of it. Each desk lit by the active terminals revealed nothing. Was it just my imagin-

A shadow passed by the end of one desk.

The panic rose inside me. Something was definitely down there, where I’d just been. Quickening my pace, I cantered off the stairs, every little creak and rattle feeling like a gunshot to give me away. As soon as I was able, I quickly headed into the room. Higher level equipment surrounded me, filled with fancier materials that shone from the terminal's light. Glancing at the screen, I saw an old stain across it.

Blood...

Hooves clamped over my mouth to contain the shriek, I back-pedalled away from it, falling over the edge of a bed and landing on my PipBuck. Hard. The recorder wailed at the disturbance, fast forwarding madly until I finally hoofed it to try and make it stop! Instead, it merely resumed. Now matter what I hit, it wouldn't stop.

“Urgh, week five. You have to wonder why the residents get so worked up and paranoid. What do they think we're working on in here? Weapons?”

Grabbing the musty blanket from the bed, I wrapped the PipBuck and my leg in a shred of it, trying to dull the sound. I could hear it, but nopony else could. Shivering, I pressed against the bed and cradled myself with my front hooves. It was all beginning to catch up, the sheer tragedy that had happened in this place. The horrid intentions of a few ponies dooming many others.

“Things are starting to heat up. Personally, I'm a little scared. The residents have gone quiet. I've ordered the others to stand watch and only go out if they need to. Some of them asked if we should take guns. I refused. No need of them, we are scientists, not soldiers. We—”

“Overmare! Overmare!”

“What is it? I'm-”

“Slinky Spot spotted the residents on the cameras! You-you need to see this!”

Shuffling and running sounds passed through the recorder as the Overmare apparently forgot to turn it off. I heard the noises of the same creaky stairs I had come up. Sneaking forward and peering over the window lip, my eyes traced them all the way to the bank of monitors I saw on the far side still sparking away.

“What the...”

“They have guns, Overmare. They're coming this way!”

“Get ready to lock down all doors, Spot. Don't worry, I'm sure they're just trying to make a statement. Not the best way, but even Sculpt isn't that insane to actually attack us. We're all ponies.”

“Ma'am! Nutshell Cracker's still out there, he was going off shift! They're-they're going to run into him!”

“Oh no...”

I heard familiar sounds through the recording from the monitors the Overmare was watching.

“Hey, what are you lot doing?!” It was the same scientist they'd locked in the storage room.

“Shit! Grab him!”

“Wait, what? Get off me! GET OFF!”

The sound of cans and tins falling rattled across the speaker, making me wince and hold my ear.

“He might warn them! Gloomy! Take out that camera before they spot us! Somepony grab him! Hold him down!”

There was a single gunshot.

Static washed in as the screen obviously went dead.

“Th-they killed him...”

No, they didn't!

“I...how could they, I...”

“Overmare? What do we do?!”

“I...I...”

“Overmare!”

“T-track their PipBucks on the security grid. If they come anywhere past the Memorial Room, set the Stable commands to lock their position in and vent the room.”

“WHAT!?”

“They're coming to kill us, Spot! It's a last resort if they don't think better of this or we see evidence elsewise. Just-just stay calm...oh Equestria...”

Everything was beginning to fall into a horrible place.

“Overmare! They're in the Memorial Room. They've just sent out a message to get everypony into their own rooms. That-that means they're coming right here, Ma'am. Doesn't it?”

“It does, Spot. I...I can't believe this. We're not doing anything but peaceful research in here! Why couldn't they just calm down and trust us?! It's just-just procedure to keep it secret in time of war! I...I never thought...”

“Overmare, they're about to move...”

“Out of the way, I'll send the command myself. Get me the records, track only PipBuck codes from those we’ve seen with guns.”

There was some playing around and sounds of leafing sheets.

“I'm ready.”

“They're about to move!”

“Oh Equestria...forgive me for this.”

A hoof struck a button. Whining turbines sounded in the background. A science pony was crying in the background.

“PipBuck signal detected...Memorial Room. Depressurisation routine...active.”

“It's done...”

“PipBuck signal detected...Living Chamber C5. Depressurisation routine...active.”

“WHAT!?”

“It's activating on the living chambers! It just sealed Runner Bean's family!”

“What!? No!”

“PipBuck signal detected...Living Chamber G12. Depressurisation routine...active.”

“Stop it! I...what's going on!?”

“I can't! It's like they've synced up all the PipBucks in the entire Stable!”

“PipBuck signal detected...Living Chamber A4. Depressurisation routine...active.”

“PipBuck signal detected...Living Chamber E1. Depressurisation routine...active.”

“PipBuck signal detected...Living Chamber A3. Depressurisation routine...active.”

“By Celestia...what have we done?”

Living chamber after living chamber, it reeled through them all. The Ministry ponies sat in shocked silence. Curling up on the Overmare's bed and stuffing my face in the covers to stifle my whimpers, I finally felt the weight of the entire situation coming down on my shoulders. As the sequence finally ended, the scientists mutely tried to come to terms with it.

“It...it was an accident!”

“W-we can repopulate or...”

“Hey! What are you doing down—”

“You killed everypony!”

The furious rattle of an automatic weapon tore across the recording.

“He's got a gun! Sculpt! Please! Don't!”

Sculpt’s voice was distant, but wracked with horror, sadness and fury.

“You! Killed! Everypony! All to safeguard your own sick designs or whatever you needed to hide from us! I won't let you do it! I WON'T LET YOU!”

Gunshot after gunshot. Screams, panic, begging, and rage mixed in one long cacophony of violence through the PipBuck. The Overmare had run. I heard the clacking steps as she retreated up here. Gunfire below kept track of Sculpt's rampage through the science areas. The Overmare's desperate breathing was close to the recorder. Eventually, I heard the stairwell again. Sculpt must have come up here directly.

“And you, telling me it was all fine! But all along you had the Stable primed to kill us!”

“I didn't! It was a mistake! The PipBucks were...they were...you were coming to kill us with guns!”

“We were doing no such thing! You liar! Your secrets and lies have killed my entire Stable! The last Overmare should never have let you in!”

“Everything we have down here is peaceful! WHy can’t you see that? Secrecy is just procedure! Look around!”

“I just witnessed my family die, all my friends and their loved ones, and you try to tell me that is procedure!? I...I just...it was YOU!”

His weapon roared. Sculpt screamed, that fatherly tone lost to incoherent grief at the loss of everypony he knew. I knew without a doubt the Overmare was dead. Only Sculpy's breathing took over, eventually succumbing to tears before the entire recording cut.

Nothing had ever been wrong. Not once.

“Wonderfully tragic...isn't it, filly?”

Every inch of my body froze.

“Even in a place with nothing wrong, ponies still find a way to let the horrors take place.”

Daring to turn my face from the wet covers, I saw him.

He was sat in the Overmare's chair, his magic holding various trinkets around him as his slave knife sharpened itself on a little whetstone.

“Behind closed doors, locked in the dark, the place ponies were never meant to be in. Just as in the tale of Nightmare Moon, they succumbed to fear and hate. There never was anything wrong in this Stable. No flaw, no experiments, and plenty of supplies. More than usual, in fact. Add in a full team of Arcane scientists? Well, it seemed so perfect, but ponies were not meant to live in the dark, hidden from the light of Celestia's sun or the majesty of Luna's moon.”

He advanced, flowing in the dark. Shadows twisted around his horn as the dark wreathed and became a part of him. Barb didn't so much trot as just drift. His long dark mane idly mixed with the black aura around him. Suddenly I saw why he kept it long and his clothing ragged. It meshed into his magical shadows to give the impression of an ethereal foe in dark places.

“In fact, this Stable is the perfect little analogy of the war itself, you know? Two sides, both afraid of the other, unwilling to see the other's viewpoint and terrified of what they might do. Fear driving their emotions to extremes, to do the things they would never dream of! To take steps they do not fully understand the consequences of, and then whimper and beg for salvation when it all comes crashing down around them.”

He stopped, grinning that freakishly white smile at me in the darkness.

“Trapped in the dark, we reveal the worst qualities we have, so some say. Just as Nightmare Moon became the monster she was, do ponies living without freedom eventually give way to their inner demons. In the same way that the wasteland and cloud cover make sadistic bastards like me, this Stable created the paranoid division of sides. And you can see the aftermath right here. Their own little version of the war that ended in the exact same way. Both sides, all gone.”

My voice felt miniscule against it all. “It's horrible...”

Barb chuckled, his form solidifying as he trotted closer to me, deactivating whatever spell had cloaked him in darkness. His hoof pulled me from the bed, almost like a friend pointing out a vista, he waved his hoof before him.

“Now we have but a lovely residence where the dark and memories come together! I would make it my home, if I could. This is a wonderful little office up here, the place where it ended.”

“But, how-how long...” My voice whimpered, breaking and becoming shrill with fear. I began backpedalling, falling off the bed to try and stay away from Barb. His magic merely pulled me back in.

“Oh, since I saw you come into this floor with your little night light on. See, being able to move stuff around with your horn to make somepony think you're behind them is a wonderful talent. Something you pegasi could never do in the art of stealth, for all that light-hoofed nature. You enjoy the trip down here as much as I did?”

No. Without a word I turned to gallop away, before finding the door rapidly shutting ahead of me. Shadows around Barb's horn deepened, that stealthy magic aura of his affecting all it needed to in order to keep me in.

“Now don't run yet, little filly. We're still waiting for my compatriots to get back. My elite. The Shades. The betrayer had his Big Four, but I have the Shades. Always preferred to have something won before I've even started, y'see? They've been working their magic, literally, all around this place to find all its little secrets, trinkets, and belongings. You may have run into them on your way? This is their training, you see. Only so much you can do in the Mall. Brimstone's more direct methods may have worked out in the wastes, but my plans for Fillydelphia? Well, they need a little more subtlety. Which reminds me of your role in all this...”

Still reeling from the tragedy of the Stable, I barely even noticed the change in subject until it became more obvious.

“Me?”

“Yes, you, filly. Now once they're back, then we'll see about what we're going to do with you, my little dealbreaker.”

He stuck to his word! I hadn't brought him anything from the crater!

“I...I tried! I really did! A mine, a blue mine, I picked it up for you but—”

“Buuuut?”

“...I had to use it.”

Barb chuckled, the sound coming from all directions as he trotted to the side.

“A mine. Singular. Oh now, aren't you proud?”

He was so calm. No direct threats, just an honest word on what he would do, and the mindset to do it. More than Brimstone's rage, more than every raider's insanity, that coldness to simply do bad things terrified me to the absolute core.

“I'm no help to you, please! I won't tell anypony what you're planning!”

“Frankly, filly, I don't trust you on that. Look at you, down here alone with me and you can hardly hold the piss in you. If Shackles questioned you, do you really mean to tell me that you'd stay silent?”

Barb merely laughed under his breath at my despondent expression. He had me there.

“Now come on filly, my students are returning.”

I was dragged to the main science floor again. Confused, I glanced around after being thrown in the middle of the room. What students? Where were-

Oh.

One by one, they slid from shadows. Some more effectively than others. Two of them I heard coming in while some were almost as silent as Barb. The Shades. Raider stealth experts, it seemed. Among peers, I felt outclassed. Each was clad in darker clothing, with dyed manes and coats of dark blues and greens.

“What we have here, my students, is a little filly who was hired to help us. I promised him induction to our group in return for some materials acquirement.”

“I didn't—”

A raider bucked me across the side of the face. Choking on my scream, I fell, clutching my snout. Drips of blood landed on my hooves.

“Silence when the boss is talking!”

Barb just watched the display with a proud look. Unlike Sculpt, he seemed to love the word ‘boss’.

“Now, this little filly didn't come through. He knows our plans and suddenly decided not to appreciate my offer. Deciding that apparently, his chances for escape lie better with the traitor.”

A chorus of seething hatred echoed from the group around me. In the darkness it was hard to count. Five, perhaps? Trembling, I kept my head down on the ground, trying to stifle my bleeding nose with a hoof.

“I'm not unwilling to permit him another chance, you see. However, like any of the Shades, he cannot go unpunished. Back in the Mall, we would be stopped. But for once, here, we have an opportunity to dispense raider code properly.”

Barb lowered himself to me, his thin eyes boring into my skull.

“You may see me do little, but that's the point, filly. I'm not like him. I don't need bluster, example, and visual threat. Oh no. No shadow is safe for you anymore. I do my work out of sight, find others to accomplish my ends, or even step in myself if needs be. Oh, you probably think I'm just a bully, picking on those I can't go for. Just remember to ask the traitor about the Massacre at Whitetail someday. Fear me filly. Better than being against me. You get punished, as you shall be by my own students. As such, I decree—”

He was interrupted before he could finish, or rather was drowned out. The entire Stable shook, and I felt the rush of air blow past us. The sharp rumble of an explosion came rippling down the dark passageways, and distant voices could be heard.

The sound had come from a few levels above, I thought, a dull sound. Terminals flickered and rolling platforms rattled as every one of the raiders looked to the ceiling. Dust particles fell along with slivers of rust. Barb snarled, as the explosion was followed by far off sounds of thunderous violence and gunfire.

“They're a bit earlier than I had predicted. Kriss! Dirk! Shiv! With me! You two, deal with the filly, then join us in the atrium! Those idiots in the gang won't know what to do without us.”

He took off, his horn shadowing over as he seemed to blend into the pitch black after a few feet and entirely disappeared. Behind him, three of the Shades faded more naturally into the dark. What was that? What did he mean 'they?’

“So, what do we do to him?” The mare cackled as her eyes ran over me like a predator.

Well, at least I wasn't the only one wondering.

“I dunno. Barb says kill, I kill. Barb says steal, I steal. I'm not much for leader-uh...”

“Leadership, you stupid oaf. Fuck, Chib, no wonder Barb wanted you in this team. He's got no worries about you trying to assassinate him and take over.”

“Well, I just like doin' things, so what do we do to him?

Her face turned to me. A thin and straight long mane drooped over one scarred eye. She had actually filed her teeth into fangs that glinted when she smiled sadistically at me. She may have sounded more intelligent than your average raider, but like Barb, it was underlaid with the same maddened mindset to hurt and abuse other ponies for the sheer hell of it. This was a broken pony, one who wasn’t thinking sane thoughts. The kind that Brimstone had said raider clans drew in to use as enforcers. I could see the manic twitches in her eyes.

“.I got something I been wanting to do to somepony for a while. Hold him down.”

Chib's magic strengthened before he climbed atop me and held me down by his weight alone. The mare grabbed my head in her hooves, standing up to look right down at me, saliva dripping from her fanged mouth landing on my goggles.

“Don't, please! I-I'll do anything you wa— URRGH!”

Her magic prised my mouth open. A shard of glass from the wreckage lifted in her magic field.

“Barb doesn't like ponies talking back or interrupting him. I'm gonna make sure you can't whine ever again!”

I stared with wide eyes. My mouth!? My tongue? What!? No! I'd not be able to draw properly ever again!

“Say 'aaaah', little buck!”

“How about you say, 'lights on', motherfuckers!”

The pair twisted their heads around at the new voice ringing out, before everything turned white.

My eyes seared, and I heard the raiders scream. On sheer instinct, I drove one of my bottom hooves deep and hard into the buck's nethers. His scream went up to appropriately filly-like levels, his entire weight falling away from me. Rolling off the desk, my vision finally adjusted as I saw every light panel in the entire room had activated. Squinting, I finally saw my saviour galloping into the room, directly at the pair of raiders around me.

“Murky, get down!” Glimmerlight's voice was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard at that moment. Diving to the floor, I heard her long rifle crack sharply, followed by a bellow of agony from the stallion.

The other raider, the mare, rounded on Glimmer and began charging as she saw my friend reloading the single shot weapon.

The raider mare was fast, very fast. Only Glimmer's speed with the reload gave her a chance for a second shot, sending the mare diving behind a desk to avoid it. The raider seemed to fade into the darkness behind the desks, shadowed from the panel lighting. Glimmer took to a tabletop, seeking her out.

Seeing the stallion standing back up again with a gaping wound in his side, I realised his eyes were on me. The wound didn't stop him grabbing a club and bucking the desk to the side to come for me as his companion taunted and occupied Glimmer’s attention. Panicking, I fled, diving and rolling under the next desk as I felt his charge carry him right into it behind me. I felt a small measure of triumph, he’d be stunned! I could just run!

He had faked the crash.

The moment I stepped out of the desk, the stallion landed on me. He was slow to decide, but I had forgotten who these ponies were. Barb's students in the art of sneaky methods and misdirection. What I’d thought was him haphazardly careening into the desk had just been him leaping atop it!

“Kick me in the plums will you? I'll rip your throat out for that!”

He wasn't kidding. Knowing he could ditch stealth now that he was right on top of me, his teeth gnashed down, seeking to grab my flesh in a mad blood-raged frenzy. I heard Glimmer's rifle firing once more as she fought the mare, scaring her into cover.

It gave me an idea.

Batting his face with a front hoof, I pulled my empty BB pistol free and aimed it directly at the stallion's face. Diving to the side off of me, the stallion took cover with a sudden, rushed look of panic at seeing a barrel in his face. He wasn't the only one who could trick somepony else!

It gave me a chance to get up, only to feel the gun yanked from my teeth by his magic. This wasn't going well, I had nothing to actually do against him! I was a non-combatant, not a killer!

The stallion charged, the club raised high in his magic. He came right for me. Terrified, I backed away into the darkness of a side room. My little heart felt ready to tear itself free. I couldn’t fight a raider! I watched him step into the doorway. Tall, broad, strong, weathered. He’d never listen to pleas.

Fearfully pulling my metal ruler out, I prepared to do all I could. Mustering my scant courage, I let all the frustration boil up in me, and let out a blood-curdling war cry, far louder than I ever knew I could. One that sounded like it held the rage of a hundred violated ponies whose memories had been desecrated, one that grew to a keening howl.

The stallion stopped. His eyes wide, and his face drained of all colour, before he screamed. Turning and fleeing, my confusion barely had a chance to catch up with the reality. That hadn't been me that had howled. He had looked just like he'd seen a...

I turned, seeing it right behind me. Dead eyes, their shape even more vague than Barb's, resting within a listless and immaterial presence that I couldn’t properly focus on, as though looking at something only vaguely remembered from a dream. Every muscle of mine locked up as it stared right through me.

...bing bing!

Even as the sound of a scooter's little bell chimed, the shade faded into the background and disappeared amidst the darkness once again. Standing there, eyes locked on the thick black. I didn't know what to think.

“Hey, Murky! Nothing big but...a little help!?”

Broken from my thoughts, I turned to see Glimmer desperately dodging shards of glass being hurled at her via telekinesis. Glimmer bore a few running scars along her neckline. These 'Shades' weren't playing around when it came to aim! The stallion had fled, but the mare was as lethal as they came, diving from cover to cover and using Glimmer's slow-loading rifle against her. Alone, Glimmer would no doubt be overcome.

Rushing forward, I leapt atop a desk to look for something appropriate and—

“WOAH!”

Diving back down, shards of glass whizzed over my head. I saw Barb's student grin at me, and tauntingly blow a kiss before the glass reversed and came right back at me from behind. Screaming, I leapt over the desk again, chased by the shards as they pinged and embedded into objects around me. I felt one piece dig into my right flank, stifled a scream, and fell hard from the desk onto the floor, taking out a skeleton with my body weight. Horrified, I kicked myself away from it, clutching my leg. Glimmer's rifle fired again, forcing the mare to cover. If only I had—

Sculpt's pistol sat ahead of me. Without a thought I grabbed it in my mouth. Feeling around with my tongue, it seemed the safety was still off. Staying low, I began to creep forward, kicking a wheeled platform out to distract the mare. With any luck, she'd—

Glass whizzed into and around the platform like a swarm of angry hornets, trying to hit a non-existent Murky Number Seven behind it. Elated at the success, I began making my move under the noise cover, and galloped low to the ground from desk to desk. Glimmer's rifle clacked to load once again, before she screamed and audibly dove to the side away from the razor tipped projectiles.

“You honestly think you can take on a member of the Shades? Chib was the rookie, but just try me! I'll take you both on!”

Well, try this for your sneaky business!

Hopping atop the desk, I appeared right behind her. No time to think about the morals of killing, I was saving a friend! My mouth pressed down on the trigger. The mare slowly turned to look at me, the mad grin staring right into my eyes.

The weapon just clicked.

Blood frozen, I pulled the trigger again and again, beginning to get a sense of how the Magister felt. She just made a coy look at me, her horn glowing and tugging the weapon from my mouth.

“Stupid buck. I'm a unicorn. Just a little telekinesis and bam! Your safety is back on!”

Using the distraction, Glimmerlight hurled a chair with her own telekinesis before galloping forward, firing to give herself cover. Aiming down the sights, she took aim at the raider's head, another bullet flying into the chamber with little difficulty. Laughing hysterically, the raider turned to her.

“And the same for you! A little adjustment of your gun and-and...”

Her face drooped.

“WHAT? Where is it? Where's the safety!”

Glimmerlight merely winked at her.

“Is not safe.”

She snapped the bolt closed.

“Is gun.”

And pulled the trigger.

Reunion.

A feeling I'd never truly felt before in my life. Not properly, anyway. But seeing Glimmerlight come to my aid, not out of guilt for me, but out of a conscious decision to save somepony she cared about, was a defining moment for me.

The raider had fallen. Her head exploded across the desk she had hidden in front of. Silence reigned, other than the tiny sound of the brass casing from Glimmer's round clink on the floor and roll away under a workbench. I felt my knees go weak. Hours of running through the horrid past and thick darkness finally began to catch up to me. The raiders had been the last straw before everything just finally said ‘Yeah, that's enough…’

Exhausted, I fell to the side and slumped.

“Hey, hey! Murky!”

I dropped right into her hooves, as Glimmerlight leapt forward to catch me, held me upright again and began hugging me tightly. Not really knowing what else to take strength in, my own hooves grabbed hold of her as tightly as I could manage. Already I could feel myself tearing up again. She had come. She hadn't been lying. She had stuck to her promise. The first one anypony had ever kept for me.

“It's all right, I found you. I'm here now.”

“I...I thought they...that I...”

“I know, it's alright now. We won't let you get separated again.”

“We?” I wondered, where was Brimstone anyway?

Glimmerlight let go of me, ruffling my mane a little and helping me down off the desk. Shivering as my hooves landed in the raider's rapidly expanding blood puddle, we cantered away from the corpse. Nodding to the entrance, Glimmer put on as best a smile she could. From the look in her eyes, I could see she was rather drawn out herself.

“Oh? Brim? Got separated in the dark when we ran into one of Barb's scouting parties. I was going to locate him, but then I heard you down the hallway. Brim can take care of himself for a while. Better than when he's watching out for me. So! What's this find you got down here, Murky? I'm liking the look of this room! Creepy skeletons notwithstanding.”

Biting my lip, I struggled to really know where to start. Sitting upon the floor, I told her about the story of the Stable. About the peaceful situation twisted into a horrific interior war through nothing but fear and accidents. About the way they had died and what happened to the scientists afterwards. Oddly, I found myself not mentioning the shadow of the past that had been drifting around the Stable. Ponies thought I was screwed in the brain enough as it was. As the recap ended, Glimmerlight simply sighed and shook her head.

“The sad thing is, this isn't unusual. For all their strength, the ponies inside the Stables were the fragile part. Back in the Rangers, we kept records of all discovered Stables. It's unsettling to think how many failed because of internal issues with the residents. But all this...”

She cast a hoof over all the workbenches.

“This is unusual. Most Ministries had their own internal bunkers and sublevels, so to see all this stuff in a StableTec Shelter is pretty out of place. Especially as-oh my.”

Glimmer hopped up, trotting across to the workbenches. Confused, I followed, finding her lifting tool after tool before finally raising half a dozen of the orbs and immediately scanning through the attached terminal. Tilting my head to the side, I prodded one of them and looked up at her.

“What are those things? Don't you own a bunch of them too?”

“I do indeed, Murky. Have you never heard of memory orbs?”

I shook my head, then nodded, then shook again. “Maybe. There's a lot of things I've seen or heard about, then just forgotten.”

Glimmer floated up one of the memory orbs, peering into its depths.

“Basically, they are little orbs of magic that contain a living simulation of the past. Grab them in a magic field and whoosh! You're off to old Equestria. Ponies used them as diaries, means of remembering details or even as proof of past events. The spell itself can create them, if you know how, but most were just found from the stocks made before the megaspells. Wonderful things really. You can even extract memories permanently. So see something you wish you hadn't? Just get rid of it! You'll maybe remember some vague concepts, maybe some feelings like an old dream, but the details that made you feel bad just disappear.”

The very idea made me shiver. To actually see into the past? I wasn't sure I liked that idea. Audio diaries had taken me to wits end in this place. If I were to actually see the events? I feared they might break me. Glimmer had begun work on the adjoining terminal, casting the occasional curious glance at the memory orbs that floated in arcs around her while she worked.

“If you really want to get into detail, memory orbs aren't just a series of pictures. See, ponies are all magical, unicorn or not. Earth ponies have that connection to the ground and their place in life, pegasi have the sky and weather embedded in them. And every pony's magical signature is unique, like our DNA.”

“Our what?”

“DNA, Murky. The stuff that make us who we are. Magical signature is a part of our body and soul. Now, memory orbs contain an imprint of that signature, like a false copy of our own life and experience. That's why we see things from the creator's perspective when we watch them.”

Unable to really help it, I had my front hooves up on the workbench, tapping a lime green memory orb between them. What did it contain? Was it a good memory?

“How do you use them, Glimmer?”

The white unicorn chuckled, turning her head away from the frantically clicking terminal and tapping her horn lightly. Oh, of course. I let the orb roll away from me, nothing for me here.

“Huh, now that's interesting!”

Lifting my head, I moved to watch the terminal Glimmerlight was working on, before witnessing my nemesis. Words.

Without skipping a beat, Glimmerlight read it.

“Paper fifty two, on the residual effects of memory orbs to their users. We have continued work upon what Chief of Staff Aurora Star theorised a long time ago for training of our military. That is, the ability to 'pre-record' situations within orbs to create experienced veterans before even going to war. This theory was proposed within days of the memory orb spell being approved and released to the unicorn public, but the effects simply did not stick. A user's magical signature could not correctly see it as true 'experience' in the way genuine life could. Huh.”

She flicked a few more screens past. In the distance, I began to hear faded noises. Thumps and sharp cracks. What was going on above us!?

“Apparently they succeeded, listen to this.” She coughed lightly. “We brought Aurora's prototype spell with us. Apparently, she shared her research with the Ministry of Peace under the watch of Surgeon General Doctor Weathervane for use as spell storage orbs. In the end, this was the breakthrough. When the medical staff figured out how to store pre-made medical spells within orbs, Aurora had a theory. If we could store spells, why not store a memory orb creation spell in the orb itself that activates upon the user, making them a temporary spell storage hub by storing it into their own magical signature. Wow.”

I was lost. Storing a memory orb inside an orb, to create an orb...inside a pony, using an orb to— oh Goddesses, why did it have to be me to hear all this?

Giggling, Glimmerlight patted my head as I laid it on the table before I got a headache.

“Simply put, Murky. They made orbs that would cast a spell on the pony, using it to imprint a spell into their own signature for a short period of time.”

I blinked, staring blankly. Glimmerlight rolled her eyes.

“Orbs that give unicorns new spells for a limited time.”

Ooooh! Well why didn't they just say so? I was beginning to think scientists just spoke in fancy terms to hide their ideas from other ponies. Glimmerlight moved away from the terminal, dragging a few orbs into her saddlebag with her before moving onwards to the large cupcake tray machine I'd seen earlier. Now in the light, I got a better look. It had one large central chamber with the baking trays in it and a weird headset nearby. Seemingly just made of dull metal, it shone brighter from the series of gemstones of all colours embedded under the rim. Around the base, I could see a series of bones.

“Now if I'm right, and when it comes to memory orbs I usually am, this would be where they got unicorns to transfer a memory of using said spell into a bunch of orbs for use by others. Which means...”

She bucked a nearby cupboard, breaking the rusted lock on it. Spilling open, half a dozen small cases out. Almost squealing in delight, Glimmerlight lifted them with her magic and held them before her. Opening one, I could see a much brighter and almost unstable looking memory orb within that pulsed with a bright red light. It reminded me eerily of Red Eye.

“Aaand here's the prototypes! Let's see, we have a shield spell, handy. Three healing spells, very handy. 'Create a door' spell? Well, not so handy. And oh! YES!”

“What is it!?” I shouted quickly, my voice raising. Could it be something to get us out? A teleport spell that would send us all right to Tenpony Tower!?

“Want-it-need-it spell! I've never been able to do this one! Oh, this is fantastic! Never again shall it be my round at the Roamer on break days with this little baby!”

Facehoofing, I could only nod in vague agreement as disappointment washed into my head. Sometimes, Glimmerlight really confused me. All that caring bound up in one casual and self-admittedly shallow package.

“Oh I could spend hours down here looking at all of this! Memory orb research, memory transfer theories and spell enhancement orbs! So many to look at, to learn from.”

I left her to squee over the orbs, hearing her chattering to herself about the methods and means. How did she know so much about them anyway? Why did she own so many back at the Mall? Shrugging to myself, I decided to have a look around elsewhere. Only now was the fact that the shadow had helped me beginning to set in. That, or had it simply wanted to get at the raider who had looted its place of rest? Picking the room it had appeared from, I advanced towards it.

The interior was little more than a basic office. Piercing through the fallen files and folders, I wasn't really looking for anything, rather just wanting to avoid Glimmerlight's fascination with the past and memory. Neither of them were particularly nice topics for me.

Unfortunately, I could have chosen a better pastime. As I cast my PipBuck's light around the room, it fell upon the desk. A smashed terminal sat there, riddled with bulletholes that passed all the way through to the metal wall behind it, where they had dented the thick material. The inevitable waited for me behind it.

A mare, I thought. See enough skeletons and perhaps you might be able to not freak out at more. But finding just the one little story left was always hard hitting. She had been at her desk, simply working on helping ponies to learn through memory orbs when Sculpt had rushed in amidst his rampage. Was this why the spectre chose this room?

Shifting the Stable Dweller clothing to one side with a hoof, apologising profusely, I saw a small picture frame. Holding my spasmodic light closer, I got a good look. Suddenly, everything made a lot of sense.

A lovely older mare, ribbons in her mane and tail that now lay beneath me, stained and ripped. She was standing proudly beside a little pink filly riding her brand new red scooter.

I'd thought I was past this. That nothing could affect me after the hallway of death where an entire Stable had been choked to death. That after witnessing corpse after corpse with shattered bones from bullets I may have become accustomed to it. But little details, little memories...

“Murky?”

Glimmerlight was behind me, standing in the doorway. Not turning around, I held the picture frame in my hooves, just staring. Only peripherally did I remember that these were the same colours as the ponies in the picture upstairs. Shivering, I almost dropped it while leaning sideways onto the desk, feeling as miserable and lost as I ever had. Glimmer's hoof lay on my shoulder.

“Not everything in the past is bad, Murky. They had good times before it happened.”

“They watched their world die. She saw her daughter killed!”

“Does that invalidate everything that came before? Accept the past. Remember the good and then just look to the future.”

Soaking wet around the eyes, I turned on her, standing up on all fours.

“I don't know how alright!? I've never had to look to the future! All I've ever done is to be reminded what I'm to do here and now, all my life! A slave! You wonder why I hate the past so much?”

Turning, saw my cutie mark briefly and knew just why.

“Because if I ever did properly comprehend how much of my life and potential has been wasted since I was born into this, I'd don’t know how I’d feel! I tried to kill myself once, I don't want to...to do that! I terrified myself!”

Spluttering, I shook my head and mane furiously, trying to get my train of thought out of that road. Looking at the poor mare's remains, I just kept venting.

“Seeing other ponies like this, remnants and ghosts, it makes me think about my own life. Whether I'll have anypony who'll ever look back on my skeleton and be able to find anything worth mentioning. If I'll ever be more than just another nameless figure on some history book's pages of how many slaves died!”

Her telekinesis dragged me back around to face her. Snapped from my sudden anger, I looked up to see her standing tall before me. A serious expression came over her, before eventually calming. Around her, whirling orbs of light flew in blurring circles. All colours of the rainbow.

“Listen to me, Murky.” Glimmerlight advanced. “You're afraid of the past. That I understand. I can be too. I was scared coming down here to find you. Hell, I think even Brim was unnerved. That's normal. But do you really not know how to look back and find anything good? What about Littlepip's escape? What about the mare? Velvet's songs? The DJ helping you? Don't tell me none of that matters!”

She was right, but somehow none of those seemed to properly sink in whenever I tried to think of it. How happy had I been when I saw Littlepip flying without wings?

“So perhaps it's going to take somepony to show you.”

The orbs span faster, before one, a small pink one, spun off and around the room before resting between us. Glimmerlight's head lowered. My mouth falling open, I shook my head.

“No, I don't want to look. I can't even view them! How do you intend—”

“Sometimes I wonder what your special talent is from that mark, Murky, what in the past gave you it” Glimmerlight turned to the side, lifting her crimson Ranger robes with a hoof to reveal her cutie mark. Three memory orbs of pink, purple and light blue. “But mine is that I can help those who cannot see for themselves.”

“Glimmer, I...I don't like the past, please, don't.”

“Don't worry, Murky. This isn’t like before.”

Fear demanded I shrink away, but her voice kept me rooted on the orb rested against my forehead and I felt consciousness rush from my body.

“Trust that memories have the power to help us.”

I was not me.

Every instinct fought to close my eyes, but they were not mine to close. Trapped in another body, in the half a second it took for 'reality' to phase in and properly become visible to me, I had nothing but a sense of enclosure and claustrophobia.

I did not like this. Who was I? Why did my back feel better? My ear was fine, how? What was that on my head? Why didn't I feel like a buck?

Oh. That was why.

My 'host' (wait, my what? How did I know that word?) opened her eyes as I gazed upon the outside world. A spreading wasteland of shifting, unhealthy colour and an yellow overcast sky. Hardly the paradise I'd come to picture these days as my eventual escape location. I could hardly look around however; not only because the mare I embodied wasn't, but because I couldn't quite get over the fact that I was a mare. Not entirely something I was comfortable with. Everything felt different. I was too tall, my head was held too high. Why did my lungs feel clear? Oh Goddesses, I had forgotten how it was to properly breathe.

I couldn't be sure. Was my host's head spinning or was it just all this? Did I still have my own feelings? Why couldn't I blink when I wanted to? I didn't want to trot through the wastes with my head held high! Everypony would look at me! I just wanted to lower myself down and not be as open in my stance.

In an attempt to calm my mind, I focussed on what was ahead. This mare was striding forward through a bleak forest of brittle wood. Mountains rested either side. Was this a valley? Whatever it was, in the fuzzy daytime of an overcast Equestrian Wasteland, the general difference between it all was very difficult to ascertain. The mare was tired, that much I could feel, and she had a large weight upon her back. Wait, hadn't Glimmerlight said this was her memory? Was I Glimmerlight? The ramifications of what I might experience from things she had done rammed home very hard (and hopefully not literally).

But short of any professional buck hunting, instead the idle travels seemed to bring her into a heavily clustered wood. Part of me wondered if I should feel free. Was this the freedom that Protégé spoke of? To wander the world alone? The silent world around me just felt empty. Where were the wondrous things I had imagined and drawn passionately upon the walls? This was so lonely.

No, not alone. Not for long.

Very soon, she found a village. Small mud and reed huts reinforced with heavier wood supports, it camouflaged well in the woods. Covered fires and small patches where brahmin wandered to and fro made up the outskirts as ponies of all shapes and sizes began to stand up and watch Glimmerlight approach. Nerves demanded I run, or find the biggest one and offer my services.

“Hey folks! What's cooking for a long term traveller looking for a place to stay?”

Well, not how I'd have done it. Everypony turned to stare at me...her. Glimmer's voice rang out loud amongst the village as more and more ponies gathered. I saw foals hiding behind parents as larger bucks stood ready with clubs. Casually, Glimmerlight stood her ground as an elderly mare approached. Her cutie mark was the head of a brahmin while her sullen brown face and coat marked a life much longer than any I had known in the wastes.

“How did you find us? Creaky Hollow is unmapped. We take care of our own and live off what we can.”

I felt Glimmer roll her eyes.

“Hey, look, I'm just wandering to find my place, wasn't working out back home. I'm pretty good with just about anything if you need an extra helping hoof. Got anything needing fixing? I do that pretty well, arcane science and all that jazz. Type of pony everypony should know. You'd be surprised at how many little bits of talent I have in this noggin of mine. Could even open a massage parlour if I wanted, honest.”

To my surprise, she stared sideways at one of the big bucks approaching with a club. I felt her smile after speaking and lower her eyelids as she met his eyes, then cast a view to his, uh, rather well-built torso. Watching his face soften, Glimmer turned back to the elder. I could swear her smile was wider.

“I'm Glimmerlight. Seriously, though, needing anything fixed? I'd do it for free if it'd prove myself to you.”

The elder scrunched up her face, looking around at the other ponies before pointing to a nearby shed with a few bits of metal coming from the roof. Small wires led to a large searchlight.

“We have the odd problem with timberwolves in this dry wood. Light scares them off but it broke last month. We lost three brahmin and...two foals. That and we can't purify the water without it. None of us can fix things, I don't even know if we have the parts.”

Glimmer went to work. Respectfully canning her attitude in the wake of foal deaths, she wandered into the shed. Inside was oily and seemed to be filled with a slight magical haze from the malfunctioning spark generator. But as I watched, uh, experienced her work, I gained an immediate respect for her skills. Telekinesis redirected wires, plugs, and jump-started circuits with startling dexterity. The buck sent to guard her moved to complain as she tossed some components out. Tutting, she stopped him entirely, raising her hoof to signal that he was to shut up and let her work.

Come six minutes later, and the generator eventually surged into life with a climactic whine, before settling into a more content low hum. Glimmerlight seemed to sigh happily, before turning to the buck.

“Seems somepony just didn't know how to keep one of these maintained. Really, half the stuff bodged in was just unnecessary. I mean, gaffertape, really? So, can I stay?”

She highlighted the last word while wandering past him and drawing her tail across his chin. Really? Was Glimmerlight seriously this flirtatious around bucks? She hadn't been here an hour!

That said, I quickly realised that I knew nothing about how to 'appeal' to anypony anyway. So how could I say whether she was right or wrong? Even quicker I realised I was only thinking all this to keep the feeling that “I” had just felt “myself” flirt with a buck. If I could have shivered, I would have. As she watched him wink back at her slyly, I got a sense of just how normal and relaxed this sort of activity was to her. I had no doubts that she had not gone to bed alone this night, but I couldn’t feel apprehension or tightness in her body.

Briefly, I wondered if this was how it felt to have higher self esteem, but I had no frame of reference. I just felt jealous.

Why had Glimmerlight shown me this? To make me uncomfortable? I was trapped in somepony else's body, unable to move for real! I was more trapped than before! Trapped as a slave in Fillydelphia, then into an underground Stable, then into a memory? Stuck in her past with no control at all, a slave to her life! I was...

Being cheered.

The moment Glimmerlight had wandered out of the shed, it seemed like the entire village had gathered to applaud her efforts to help protect their village. Coming from shelters and huts, they gathered in a crowded circle about her. Families hugged close, the safety of the lights and purifier reassuring them in one swift motion. Jokingly bowing down on her front hooves, I felt Glimmer lifted by the bucks and be carried around in a small lap of the village while laughing. She was surrounded by screams of thanks and promises that she could stay. Even the elderly mare was cracking a smile amongst the many cracks on her face, as she nodded slowly. Dropping back to the ground, she was surrounded, appreciated...

I felt...

Happy.

Something had gone right. She was being accepted and welcomed as one of them through simple means of proving her worth, not as a slave or as somepony less, but as somepony unique for what she could do! Hadn't that been what she had done when I’d fixed her robes? Could my past actually have little moments worth remembering clearly like this? Could Glimmerlight make me a memory orb of Littlepip!?

Foals bounced happily away from a pony I presumed was their teacher, chanting ‘The bad wolfies won't come back!’ over and over. They circled around her as though playing a game. Glimmerlight hugged one of them, a chirpy little young colt wearing an old floppy hat that was clearly too big for him. He squealed happily and he buried his head into her still long pink mane before returning to his mother with a giggle. For a second I thought I caught a glint of recognition. Perhaps just that motherly look anypony missing their mom would feel.

Glimmerlight was shown around, given a spare hut and told she could make a workshop if she wanted to help them out and bring her expertise to improve their way of isolated life. One apparently safe from all raiders and gangs in such an isolated and self-sustaining area. Life, it was explained, wasn't easy, but it was a hell of a lot more peaceful and joyful than most places in the wastes could offer.

Happiness in the wasteland. Hope and friendships forming around her, potential memories to be had. The vision of a past I could never have. The home I couldn't go back to. She was filling in the gaps of my life through the gift of her own.

Even as I felt it all fading, now I knew precisely why she had shown me it. The same reason I liked to hear Sundial's voice. The past could give hope as well as terrify. I knew it wouldn't change my feelings immediately, but even as my consciousness drifted out of the hugging crowds, I knew something was different. I'd been pushed onto the first step to realise what it was like to be anything but in slavery.

I emerged on a sofa within a medical waiting room. Like waking from a hazy dream, I stretched and groaned as my own ruined body reminded me it once more had my presence within it. Gazing around at the darkness of the Stable, I began to miss the feelings of seeing an open world around me all the more. But no, it hadn't been 'freedom', not like Protégé meant. I had been entrapped to one path. Even if it had helped, no 'memory' was going to free me. But it was a beginning, a start to begin to realise what Protégé had so teased me with.

Feeling movement and a warmth close by, I shifted, finding Glimmerlight kneeling down beside me, waiting for me to properly wake before speaking in case she startled me. For all her flirty nature, she did know how to care, that was for sure. What she had given me was a true gift. That even if I was scared and upset by the past, I didn't need to fear every aspect of it. She smiled, stroking my rather straggly mane with a hoof.

“So, you understand?”

I didn't know what else to do. Something drove me. I couldn't explain why I simply leaned forward and tightly hugged her.

“Yes, thank you. Thank you so much!”

For once, my tears were not from the pain.

“Don't worry, Murky. Take a second. Your first time is always a little tiring.”

Lying back on the waiting sofa, I glanced around me at the medical bay. Apparently it was just around the corner from the science room, the same way I'd seen the spectre disappear to before I'd gone in myself. Glimmerlight had come down this way, finding her own route. According to her, the memory orb had ended about ten minutes ago. I'd just been so exhausted that it had actually put me out. She had carried me here to rest it off until my mind recovered. Looking up at her now, I saw her holding one of the spell orb cases and wondering.

“I noticed your ear was in a bad way. Well, we both are.”

“How did you know?”

Glimmerlight just grinned, looking around the orb case. “I am not a healer, but I can spot someone holding something a lot. I hadn't reached the healing part of my initiate training before I left Bucklynn Cross. But hey, I can diagnose a few things by sight, basic triage, that sort of thing. As I said, you'd be surprised at how many little talents I've picked up. Don't expect me to go identifying illness though. All we were trained to look for was internal injury and to best judge who got what potions first. But with this, well, here goes.”

Her horn glowed. Curling up on the couch, I watched as the orb floated out of the casing, drifting toward her horn before glowing brighter. A hazy blue aura, solidifying like the rings I'd seen around some planets in books, it began spinning, before the entire orb dissipated. Glimmerlight sighed, staggering backwards and grabbing her head.

“H-how did that feel?”

Without a word, Glimmerlight held up her hoof and with a flash of magic, I saw a scrape simply fade and knit together once again.

“Just like a memory orb. Kind of a weird sensation, really. Like I've always known how to heal with magic. Here, before it fades, lean forward.”

Obeying, I moved my head forward, feeling her horn move closer to the ruptured eardrum, if that even was the problem. I was no medic. But a cooling, tingly, and itchy feeling overtook my ear and most of that side of my head. A numbness faded in, then nothing. Before long, I realised it wasn't numb. It just wasn't hurting any more. A headache that I hadn't even known I had just disappeared with a gentle sensation.

“Wow...”

Glimmerlight smiled, dealing with various scrapes, bruises, and cuts. “I can feel it fading already. I don't think these prototypes were designed to be particularly long-lasting. Just a proof of concept they made with limited materials in this Stable. Given my affinity with memory orbs, I can't help but feel I should take some of these to study. No doubt the Ministry of Arcane Magic Hub in Fillydelphia has the full records and greater forms of this, if it even still exists. But just in case, we need at least one of these now I know they work for myself! This technology shouldn't be forgotten. But Red Eye doesn't deserve it. Those six were the only prototypes I could find. But I've kind of been getting the impression that this Stable doesn't really want anything taken. I hope it understands.”

Her head cast back out to the dark hallway. Her horn's light and my PipBuck mixed into a turquoise aura around us, but despite the light from the science room nearby, the corridors were still a deadzone. Glimmer's eyes tracked back and forth. A clearer head now, I could still hear ambient sounds. the Stable, residents or not, was still very much alive.

“Call me crazy, Murky...well, okay, I am, but even more so, I don't think this Stable's all that dead. I can, well, feel memory orbs. Nothing unnatural, just that I can sense their magical presence, the spell that drives them. They're my thing. But in this Stable, I can't help but feel it moving around sometimes. Moving memories, drifting around.”

She turned back to me, biting her lip for a second.

“I can't help but wonder if perhaps their research had some other effects on the final events in here. Anyway, let's just stay safe in here. Brimstone will be here soon, he knows where I went.”

Casting my memory back, both the Overmare and Sandy Sculpt had been obsessed with that. What was it the Overmare had said? Memories have power? Hadn't Glimmer said the same thing? This was getting too big, too philo— uh, fillysop...ah forget it. Too fancy. Sitting up, I shook my head and quickly regretted it as my vision spun wildly. Feeling Glimmerlight prop me up, I sat back up on the couch, my hind legs dangling off until I got my balance back. It took me a second before I saw Glimmer looking at me weirdly.

“What?”

“Uh, you sure you're comfortable sitting like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like that.”

“I dunno. Just feels normal to me—”

A crash sounded down the hallway. A pattering of hooves and a frenzied shouting. I recognised Chib's voice. Apparently he'd brought friends.

“It was down here! A fucking ghost, I swears!”

“Chib, there's no such thing. Can't believe you ran from that runt.”

“Not from him! Like some-some shadow!”

Chib’s voice was strained, protesting as though he’d been doing it the entire way down. The other voice, however, was almost mocking.

“You are a shadow. You're a Shade student under Barb. How can you be afraid of the dark? Look, we can't delay much longer. Barb needs us in the fight up top! You want him to think we're avoiding it?”

“Isn't that what we're doing by helping Chib here?” A third voice added with a knowing tone.

“QUIET! You never know when he's listening! We're going back up top as soon as we get the fancy loot down here. Now, you get the medical bay, we'll get the science room.”

I killed the light just as quickly as Glimmer turned off her light spell. Where was her rifle? A glance to ask later and she just shrugged, mouthing the words 'no ammo' to me. I felt her stand beside me. There was no way out, but at least we were together.

“Hey! Look what we got here!”

Four raiders. I recognised the dark figure of Chib, still sniffling in fear as he glanced at the science room. But the other three were coated in something that looked disturbingly like the coats of other ponies. Fresh blood ran down the edges of the 'clothing.' Some poor slaves, no doubt. I wanted to retch.

There was one mare and two stallions. Each carried some bladed implement; presumably all guns were being used in whatever battle was going on above. Against who? Slavers? Was Barb seeking to make this place his dark lair permanently? A Stable was certainly defensible.

The lead raider strolled forward, getting a slow grin as he saw we were unarmed.

“Now ain't this just perfect? Chib gets his revenge and we get a little mare to share. Hah! Fantastic. Think we should keep her? We could put the runt on a leash! The Clan pet— OW!”

The mare had snapped with her teeth at the stallion's neck, growling and drawing blood.

“We are not a Clan! That was the traitor's word! We are under Barb now!”

I try to be brave, I really do. But hopping off the couch and pressing against Glimmer for any support I could get was just how I responded to these things. They had knives and spiked mouth clubs! Glimmerlight patted my back lightly just once, before fixing a stare at them.

“You guys really don't want to do this, y'know?”

“Oh? Why's that, bitch?”

Shocked, I saw Glimmerlight grinning at them, that wide joyous look.

“Because you're going to force me to use my special weapon.”

A different atmosphere took over the room. Backing to the side away from her, my eyes looked over her clothing and bags. Had she found something? Some old magical energy weapon? Maybe a different spell orb!

“Hah! You're not fooling anypony! So what is your weapon?”

“Oh, it's a good one. I got it right here with me. It'll blow you right down, all four of you.”

“Yeah?” Their eyebrows went up in mock surprise.

I hoped so. Perhaps it was a spell I hadn't seen? Could she shoot lasers from her horn? Or magic bullets! Maybe she could blast a huge rainbow beam! Smiling a little, the confidence in her voice reassured me as I saw her wink down at me. Oh yeah, Glimmer had something special planned!

“Yeah, you don't stand a chance. All four of you? Psh, nothing.”

“Well bring it!”

“Okay!”

“Good!”

“Fine!”

“Well do it!”

“Okay...” Glimmerlight shook out her mane, planting her four hooves solidly down, taking a slow breath.

“Go get em, Murky!”

My eyes shot as wide as they could, my jaw dropping while looking in abject shock first at the raiders, then Glimmer, then back again and back to Glimmer. Stunned for a second, the raiders burst out laughing.

“M-me? B-but Glimmer!”

She grinned and rubbed my mane without taking her eyes off them.

“Oh, don't be so modest. You can take em!”

The raiders were already crying with laughter. “Oh yeah! He's sooooo threatening with that little ruler poking out of his pocket! Hahaha!”

“Hey!” Glimmer protested. “Pay some respect, Murky here would tear the lot of you apart. He survived the Pit!”

“Ooooooh did he now?”

“Yeah, watch out, here he comes!”

“Uh, Glimmer...”

“Just wait till he gets his hooves on you, like a little rabid wolverine!”

“Glimmerlight?”

“Never seen anything so deadly in my life!”

“GLIMMER!”

My shout cut everypony into silence as I hopped up to her ear.

“What. Are. You. Doing!?”

From the door, the raider in front tapped his hoof on the ground impatiently.

“Yeah, what're you saying, stupid bitch? We've seen the runt try to fight. What's your plan, get him to distract us, then run for it?”

Glimmerlight just patted my head, before turning back to them, her grin turning to a laugh.

“No, actually. I was just keeping you distracted while he got behind you.”

“...he? Who?”

The raider stallion turned, bumping directly into a dark red wall of muscle almost twice the height of him. Very slowly, the raider's meek face looked up, and up...and up...

“Hi,” said Brimstone Blitz.

“We can't stay here. We're leaving. Now.” Brimstone was cutting no corners as he stepped out of the (thoroughly destroyed) medical room.

“There's still a lot I can gather from these terminals, Brim.” Glimmerlight was frantically moving through the side science chambers, sifting through diary after diary and murmuring details while Brimstone had cleaned house. “You have no idea how amazing the technology they've been working on is! If we could get this out to the wastes and finalise it, we could get properly trained ponies building again! We could—”

“If we stay here, we're dead. Now come on!”

“Well then give me time! I've got the prototype orbs, but this terminal has the spell on it, I need to get rid of the files so Red Eye can't—”

Brimstone smashed the terminal clean off the desk to end the argument before it had even begun, making me squeak in shock. His move stunned even Glimmerlight, as the terminal itself slammed into a nearby wall and broke into a thousand tiny pieces. She just sat still, blinking for a second, her hooves hovering in the air where the keys had been.

“...that works too.”

“COME ON!”

His voice brokered no argument. Taking off after him, I struggled to keep up with the massive raider and his huge strides. Running down darker corridors, lit only by scant PipBuck light and an illumination spell, Brimstone led us to another set of stairs. What was going on above? Oh wait, friends now! I could ask!

“What's going on, Brimstone?”

He must not have heard me over the clattering of all our hooves on the thin metal scaffold stairs. This staircase clearly had been scratchbuilt into the Stable after it had closed. Up three floors, on each one the sounds became louder. Heavy weaponry roared, the clattering of metal and roars of...what were they? The floor was shaking and smoke was already drifting in through some of the floors we had passed.

“What's going on!?”

Diving into a corridor, Brimstone finally heard me, turned, and then immediately snapped around and dove across the corridor into the adjoining room. Just before I followed, a projectile whooshed past me, trailing smoke. Seconds later, a concussive blast reverberated up the hallway that sent my sensitive ears into aching spasms. If I hadn't had them repaired, that would have been immobilising. Just what had that been?

Glimmerlight ducked back against the wall and peered around.

“Oh no...”

Poking my head out under her hooves, I witnessed a demon made real, stood amongst a burning corridor. Angular, wreathed in fire and ash, it came galloping down the hallway, it's hooves sparking on the metal floor. Shaped like a pony but made of dark metal, it continued its charge, a huge rotary cannon screaming, strafing lines of devastation all over the corridor. The sight made me flinch back, whimpering in the corner as I prayed it would just pass. All I felt was Glimmerlight grabbing me.

“Move, Murky! Move or you're dead! You can't hide from them!”

Screaming at the top of my lungs in sheer terror, I followed her as we charged into the main corridor to where Brimstone was. A haphazard glance led me to see the metal beast stopping to unleash hell into one room. I heard hoarse-voiced ponies screaming and gurgling as the weaponry tore them apart so violently that I saw parts come flying out of the doorway. Up ahead, Brimstone pounded through the chamber, bulldozing into a rusty door to collapse it and knock it out of place enough that we could force our way into the next corridor. Behind us, the sounds of metal hooves on the floor resumed, coming closer after the demon had dealt with the raiders it spotted.

“They're coming! Just gallop, go!”

I saw Brimstone spin and grab the old assault rifle from his back. Clenching the mouthgrip, he unloaded the entire load of rounds down the corridor. Sparks flew, walls charred, and the floor plates kicked up as the sharpened armour-penetrating rounds hurtled down the hall with deadly force to destroy absolutely everything other than the giant, almost unmissable, figure that stomped toward us. Glimmer cast Brimstone a narrowed glance.

“You weren't kidding when you said you couldn't aim.”

“Shut up. Move!”

Following Brimstone through, we rounded into a firestorm. The entire corridor was filled with smoke flowing from broken wall panels and furiously burning pools of oil. We had went from the cold dark to the fiery light. Squealing, I hopped back as sparks landed on my woollen fleece, lighting it until my hooves desperately patted it out. My mane felt frazzled already, and my eyes stung under even my goggles. I was reminded oddly of Fillydelphia with the fire and rust, only enough to give an odd sense of familiarity before I felt Brimstone's teeth grab my fleece and hurl me through a room's window.

Crashing over somepony's old board game and collapsing the table below it, I felt the pieces digging into my body painfully. Landing in the heap upon the floor, I groaned and staggered up, watching Glimmer and Brimstone climb through after me. Behind them, masses of small explosions took out the majority of the wall panels, sending shrapnel pinging all over the corridor and into our room. I cowered, covering my face as the whizzing metal sprayed around us. I felt one bit embed itself in my journal by my side. What shape was the surrounding area like? Where did this room go? I didn't know! This was too fast, too violent. I had no idea what kind of area I was in, or where I could go!

Brimstone grunted in pain, staggering. I saw blood pooling on his side where shreds of fragmentation had penetrated his thick hide. Sobering up at the sight, I saw we were in an office. The window had led from the corridor, but the door ahead of us, the only way out, led into another corridor entirely.

“Goddesses damn it, I really hate those big guns. Keep going, it's coming!”

We ran through the door. Behind us, through the window I had been thrown through, I saw the massive steel pony glance in at us, before bracing itself and diving through the window. Turning, it aimed at us while we ran through the door.

Yet even as it swung those weapons around. The room we had just left let out an electronic scream.

“Eyes-Eyes-ForZZZK-Spark-kle-kle-kle signal detected. Depressurisation routi-KZZZ-”

The room's door between it and ourselves slammed shut so close to me that it almost took my tail off. A second later, the rocket fired by the demon slammed into it, denting the thick metal. Somehow, I couldn't quite feel thankful for that hideous routine even after that.

Brimstone seemed to know the way he had come down, leading up around another corner. Before I knew it, we were back in the atrium, entering via a previously closed door into the canteen. Galloping for the door, I saw the huge pile of loot was completely abandoned, and partially ablaze. Scar marks of weapons fire puckered the entire floor while the bodies of raiders lay in various pieces.

“Murky! Stop! The area up ahead is sure to be covered!”

Glimmerlight's words gave me reason to stop and roll under a table out of sheer habit. I watched them look back behind us through the door as it slid closed. Up ahead, I could hear furious gunfire, going two ways this time. Brimstone Blitz snarled.

“They must have brought half their fucking force to get by the small army Red Eye posted outside. Had to dodge two more on the way down. There's about four scraps inside the Stable. Must really want this place.”

“Of course Brim,” retorted Glimmerlight, “a Stable in their neck of the woods? Only just discovered? The Steel Rangers would move the sun and moon if they thought they could capture it from Red Eye!”

“And fuck every slave inside it, right?”

“Yeah, they think like that now. To them we're just looters and scavengers like anypony else.”

Brimstone craned his head up, before scowling.

“Don't suppose your standing will help us?”

“If they knew who I was, they'd probably get even madder. What do you mean by scraps anyway?”

“Rangers, ponies hiding under what will be scrap metal if I get my way. Rangers are scraps, ghouls are rots. Just part of the way of life to name things.”

Steel Rangers. I'd heard of them, obviously. Everypony had. But I'd never seen one. Frantic images of the steel-clad pony bounding through fire, heavy weaponry spewing death ahead of it. Unstoppable machines of war by my perceptions. If they'd been designed to intimidate, the Ministry who built them had succeeded. It was hard to imagine there was somepony inside one of those things. If they'd taken out Red Eye's forces then...

Wait.

Time seemed to slow. To stop. Every sound faded. Only my heartbeat remained.

If Red Eye's forces had been taken out. That meant that there were no slavers watching us anymore.

We were outside the wall...

Staggering, not hearing anything properly, as though I was submerged in water, I wandered into the atrium. Around me, sparks and smoke swirled as the venting fans did their best on automatic. Above me on the balcony, shadows moved back and forth, edges of sudden light peeling off them into corridors. Were they the residents or just ponies firing at the Rangers? I could feel wisps in the air near me, but nothing could draw my attention but for one thing.

Ahead of me, the main exit that led to the Stable door room lay open. Almost imaginary, I could feel the wind flowing in from there in my mane.

Could I? Was it that simple? To come out there, face my greatest fear, and then just go?

Cold fear gripped me. What if Red Eye was still out there? What if I let hope get the better of me and The Master had brought reinforcements to decimate the Rangers and reclaim me? A thousand reasons to be afraid, and only one reason to try. One dream.

“Dare to dream...” The words barely a whisper from my mouth as I felt each hoof move on its own accord. A second chance to try.

A low sound, one steadily growing in volume, made me turn. I thought it was Brimstone, a huge silhouette charging through the smoke, directly at me. The sound heightened in pitch as the keening scream of a spark engine began to pick up speed.

Glimmerlight crashed into me, hurling me to the side. A strafing burst of fire whipped past where I had stood so fast that it was little more than a single deathly wail than a series of shots. Sound returned, a sudden scene of abject carnage exploding around me as Glimmerlight and I dragged ourselves into the cover of a thick metal bench. The Ranger was being peppered from every direction, raiders on the balcony pouring fire at the thick armour. Most of the rounds fired by the rusty weapons merely pinged and whistled off it. Bracing itself, the Ranger twisted, its huge body swinging around a colossal pair of weapons, one a multi-barrelled cannon and the a short but wide barrel. A belt of grenades fed into the latter. Starting the engines of the big saddle again, it unleashed hell.

Covering my ears, feeling Glimmer pressing herself as low as possible over me, the sound felt like the world tearing apart as the Ranger dragged itself in the circle, ripping the balcony from the walls as raiders and slaves fell from above in pieces. No single sound stood out amongst the firing, impact, and devastation wrought. Parts of metal fell over us, along with immensely drowning sounds of large metal plates tumbling from the walls and flipping over on the atrium floor. Behind us, I heard whoops of victory from somewhere, I never found out why. Every noise echoed back and forth, slapping my senses from every direction as I desperately tried to scream into Glimmer's ear about the exit.

A shadow fell across us. Brimstone Blitz rushed forward, a huge 'L' shaped piece of wall panel balanced over his body.

“MOVE! MOVE!”

We required no telling. Using him as literal moving cover, the three of us sprinted through the intense firefight into the main corridor.

“The way out!” I couldn't not scream it. “Red Eye's guards must be gone! We can get out! Be free!”

Up the main stairway we ran. Behind us, the battle continued. One Ranger against a dozen raiders that survived in the side rooms and balconies. The Ranger's presence was the only thing that had saved Glimmer and I from being targets from above. My mind was too focused. I wasn't meant for battle! If only the Rangers knew that we simply wanted out the way, wouldn't they be fine with us leaving? But no, just as the residents of the Stable had become corrupted by the dark to distrust and fear their neighbours, were the ponies of the wasteland sickened by the darkness of their lands to fear the worst and never assume. Barb had been right, as had my old master. History repeated itself, again and again in different ways, but always ending the same way. In the crushing of trust and innocence.

Well I wanted no part of it. No longer. I was going to leave it all behind, pass beyond my fear and take one more chance. Facing the past had done it, I felt that burning desire in me, the willpower to willingly take a chance.

We were going out there. We were escaping. Somehow I knew they'd follow, and they did.

Together, we ran into the great Stable door room. Together, we saw the sunlight streaming in.

Together, we fell as the Steel Ranger on guard's anti-machine rifle slapped into the ground in front of us. The concussive wave behind it blew me clean off my hooves, Glimmer tripped as she fell over me. In front of us lay slaver after slave after raider who had tried the same. Who had tested this beast’s stubborn defence of the way out.

Brimstone was not as simple to knock over. He whirled on the spot, diving at the Ranger and, using his entire weight, bent the barrel of the long rifle before tearing it clean off the battle saddle. Swinging it on the spot, he brought it crashing down against the Ranger like a club. The weapon shattered, exploding into its component parts, and yet the metal pony was not thrown down. Rounding off, the big earth pony rolled away, dodging the return hoof swipe, and faced down the Ranger.

“Stand down, raider. You are unarmed.” A harsh voice, distorted by armour and replayed through the helmet. It was almost genderless. Female? Or was it lighter from the tinny replay voice?

Brimstone didn't even wait to reply. Time was against us till the other Rangers got here. Bellowing at a volume I had never believed he could, I saw the Great Warlord charge a Ranger just as big as himself in that hulking armour.

“For the Chapter, and the Ministry!” The Steel Ranger nobly screamed their own warcry and thundered forward.

What ensued was the most brutal clash I thought I would ever see. Glimmer and I could only sit as far away as possible as we witnessed metal against flesh, hydraulic technology against sheer power. Clashing hard enough to send a shockwave through the floor of the room, both rose to their back hooves, towering high enough that even griffons would have been cast in shadow, before the hooves began to swing.

Neither gave. Backed by the armour, the Ranger took Brimstone's charge like a solid wall, powering her own hoof around to force Brimstone to the side. Swinging his entire body, the raider whirled and dropped every ounce of his weight to throw the Ranger above him into the wall. Like a thunderclap, the power-armoured pony left a dent as deep as I was wide. Undeterred, she charged back at Brimstone, sending him careening into the railings by the doorway. Crumpling under their combined weight, the two crashed down to the next level behind them, rolling and slapping hooves hard enough to kill a normal pony into one another. Already, Brimstone's face was filled with bloody marks, and his body bruised around puckered scars. Cursing and stomping the ground, Brimstone swung up faster than a pony his size had any right moving, to buck the Ranger square in the side. With a sound like the Goddesses themselves stepping hoof upon Equestria, the armoured warrior flew over ten feet backwards with a deep indent in the side plate.

Brimstone wasn't done. Not giving his opponent one inch, frothing at the mouth and his eyes bloodshot and wild, he charged over, leaping and slamming both front hooves down on the ground. As much as Brimstone himself moved fast, the Ranger did too. With an unusual sound, she rolled the armour over the ground away from his slam.

Lifting herself up, the pair wrestled, wrapping front hooves around the other's to gain leverage. It suddenly appeared to me how matched they were in different ways. The Ranger had a mechanical strength that went on and off at unstoppable levels, but Brimstone's power was variable, able to twist and redirect in ways the Ranger armour never could. His savagery and experience was showing as he took advantage of the armour's joint limitations, while the Ranger used that sudden ability to surge power into movements to force back her opponent.

Eventually though, beyond all thought that beggared belief, Brimstone was actually forcing back a suit of power armour by sheer strength alone. With a twist and a shove, he threw the Ranger to the side, hurling her through the glass of the nearby control panel room.

Somehow still moving, the dented armour plate restricting her movements, she held both of her front hooves together around a metal beam, using the armour's shape to hold the bar steady. With a mighty swing, the beam set a course for Brimstone's head.

Horrifyingly, it connected. The warlord collapsed to the side, stunned. Without mercy, his opponent stood, pounding hoof after armoured hoof down upon my friend.

I didn't know what drove me. Grabbing my metal ruler in my teeth, all I knew was I had to help him, however I could. There was only one place I knew of that I could hurt most ponies in!

With all my might, I swung the ruler up and under the armoured tail.

There was a dull clang. My teeth chattered, and my entire body shook as the impact came right back down to me instead. Almost dismissively, the Ranger cast its head backward.

“You have to be kidding me. Really?”

The back hoof shot out. About to scream, I felt my entire body dragged backwards as Glimmerlight caught me in her telekinetic net enough to at least pull my tiny weight away before it connected. I hadn't done a thing.

Only, I had. Those few seconds of distraction were her opponent nmeeded. With a mighty roar, Brimstone Blitz, the Great Raider Warlord, the Scourge of Ponyville, rose up and took the Ranger with him. Stunning my every sense, I witnessed him rear up, lifting the entire Ranger with him in his front hooves, then twist and bring her down with the strength of a vengeful god.

The Ranger hit the floor so hard I felt my entire body kicked up off the ground by the shockwave, falling on my side.

And then silence.

Brimstone staggered across. I had never seen the big pony look so worn out. Yet in his eyes I could see a strength still, that fury that could drive him to go on and on. The Ranger lay in a crumpled heap. Glimmer hastened over, but from the angle of the helmet, it was clear this was done. She sighed, laying a hoof upon the breastplate.

“Rest with the great heroes of the Orders, noble Ranger.”

I blinked a few times before it struck home. On separate sides or not, all Steel Rangers still shared the same bond and hardships they'd endured to be a part of that group. Glimmerlight's reverence for one of their fallen, regardless of intent, was proof enough of that.

Brimstone merely spat blood onto the grilled floor nearby.

“Thought the ones in this area had cleared out, gone to some other Stable near Ponyville lately to try and take it. Least that's what the slavers reported.”

Glimmer shrugged.

“Perhaps these ones were still out on long patrol when the others left. Perhaps they were given the mission to retrieve the technology in here first then join their comrades. The Ministries were active in here, so we likely had records of it. To be honest, I wish I could have helped them. The memory orb research is better in their hooves than Red Eye. This is all just...”

Brimstone sat, nursing his face and moving each joint to make sure it still worked properly. By the sounds of it, some didn't, not that he seemed to care. But my attention was on Glimmer. She bent over the Ranger, her magic accessing a panel until the helmet clicked free. Underneath was a snow white and light blue maned mare, hard looking and rough from days inside the suit. Her neck was twisted at an odd angle. Even as I watched, Glimmer closed her eyes gently, before seeming to sniff.

Friendship wasn't something I really knew, but at that moment even to me it was obvious what she needed.

Limping over, I leaned over to her, wrapping my hooves around her neck and squeezing gently.

Over her shoulder, in the dark of the corner, something shifted. Nothing anypony but me saw. A drifting darkness that flowed from vents and ducts, and never once approached the light. A vague pony shaped head watched as, even today, ponies on the same side were forced to watch one another die because of the fears and dangers around them making them be this way. To see the cycle repeat again, and again...

Feeling Glimmer hold onto me, I watched as the vague shape seemed to tremble, the lidless eyes falling on her bag that carried the research. Tensing, I expected the worst, to reclaim its property.

But hidden from my friends, I watched as it seemed to relax and slide away again. I could only hope that it had seen Glimmerlight as the correct pony at last to take their most treasured items that had caused all this in the first place. That perhaps, under her watch, .the research so many died for might still mean something someday.

As it faded, I heard it one last time.

...bing bing!

We spent a minute or two using the second healing orb to allow Glimmer to do what she could for Brimstone. The prototypes barely lasted any time, but it was enough to get him moving properly again.

“Brim? Any ideas when we're out there?”

“Grab the armoury cart, I'll pull it. Get into the outskirts Filly, the areas Red Eye doesn’t control, and use the buildings as cover until night falls, then get to the hills.”

“Think we can do it?”

“If it kills me. I will get you out, Glimmer.”

We paused just short of the door. Breathless, I fell against the wall. Much to my surprise, I felt Brimstone's hoof on my shoulder, back, and neck, all at once.

“...and you, little Murk. You've done more than you ever had to.”

Words wouldn't come to me. Looking at the big raider who had once held me against a wall for insulting him, I saw him actually grin a little.

“I may not show it. But I try. You deserve this freedom, Murk.”

Unsure how to react, I just tried to smile as well as I could, making Glimmer ruffle my mane again. I could sense that becoming an ongoing thing. She grinned and patted my cheek.

“You really have a big, beautiful, innocent, silly grin, you know that, Murky? You really should smile more often.”

Chuckling, I felt giddy as I rounded to stare at the door. I could see nothing from outside against the contrast of light. Was this really happening? There were likely guards outside and a whole heap of danger, plus Barb and his cronies behind us somewhere. It would not be easy. There was every chance that some or all of us would be back in Fillydelphia if caught. None of us said it, but there was every likelihood that not all of us would succeed or even survive.

“Ready?” Brimstone's voice rumbled as he rolled his neck, ready to pull a cart.

“I was born ready.” Glimmer grinned, then stopped. “Wait, no. Actually, I was born horny. I got ready around my teens. But ready now! Eh, Murky? Attempt number two. Ready to dare?”

“To dream,” I replied, not paying attention to her confused look.

It was unspoken. We simply went. Three ponies, who had found one another in the worst of pits, ready to take a chance in a bid for freedom.

We galloped toward the light...together.

Footnote – Perk Attained!

Galloping with Ghosts – Drifting from shadow to shadow, you are that thing that leaves those in the light wondering just what they are facing. Are you even real or not? Or are you simply all in their imagination? When aware of your presence, your foes now have a lower chance to detect your true position.

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