Fallout Equestria: The Tartarus Contingency

by ThatDarnPony

Chapters

• Fallout Equestria: The Tartarus Contingency (Intro)
• Smile, Smile, Smile
• All it takes is one
• The Long Trot: The First Day
• The Fields of Hungry Earth
• The Quiet Ones

Fallout Equestria: The Tartarus Contingency (Intro)

This world has got to be the most pathetic, sickly thing I could ever imagine.  Only once did I ever think it could do better.  Just once.  I don't know if I've been proven right yet.

Even so, it was only one goddess forsaken pony I really trusted.  What's worse?  It wasn't even me.

He was sad.  Insane.  Obsessive.  He was my best bucking friend in the two very different wastelands I traveled.  I...

I guess that's why I'm watching tears sink into the whiskey.

See, there are things these feeble ponies of now just don't deserve.  I still believe a real peace is one of the things we do need.  Not some lie, congregated under an idea of justice or necessity.  Hell, “the right thing” is a bad joke in itself; one colt believes in it, another abhors it, and another thinks it's the most amusing thing in the world before returning to his own devices.

One of the things that shouldn't be so distributed though, is knowledge.  The ponies of the wastes kill, maim, steal, and enslave for the sake of whatever.  Survival.  Convenience of the opportunity.  Pleasure.

There are things those ponies shouldn't know.  I met a mare with exquisite medical knowledge, for example.  What did she do with it?  Discovered just where to cut.

With education, she made what she called art.  Strung up her opponents, and when was done experimenting (if  she even did), left their skin-stripped muscle spread out along hooks and wire.  She'd take metal shards and implant them in skulls, or spread out flesh to form wings.  She said she was transforming “disgusting dirt ponies” into a more beautiful likeness- unicorns and pegasi- all for the sake of learning..  Thanks to her experience with makeshift anesthetic and pre-war med-x, those mantle pieces never did die until after they were awake enough to realize what she was doing to them.

You can't do that without knowing how.  You have to drive yourself to learn it, and then to practice it.  The why's to events like that always arrive much later, if they don't go completely ignored for the sake of feeling comfortable. In this day and age, we don't deserve to know the how's, with all our drives.  Especially if gutted “pegasi” hanging from the ceiling, screaming, are the most progressive things I've seen a pony do with knowledge.

It's the same reason I took to trying to protect Phen in what he was. It certainly wasn't for his sanity's sake.  He was the most callous pervert of intellect you could imagine.  It was also why his decision was probably the most ingenious thing to end the twisting of old knowings- he anticipated what ponies would do with what he found, being such an energetic avatar of it.  I never thought he'd be brave enough to do what he did, but he was.

We traveled together for a while.  I took pictures while we trotted and fought.  They were of everything, really.  The jagged beauty of the wastes.  The accepted evils of what smarter ponies were capable of, and the apathy toward it.  I have a few smiles of Phen, too.

I never thought they'd become a liability to track where he's buried. I just can't get rid of the pictures; not just in my own head.  No matter how drunk I allow myself to get, the piles of parchment sit here.  They persist, just like that bunker we made our way to, and just like how I begged whatever goddesses still exist that Phen died.

I came to hope he was rotting down there, with everything he had always craved to find.  I like to think he's just frosty bones, all alone amid the terminals, smack dab in the middle of a frozen circle of Tartarus.  It would be such a fitting end for the little bastard, grinning to death, muzzle-deep in a monitor within a city he always dreamed of witnessing in it's original glory.

I want to visit him.  I want to make sure.  I want to really bury him, if he is gone.  I keep leafing through this scrapbook, seeing all the smiles he had, and listening to the music on the radio.

But... I can't get rid of the other pictures either.  Too much sentiment, and such great reminders of why I'm playing this sorry ass part in our little duo.  Goddess.  This first photo...

These are the visions of my travels.  How they started, and why.  How they ended, and why.  Why I'm sitting here crying, spinning in whiskey thoughts, and yet again trying to make sense of what exactly I deserve for granting the world a fresh leash on deserved ignorance.  It's how I hoped my best friend would rot along with what he would find out, frozen and alone, beneath that snowy crystal rubble of a place my homeland called Sorrow.

Smile, Smile, Smile

Fallout Equestria: The Tartarus Contingency

Ch1: Smile, Smile, Smile

--

Ever stop time?  It's easy.  I've done it, quite a lot.

The trick behind it is simple. The timing, your placement... Not so much. Keeping the device maintained? That's even more difficult. I only realized how do it when I found my first camera.

The moment they hear it like that, everypony else simply rolls their eyes. I can't help but laugh; if they only took a look at some of the things I've caught, even as a kid, they would understand. The smiles, in particular.

Do they even respect how hard hard it is to find an honest one?  No strings attached?

I caught my first real one, as morbid as it was, on the outskirts of my hometown. Resilience was a strange place to me, like any place would be to a colt.  It was all a lot of metal and burnt crystal, and of course since I was so new to the world, I didn't understand why.  I was never aware of what was past the walls until I was little more than twelve, a year after “story time” between my brother and I began as a past time.  It was a gentler way of him explaining the reality of things to me.

The city itself was a thick crescent.  The convex face pointed south- that wall was made of the junk that had been saved after the Last Day.  It was made for bullets, for bombs, for other ponies that would come after us for what they thought we had. It was for that reason it was over the bulwark most of the Tower Ponies, our many snipers, scanned. The height of the junk towers gave just enough to see the landscape past the Resilience walls, it's jagged outcroppings hacking at a smooth and ever gray sky while quiet shadows rustled inside and occasionally let out the sound of a gunshot.  

The northern wall, though.  That was the real reminder of what we were.  Why the crystals thirsted to stay and suffer, gluing ourselves together for better or worse.  It was where my brother, Sureshot, gathered the kindling for his cautionary legends during story time.

The wall was comprised of the remainder of what the shockwave from the balefire pushed around.  There was a great shield projected from a tall tower, or so my brother told me.  Crystal ponies fueled it through an artifact our princess maintained before she died, through a link we once shared through the small spark of magic in our hearts.  The shield took the brunt of the heat and impact, but with balefire, that wasn't nearly enough.

The shield fell, and the tower scattered beneath that sour and powerful wind to wall us off from the corruption that drifted through the streets in a tall jumble of blackly surfaced crystal chunks.  The building's corpse had become a fortress against the bitter gusts, and the only thing that kept the land in a state to found Resilience.

Beyond it, though, the others had to fend for themselves in the suddenness of their expulsion into the cold world.  Even in the softened childhood tales, those old ponies did not fare well.  The tainted water, snow that had melted under that instant and fake sun, froze in minutes after flooding the darkening streets.  That first generation of Resilience ponies tried to help the rest, when our binding to our pathetic sliver of scorched Equestria was secured.

The surviving crystals found their corrupted fellows changing before their eyes, the only grace for the “live ones” being that they were cut off from the then smothering emotional connection.  The unfortunate ones flesh transformed to blood fogged crystal, their organs and skeletons too thick to follow the trend.

Throbbing bulbs caged within visible bones, the shambling and gossamer terrors came to be known as Wailers.  Our very own ghouls, weeping in a constant and unexpected mourning of what they witnessed and lost.  Countless, and most of them alive from the moment the balefire hit, they recounted every flaming and then flash-frozen detail of their journey to madness.  

Any pony with enough of the old biological connection could see that too, my brother warned me.  All a crystal pony had to do was look into their eyes.  The connection would revert, and the idiot would get to experience every instant of the time those creatures had been alive in their own quickly lost minds.  Their union of soul left them all wallowing in cyclical, revisited memory, together...  And looking for the living and “Resilient” of the crystal ponies to join that union, on the instinctual urge to keep the link maintained and their society alive.  Unity is of lethal importance to any crystal.

It was why the tower ponies and their spotters were never allowed to turn around and look north into the blasted graveyard.  With all of them there, their crystal scilera a bloody red and always crying from inside their skulls, that huge portion of city had been deemed Sorrow.  When I heard weeping on the wind at night, I knew from the stories not to try and look from where it came.

Then, I found that toy of mine, resting upon a pile of junk and preparing to become scrap.  A codec 9000 camera.  I wondered, at first, if it had taken pictures of the last day we'd ever been really free and alive.

I decided to ask my brother Sureshot about things I could do with it. Stoic and plain as always, all he suggested was that I just go out and start pushing buttons.  That single encouragement got me wandering, trying to see what I could see- risk doesn't fathom for a colt, after all, until they edge out of the wounds acquired during a mistake.  So of course I did the worst possible thing, and thought like a colt.  I got my first disciplinary beatings from it.

Hiding within one of the taller, condemned towers one day, I pushed buttons.  The pictures were awkward and strange.  My camera had problems focusing on their transparent flesh.  I only picked up the wandering and far off skeletons, veins and hearts and lungs still squirming inside, distending the walking corpses limits in a display that had left my kin sickened.

After Sureshot found out (and I healed from his reply), I wasn't allowed near the towers for a long time.  So, I took a lot of pictures at ground level to figure my device out.  None of them were spectacular, or even distinguishable from one another. There was a lot of building going on, all the time; it was usually a lot of repairs on the towers legs, so I got some confused faces holding hammers or arc welders.

There were plenty of those towers within the jagged junk walls, flimsy looking and in varying states of worth, against (or even atop) the magenta crystal abodes. My brother usually occupied one with his rifle and whatever spotter he’d been assigned. So, I made it a game to find him each day, and take a picture. Many of my early photo's were of my brother sneering at me from behind his fluff-lined hood, his rifle and body silhouetted against the sickly gray sky.

After a few months, (with a long hiatus between the trader caravans- papers to bleach for “film” were few and far between) I was already bored. I asked my brother if I could explore outside.  He mulled on it for a while, and decided it was probably a good idea- if for nothing else, than to get used to the cold that existed outside the city.  He said it would be healthy for my spirit to see the outside, and not nearly as dangerous as looking north.  Interactive story time! I'd exclaimed.

Yet, there was even less to find beyond the walls. Lots of pristine, beautiful, arcing white dunes.  Bits of snow lofting lazily through the air, with gusts occasionally sending them into chaotic spins and tossing up waves of thin frost. Through the poorly fitting goggles and two-sizes too large coat, I was disappointed, but believed my curiosity would pay off somehow, no matter how annoying I'd have to be.

The trips became regular, outside one of the groaning and smaller side gates, with my brother smoking whatever cigarettes he had by that entrance to keep an eye on me with a smaller variant of his rifle. I steadily grew into my coat, and eventually, the goggles kept the cold air out because they actually fit on my face.

My first little adventure began when I stumbled across something peculiar. It was a big metal ring, attached to a bolt. When I looked back, my brother not much more than a speck against the huge metal doors, I decided to play with it. I found that it turned in one direction atop the dome to which it was connected. After nipping and yanking, using what little strength I had back then, something popped.

It hissed open with all the venom of a wounded breath. Hot air, something I was not at all expecting, formed a billowing pillar of steam from inside.  It hit me in the face in such a way I started to sweat in my baggy coat almost immediately.

Even after rubbing off my cold goggles from the condensation, it was dark.  A ladder went downwards, and disappeared into the blackness.  Little lights showed that there was a floor, however far down it was to me.

The sound of lilting metal and beeping, not to mention the heat and familiar odor of rust, overwhelmed me in interest. I looked to the dot that was my brother, and feeling satisfied he wouldn't be able to stop me from finally finding something fun, went down the ladder with my camera ready.

It was uncomfortable. Not just for the darkness, but the humidity and smoldering air making it hard to breath. Several pretty, symmetrically aligned dots glowed on the wall to my right, and there was a strange hum that was punctuated by clicks. It sounded like it was coming from some kind of metal box, and a needle was tap-tap-tapping away on a table.

I ventured out of the column of bitterly white light the hole above me was giving, and wandered haphazardly toward the dots. I stepped on a lot of things. Papers, mostly. I hit something that rolled and spun, clinking like glass and making me pause. But then I reached my destination, and bumped my nose several inches away from the wall.

I waited there a moment. I blinked a few times, trying to let my eyes adjust. I found it was like a table, and I had been just tall enough to bounce my muzzle off it's front. I put my forehooves up atop it, and peered all about at what was before me.

Most of the dots were lit. Some of them were blinking red. When I squinted, really hard, I saw there were words below each one, but remained obscured for they blended in with the dark. Many strange little yellow papers were all about the flat spots before it, covering glossy buttons and scrawled in scratchy scrabble.

There was a pair of something to my right. Twice the size of a bottlecap, and very, very round, one of the discs was tilted atop the other. When I nosed it, the skin all over my body burnt for the moment I was in contact with it. I snorted and sneezed, then let myself down from atop the metal table in annoyance.

The world seemed clearer then, though my eyes felt strained in the dark, so I looked around more. I saw a shape on the wall. Well, colors really, in the form of a shape. They had gotten quite bright once the snow-blindness left. To my interest and amazement it was something I was quite used to seeing, though only in my own collections. It was a picture.

A bright pink mare was smiling. Her poofy, awkward mane was cut with gray, her shimmering blue eyes crinkled with age. On her haunches, she had a hoof to her chin, as if pondering. Above her, in an oddly shaped white bubble, there was a bizarre arsenal. A green, shiny looking circle on the end of a stick.  A puppy.  A heart.  Above her, the words “Think HAPPY Thoughts!” was printed in a soothing and bubbly font.

At the bottom of the picture, though, it was torn. Gouged out in brute force by something sharp, the metal wall behind the fresher graffiti had a faint sheen. “OR ELSE!”

Not knowing then what it meant, I sat back and tried to contemplate it.  Being so young, I decided a few seconds was long enough, and went back to the dot-wall. I looked under it that time, and found (to my delight) even more pictures. Pinned atop a piece of board by a clip, I pulled some of them out.

They were very old, very frail, and very grainy.  They were of ponies I'd never seen or heard of before, and they had poor clothing for the snow they were in. What I could see on the gaps in their clothes, which were mostly on their neck and back legs, were black stripes. Many had saddles like my brother did, and had smaller rifles that my brother carried around outside the towers. The pictures had been blemished though, with ink circling the guns and had arrows pointing down to letter and number combinations that didn't form words.

I didn't have long to look at them.  I heard yelling from outside.  I recognized my brother's voice, and a flowery, yet strong female response.

I ran to the light pillar, and yelled skyward. “I'm down here!” There was crunching snow, and two heads blocked the light from above. One was hooded with fuzz, the other wearing a wide brimmed hat. My brothers voice started swearing uncontrollably. The mare's shadow put a hoof to him, stilling him, and simply asked: “What are you doing down there?”

“Huh? Oh! I found all this neat stuff!” I shuffled over to the picture-board, and nipped it between my teeth. It wobbled in my mouth as I tried to talk. “Fee? Mickchuh's!”

Sureshot sighed at me and shook his head. “Get your flank up here, NOW!”

I placed the picture board neatly down, and tried to think of an excuse. He was scary sometimes, when he was mad. Getting inspired to save my flank, I said “Wait!” and scurried back into the dark.

“What the hell did I just say?  Didn't you hear me?” I nipped at one of the strange coins, wincing a little at first. It felt tingly and warm simply to touch it again, but I was more worried about his reaction had I been unable to prove my excursion worthwhile. I ran back to show him. “Fee? Fif fing if weird!”

Both of them silenced. Then, the hatted shadow let out a laugh. “Little guy would make a good scavenger.”

Sureshot grumbled. “Only if his luck holds out. Never does.” He gestured with his head for me to come back up. “Alright, bring that up with you.”

“Fere's anofher down here! Fudd I get it?”

She positively cackled, and had to walk herself down to speak. “Really? With fortune like that, I'd take him with me any time.”

Sureshot disappeared from view, and I heard more swearing. Needless to say, I got the other coin, and clamored up the ladder toward his curses and my perceived punishment. I had been preparing myself for the colder air outside, when I scrambled up into the snow. To my surprise, it started to melt around my hooves, and steam curled off of me. I wasn't cold. In fact, I was comfortable.

The mare was unfamiliar, and from her clothing, was as well prepared for the snow and bitter cold as the striped ponies in the pictures. She had exceptionally large saddlebags atop her white coat, and her hat had a goggled hood that came down to frame her green muzzle. When my brother took one of the coins from me, only a few seconds passed before hot air started to lick the air around him. He offered it to her, and she gladly took it without any hesitation. It vanished into a pocket, and she shook off like a wet dog.

She laid down next to me. Looking me straight on, I felt nervous under her sudden, persistent gaze. Then, she brandished the warmest smirk I'd ever seen from a stranger. I wish I could have snapped it then, but my mouth and mind were occupied. “I know I was laughing, but... You shouldn't have done that. He was really worried.”

I looked toward him, not allowing myself to talk. Unable to concoct any reasonable reply, I simply adjusted how my lips sat around the coin. “Lets go back to town, okay?”

I nodded, and began to follow my brother. She took up a position beside me, while Sureshot lead us onward. I thought it completely bizarre that we were smoking, and couldn't take my eyes off it for the short distance we had to go in order to return to Resilience. “Do you know what you found?” she asked me.

“Mickchuh's.” I said, still tongue-stupid.

She laughed a little. “No, not those. That thing you've got there.” I was relegated to shaking my head, after crossing my eyes to try and look at the coin. “Well, this guy is right. You are really lucky.” She said. “That's a very important talisman you have.”

“Talifman?”

“Yes. You aren't used to things like that, are you? It's magic.” As we reached the doors, Sureshot tapped the side of his hoodfuzz with a hoof, and jerked it away from himself in a wave toward one of the towers. The doors screeched open, the red lights and howls of the klaxons spinning, leaving just enough to fit a body through. “They're very special to people that have to be in the snow. If you like playing outside, it will be very good for you to have it. Understand?”

I nodded, not knowing fully the implications of what she was saying.  Magic, my brother had always told me, is what got us in the position Resilience found itself within in the first place.

Once she left for the center of town, we took a trip back to our home.  It was a long, quiet night with expected discipline; when it never came, I finally broke into questioning.  He just sighed, and started story time while he worked.

He sat at what I called his hobby table, with instruments I still haven't seen outside of that room. He measured bullets, weighed black powder down to the grain on rinkydink scales, and then put it all into a brass casing that more often than not had burns at the end the bullet was going in. He held his breath whenever he toyed with the powder, trying not to scatter it.

He explained that in our outdoor ventures, I had only seen a fraction of what the white dust encompassed. It extended for many, many miles, and the only way to survive was with those coins. Warming talisman's.

“There are places that were made during the big war.” he said. “They were a lot of those rooms, in fact. All of them in the dirt, some of them connected by halls, and if you don't know where they are you need those talisman's to go anywhere over long distances. We have a lot of the talisman's in the city, and we need them to stay as warm as we are now.” He pointed toward the ceiling, his back still to me. Within a crack there was a gold-colored gem inside, which lit our magenta walls and dingy cots with dull yellow. Behind it, there was the glint of something metallic- it was the edge of a coin, the same size of what I'd found. “Those were made during the same big war.  They were from ponies that were all the same, black and white...”

Interrupting his tale, though, there was a knock. Confused, my brother opened the door, and there stood somepony familiar. It was the mare we'd met. One of her saddlebags flat and rolled up, the other much looser and holding something with corners. I waved at her from my cot. She waved back to me first, then looked to Sureshot. “You're a hard pony to find, you know that?” she said to him. “Tiny place like this in all this shiny stuff. With the way ponies look at you and the money you earn-”

“That, is for the staples. Rifle, bullets, food, and water.  The reputation can go hang.”

“Saving humbly for the future?” she asked, looking beyond his brown coat and toward me. He looked back at me.

“You could say that, but up here we all do.” he replied, before stepping into her line of sight. “What are you here for, exactly?”

“To check on your lucky scavenger. You didn't hurt him for what he pulled, did you?”

Sureshot sighed. “No, I wouldn't. Not with what he found. But I was just in the middle of explaining things to him.”

“Do tell.”

Sureshot grunted, lowering his head. “Look, I appreciate what you did. What you've been doing. But don't think that means we owe you anything- the trades have been fair, you don't deserve more than what you've gotten in caps already.”

“I'm not here for that. I already have plenty. I'm here for him.”

I leaned back into my cot, in order to watch their lips move. Curious as ever back then, I was even worse once I realized they were talking about me. “What about him?” Sureshot asked.

“Well, I learned a lot of stuff asking around about you. Not many other ponies get out anymore, huh?”

“No. No they don't. Not with the... Storms.”

“Ever think you'd be doing a solid for the city if somepony taught another pony that it’s not so bad?”

“I do enough already. And don't go thinking you'll give him ideas. If anything, he's going to stay put and learn proper- not get prospecting dreams.”

“Proper is so slow. And you need all the help you can get. That's coming from a pony that's real, real tight with your city suppliers. Ever think I could weasel in a discount for you, if you do me a little favor?”

He sat back on his haunches, and threw his head back in annoyance. “Why are you so interested?”

“I learned more than where you lived when I was asking about you. He's the only one so young that's willingly gone out there, isn't he?”

“... Yes.”

She clicked her teeth in tsks. “Your city needs more scouts, more travellers if it's going to live. Your hydroponics are threadbare and really dependent on the talismans.  And while I like how many caps you spill over the pipes and seeds, I don't think it'd be good for business to see you all starve.” She waited. My brother didn't budge. He never budged. “He's got the urge the city needs. I can at least show him how to indulge it.”

Sureshot looked back at me, his short, fuzzy chocolate mane tilting from an outside gust that numbed the room. His blue eyes thinned. He went over to his cot, scooping his pale blue coat from it, and started to nestle himself into his thick clothing. “My shift is starting anyway.” he said. I knew he was lying.  He always did an extra shift when he lied.

He went to his big rifle. It was black, old, and well maintained despite the surface scratches that covered the dark coating. There were two mouthgrips. One was on the side, a soft looking padded holder with a delicate tongue trigger he was always fiddling with. The other mouthgrip, if it could be called such, was nothing more than a curved metal bar with an orb on it. If it was pulled backward and up, the chamber was exposed. A fat, long scope was atop it, and the entire thing was attached to a set of straps that could sling onto the saddle he wore. The barrel itself was two full grown ponies long, and ended in a wedge that had holes.

She entered with a start, her eyes lingering upon it. She was oogling it. Since I had been so desensitized to it, it made her reaction all the more obvious; I regarded her with concern. That rifle was Sureshot's favorite and most expensive possession, and he used it every day. If she had ideas about it-

She swallowed hard, and took to purposely ignoring it.  Not knowing exactly what was so special about it then besides that my brother adored it, I did what I always did.  I helped him with some of the sling straps so it sat taut over his coat.

He whispered to me. “If she does anything bad, anything at all, you start screaming okay? Kick her between the lips and the back legs like I taught you, and run outside to get help.” I simply nodded, and shut the door behind him.

When I turned and saw her laying on her belly, looking at me... Like that, I was taller than her when I was standing. She seemed a lot less scary. I returned to my cot, in front of her, and it sagged so I was at eye level with her.

“My name is Book Worm.” she said from the depths of her hood.

“I'm Snapshot.” The quiet enshrouded the room again, and her mind chewed in order to digest her words into something she wanted to say.

“Can you think of why I'm called that?” She asked. I shook my head. She smirked, just like the first friendly time I'd seen her do it. The look made me hug my camera. “Well, here...”

She nosed back at her saddlebag, lifting the flap. She mouthed out a stack of papers, old and dry, and plopped them on the ground in front of my cot. She called them magazines.

She used a queer glow I rarely saw, levitation, to move the pages. That simple trick alone was enough to mystify and enrapture me. But, even more seductively, each of those thin and fluttering books were filled with pictures.  Ancient things, from shiny glass buildings, to floating orbs with sharp arms that she called robots, to big boxes with mouthgrips she called magic weapons. My fascination in the pictures themselves obliterated any mistrust, and did so stupidly quick.

The pictures of other ponies I liked most. She had a lot of them, in a verdant and bright place she called a park. The very idea of one was a completely stellar notion, as if plucked from stories even the tower veterans hadn't heard. The pictures couldn't be fake, I'd thought. If they were, they were very, very well drawn.

That's how she hooked me.  It's how I got started. They were all smiling in the photographs, and that was the first real twinge of realization on what kind of moments I craved to capture.

She spent a week, coming and going and occasionally imparting herself on the house for sleep while my brother was “on shift.” Sureshot actually started to like her; she kept sharing her food, and even brought him a box of bullet cases to bribe him. I only appreciated her more, as she also brought back parchment rolls that fit into my camera and allowed me to take more photo's.

When she left the first time, it was with the promise that she would come back with more magazines. It took a month or so. I was on coals the entire time, wondering what exactly she would bring back, and what I would see. I consumed every inch of those she'd already given to me in the interim, gleefully memorizing them down to the wrinkles and accidental folds.

She didn't disappoint. Twice as many, at least three dozen, and every one different though many had the same names. She even gave my brother one, to which he blushed. He tore pages out of it, gave them to the other tower soldiers, and kept a long, unfolding three-page picture for himself. The others were all for me, and I had them in an open but cautious jumble along the floor for many hours, having to leave paths for my brother to walk through when he was done with a shift and ready for sleep.

The last few days of her life, Book Worm was taking me to and from that bunker I found. My brother was always at the gates, with his smaller rifle, smoking as usual. Bookworm showed me things down inside it that I had never known were precious- batteries, what a pre-war first aid kit looked like. The place had been picked apart since I'd found it, but the old pictures of what were called zebra remained.

With the picture board, though, there was something else nopony else had cared to notice.  Not even me, the first time I’d been around.  It was a small map.

It showed a number of other bunkers from far above. Many of them close to Resilience, buried in the snow and ice, and circled in those rough black lines. She brought it up to Sureshot, and after a quick perusal, he begrudgingly allowed the two of us on an excursion to find one.

The only reason why was because it was still within earshot of the first one, not more than three hundred feet away. It had apparently never been noticed by the towers, because it was further out, and from Book Worm’s excuse “probably hidden under white shit.”  We would find it! I'd exclaimed.

It took us a few hours.  A little digging. We had to take a warming talisman, trading it between each other every once in a while, and she would make fun of me when I started to smoke.  I returned the favor.

Unlike what we had expected, we instead found it within a smoothed, glittering crater. It had been painted white, and had been hard to notice even though we knew just about where it was. The hatch was half-open. From inside there was little noise, besides the clang and thump of ancient metal.

We didn't even get inside before I got so content that it was a victory.  Dancing around her on my stubby legs, I held up my camera, and laughed. She rolled her eyes, as ponies are apt to do against my lens, and took position by our newfound play area.  I made her take the talisman, so I could get a silly picture of her steaming.

I brought the camera up, and aimed. Wiggling a little as I looked through my goggles, I tongued at the mouthgrip. The flash went off as it always did, but the sound that came from her direction suffocated my camera's click with a violent and terrible crack.

She collapsed, and the snow quickly started to turn red. For a moment, I honestly thought my camera had somehow murdered her, and began to panic. She wheezed, vile crimson bubbling up from her nostrils and frothing at coughing lips, pouring in rivulets to pool below.

When the hatch creaked open, and the white coated mare slipped out, I turned. When she saw me, she met my terrified look with a confused expression of her own. I pivoted completely as another mare's head slithered from the hatch, and I started to run.

From behind me, I heard angry yelling. “Get the lil' bastard! He's gonna tip the spotters off to where we are!”

More and more gunshots sounded off. The air tore around me, and I could see the supple impact exploding from the white dunes. Snarls and thumping hooves followed behind me, barely loud enough to eclipse the beat of my own heart. “Sureshot!” I screamed out. I just kept calling his name, and the blood running through my ears made me believe I wasn't even saying anything at all.

With another crack, my back right leg kicked out from beneath me. I tumbled, and the hard top of my camera hammered my jaw. My leg started to hurt as if crisped, hotter than any burn barrel I'd let myself near in the city. When I moved it, it only made me squeal.

I saw the tatters of my coat cradling the wound. Ragged threads of muscle, the meat boiling over with blood. It only made me shriek louder.

I heard trotting from behind me. I tried to get up, pushing up on my front hooves. The pain was paralytic, and made me shake.

“Sureshot!” I kept screaming. My mouth was bleeding, and when I yelled, I spit red. “Sureshot!”

A hoof came down on my muzzle. It pushed me into the snow, and the weight compressed my flesh against my bones. I started to see stars almost immediately, and could barely breath. I could feel the cold of the shadow the body was casting over me.

There was a loud, sharp whistle from the distance to my left. I felt the body above me through the stomped hoof; it twitched, and looked toward the sound. There was another gunshot, different that time, and much sharper.

The pressure on my head lurched away, the pistol fell next to my head, and I opened my eyes toward what had been slung from me and into the snow. Missing half of it's face and one of it's eyes, another pony stared back at me through the fuzz of her coat. She had a skinless and gory grin, her bloody skull covered in flecks of flesh that reminded me of dark rust on bone. I could see the snow behind her, through the shattered goggles and empty socket.

I screamed again, so loud my balance began to twirl, trying to push away from her. The sensation in my leg gnawed at my temples. I was shivering as I felt a nauseating chill, far worse than something normal in the snow, rush between my ears and the weeping hole in my body. I heard Sureshot's voice after he galloped through the snow. He held my head up from behind my hood, and my dizzying eyes blinked.

Something pressed to my lips. His then tinny voice urged me to drink, and I wasn't strong or willful enough to argue. It was a terrible flavor, one I would grow jaded to and eventually forget the cruel necessity of. My body desperately wanted to reject the potion's twist. I spat up some and gagged, but he lifted my head and tilted the bottle back to enforce it's consumption. When I tasted air again, it was with a gasp that cooled the ache in my lungs.

He pushed me back to the snow, he said six words. “Get back to the city gates.” He looked up, away from me, and began to carefully follow the hoofprints that lead toward the bunker. The pain in my leg had started to fade, and I could feel it moving again. I didn't care; I was too shocked to try and fathom why.

I rolled onto my belly to stand again. When I did, I saw the mare. Her face intensified the urge to vomit- I merely wretched, and the sensations remained. The smell, exhumed from her paling body heat as the scent passed my nose, unwillingly intoxicated me with a visceral taste that drowned out whatever Sureshot had made me drink. By the time I looked back from the brutally hypnotic scene, he had vanished between hills of snow.

I heard his rifle crack again, and a frightened female yelp. I have no idea what tempted me to follow, being already familiar with the noises. I was hot, the sweat was freezing below the coat, and my eyes misted in my goggles. Most importantly, I didn't hurt any longer, and the heat in my head had drowned the fear.

Resting near her ear, I saw the pistol. Though gray and grazed with dirt and scratches, I knew how to use it- my brother hadn't been so stupid to neglect teaching a colt what not to do with his “work tools” when he wasn't around. It was heavy when I took up the mouthgrip, still wet with saliva and coppery blood, and scurried down the hoofprint path with it.

When I got close to the bunker again, I scooted back when I heard my brother's voice. I hid, as best I could in the open expanse, by laying my small body down and trying to peer over the edge of a rock frosted in white. I had to crawl a little, my lower jaw tightened in order to hold up the pistol where I was looking, before the scene crested.

Next to Book Worm, there remained the still twitching leftovers of another mare.  A gaping hole, the size of my hoof, was in her chest. She was crawling, pathetically so, and had left a path of several inches behind her which was shining red. Her mouth was moving as if trying to slowly speak, but there was only the noise of wet suction. My brother was circling the bunker hatch, the lid still open, sneering as he looked down toward it.

He paced a time. Another mare's voice came from within, some kind of insult to goad him. He stopped, looked at the still-living but useless mare, and then back at the hatch. Calmly, he let his gun sling to the bridling and walked to her, then took something from her body.

It looked like an apple. Gray and grungy, he pulled it off of a belt, which the mare had been wearing over her coat. Holding it by the stem with his teeth, he walked back to the hatch. He reared his head back, and with a sharp nod, the stem broke free. The apple dropped inside.

There was a clanking noise. Then, I heard dampened screams. They went completely silent as Sureshot slammed the hatch shut, and put his weight atop it with both hooves. He turned his head away, as if shying from a hot stove.

There was a loud, vibrating boom that made me cringe even at the distance I was at. The hatch flew open, kicking him several feet in the air. A huge, rolling pillar of bright yellow flame blasted from it, devolving into a black cloud that was consumed by the wind. Sureshot rolled to sit upright from the imprint in the snow that had cushioned him, his eyes still on the bunker hole, and spat away the stem which he realized he'd still been holding.

He returned to his gun, which had come undone and fallen near Book Worm's head. Instead of picking it up, like I thought he should have, he put his hooves to different parts of her neck. Every drop of anger I had in that moment drained down my gullet, and into my stinging lungs.  He shook his head.

Then, without any further interruption, he rearmed and walked over to the other mare. He stood on her flank, aiming the gun straight down at her head, and dispersed the contents of her skull into the ground in a single gore-slinging snap of his weapon. By the time the smoking brass from his gun had landed, I had shrunk, curling up into a sniffling, shocked little colt with a gun in my mouth.

About then was the time he heard me gurgling back the snot thawing in my nostrils.

His rifle turned to face me, then immediately went back down. His jaw dropped, the rifle with it, and we stared at one another. He broke the silence first. “What the buck are you doing with that? What the buck did I just tell you?!”

I couldn't say anything. My mouth was full with the weight of the pistol. I just stood straight up, trying to give him a snorting, defiant glare. The gun wobbled, and my conviction against his admonishment failed me when I looked back at Book Worm. I dropped the weapon, flopping back onto my haunches, and started to cry. I couldn't see after only a few seconds, and I just sat there, shaking each time I sobbed.

Before long, I felt his shadow over me. I looked up at him, his eyes hidden behind those frosted goggles. His brow was angled, his rifle slung, and he was frowning at me. He sat next to me, looking back over the corpses strewn out in front of us, and scooped me up into a hug that buried my face into his chest so I couldn't see the carnage.

Saying nothing, after a while he nipped at the pistol, and put it into his saddlebag. He had to drag me to my hooves, and push my gaze away from Book Worm's corpse. When he spoke again, after leaving the bodies well behind, his voice barely broke the creeping wind. “We'll get someone to take care of her, okay?”

I knew what he was saying. Our parents had been “taken care of” the same way. It meant what it always did in Resilience; stripping them naked, taking everything useful for the living, and sending them to the crematorium. Crystal ponies do not bury the dead; the ground for them was always far too hard.  The thought only intensified the pain in my leaking eyes.

As we returned to Resilience, the adrenaline wore off and my leg began to hurt. It made me slow down, but Sureshot remained near me the entire time, eyes swapping from me to the path ahead in constant caution.  I paused when I saw what was left of the mare that had chased me down.

I ran away from him, much to his vulgarity spewing and almost violent dismay, and didn’t dare allow myself to limp. I had forgotten my camera back where he had saved my life. I could not let the pain neglect it’s retrieval; there would not be another pony bringing another camera, let alone parchment, for a very long time.

Scared of the body, imagining it would jump up and seek some kind of revenge with it's exposed teeth, I kept my eyes upon it. I retook my toy, dragging it slowly from the red snow by the grip. I hadn't brought the parchment against the serrations of the printing slot, so the picture I had taken remained jutting from the front. I didn't even look at it during the blurry return to the gates, my brother shielding me from the staring ponies as he took me through the streets.

He tried to nurture me with words when we returned home. I barely heard anything he said.  All I could recall, obsessively clutching at my camera mouthgrip while I cried, was the sound I had mistaken for it's click. I was afraid of taking pictures then. I didn't want it to make the noise again.

When I undressed from my goggles and coat, my brother watched me. Creeped by his stare, still in awe at what had happened and furious because of it, I yelled at him. “What? What the buck is it, huh?!”

He pointed at my flank. When I looked back, my eyes went wide. Separating the white speckles on my rump from the rest of my brown hide, there was the image of my camera. It was a black, crushing joke at my expense, punctuating the helpless rage of what had happened that had quickly spiraled back under his unwanted attention.

I was supposed to be happy about earning a cutie mark. Wasn't I?

I turned and bucked at the wall. My wounded leg was weak, but I kicked with every speck of strength. I was trying to split my hooves, jostle my own bones from whatever bound them to the meat. My brother stopped me, holding me tightly as I writhed and shook, until I melted to the floor in further sobs.

Just like outside, he waited for me. That time, though, I could see his face. He was just as distraught as I was, but looked at me with a true concern I had not seen lace his eyes since... Well, ever. “Stay here, kiddo.” he said. “I'll take care of things, just like I said. Don't think about it, don't bury it. Just let it all out, okay?”

I hobbled back to my cot, and shuffled myself inside. My camera tumbled, and bumped me. “HEY!” he yelled. “It's important. Don't keep it in. I mean it.”

I was breathing hard from my outburst. My teeth were locked together, and grinding so hard I could hear them. Before he left, he said something that didn't just stick. He followed through with all the things he would warn me about.

“Her and I talked a lot.” he said. “She kept saying you should get out there. Actually see what it was like, you know? I don't really think she understood what that meant.” He sighed.

“She was the only nice pony I met.”

“I know, kid. Keep that in mind, but don't let it get to you.” he shook his head. “Look, this pistol?” He took it from his saddlebag. It was still rather bloody, and pimpled with dingy condensation. He chewed at the grip, removing the magazine, and wedged the slide on the end of the table. He pushed it down, ejecting the chambered bullet, before he rested it on his hobby table. “It's yours now.”

Mortified, I peered from behind the big flash bulb on the camera. “What? What makes you think I'd want it?”

“Want? Of course not. Need?” He looked back at it. He started to search for the escaped round, and found it rolling beneath the table. His voice lost a little enunciation, until he put it back near where he had placed the magazine. “Well, I didn't want to have you grow up so quick. I had to teach you at some point.” He took a deep breath. He was waiting for my reply.

“But, I don't wanna have to shoot-”

Quizzically, he raised his brow. “You were awfully ready to use it outside.”

“I...” I withered under his stern stare. “That was different.”

“No, it really wasn't. If you were willing to chase us down like you did, you have the spirit for actually having to pull a trigger. But you have to trust me that you do, okay? Otherwise, you'll end up like her.”

I tried hard to search for excuses. After what happened, I knew he was right. That didn't make it any more a comfort, though. “Hey,” Sureshot said. “I'll be back in a while... Think happy thoughts while I'm gone.  Big brother’s going to teach you, and do it proper.”

With that, he gave a tepid trot to the door. He waited there, and upon hearing nothing from me, left. After the door closed, I turned back to my camera. I tilted it by one of it's corners with a hoof, against the crinkle of paper. Still attached, on crumpled and red-stained parchment, was the first true smile I had ever caught.

Book Worm's expression, frozen in a single frame, was happy. A long-petaled, broken flower of crimson was blooming from her neck, plumes of red glittering upon the dreary gray sky. The muzzle flash of a pistol, the one on the table, lit up every detail of her killer's goggled face from the half-opened hatch. Book worm hadn't even realized she had been shot in that instant. That smile, clueless and final, was what persisted to me well past her death.  To this day, I haven't thrown the picture away, even with all the reasons I should have.

That image, though I refused show it for several days, made me accept where my cutie mark had come from. It wasn't just because I was good at taking pictures. It was because it made me understand what capacity a camera could allow me to reach, in all the simplicity of what it does.

You see, the camera didn't prevent, nor ignore what happened in front of the lens. That's how I was able to put to words, at least in my mind, just how important it was to be real when you face one with a smile.  Not because it was merely some bizarre holdover tradition from before the war everypony talked about, but because the thing simply didn't care.

The moment a pony neglects being sincere with themselves in front of one, it would preserve that and only that, and it could be the last thing they'd leave behind.

That is why I laugh now, every time ponies roll their eyes at me when I say I stop time. Especially when they don't know the things that camera has seen, or just how quickly things can turn so vividly ugly in front of it. If they only knew how bucking hard it was to get a good, honest smile...

That night, I tore the picture off carefully. I sat on Sureshot's chair, having to hop in order to place myself on the ripped cushion. My forehooves to either side of the weapon, I placed Book Worm's last moment against the wall behind the table. I looked back down at the pistol.

Blandly, I nipped up one of the torn bits of coat Sureshot used for his own rifle, and started to wipe its surface. I could feel the depth of the knicks. The time I spent doing so was cleansing for me, in a way, and the more I did it the more relaxed I got.

It had been what felt like hours before I heard hooves trotting back to the door. Hearing Sureshot's voice, I plucked the picture away, and took to putting it beneath my camera in a hastily folded square. Before he could enter, I was back at the table, the cleaning cloth tasting tangy in my mouth. When he saw me, studiously tending to it (like I wanted him to), he paused. He was covered in smeared flakes of soot, so I knew for certain he'd been at the crematorium. He too knew it was obvious, but made no effort to disguise it.

He took a place beside me, perusing the gun, and flipped the pistol over at the mouthgrip. I put the cloth down; I'd gotten both sides long before his return. I awaited his grade.

“... I'm sorry you have to do this, kid. Everypony in Resilience has to sometime, though.  Just part of who we are.”

Slumping in the chair, I just looked at the gleaming pistol. “Well, it's not so bad.”

“What?”

“... It's just like my Codec.” I said. I hopped from the chair, and wearily moved to my bed. I sat by my camera protectively, looking over it, but not daring to move it. He didn't understand, then, what I meant.

“When do you want to start training?” he asked me. “The other ponies are kind of eager to see what you'll be good at... Besides escaping your own luck, I mean.”

Not stopping to think for long, I only said the first thing on my otherwise chore-blanked mind. “Tomorrow is fine.” I replied.

“... You're sure? I won't be nice. You don't deserve to get shorted like that.”

“Yeah. It's not like I have anything to smile over right now.” I cuddled up with my other “point and shoot,” watching the old logo. “Tomorrow might give me something, at least.”

[***]

Welcome to level 1!

Hot Blooded (trait): Your fight or flight reflex has a hard time processing the “flight” part when you've been wounded.  You gain +15% damage for a short time if your HP drops below 50%, but suffer -2 to both INT and PER for this duration.

Detail Oriented (trait): you notice things others may not.  When observing your surroundings, you have +2 PER.

All it takes is one

FoE: The Tartarus Contingency

CH2: All it takes is one.

--

In the years my brother trained me, I grew hearty, and grew well.  A drab brown coat like I was told my earth-pony mother had, a darker brown mane indistinguishable from most other ponies of that ilk.  The spattering of white dots on my flank grew slightly more dull, though shinier than the rest of my coat.  That, as with my violet eyes, I inherited from my crystal pony father.  With the food and exercise I got, I'd gotten stocky and short, but also strong; I might have looked fat, but it wasn't blubber padding me over.  No crystal pony is fat with the way the cold makes a body eat itself.

It was mostly thanks to my brother's way of teaching me.  He wasn't lying- he didn't relent, didn't treat me special.  Learn fast, or get wounded trying (I once attempted to fire his big rifle, without the bridling to handle it--learned how to drink potions with a broken jaw, and that they did not heal an ego).  When I got more durable, morale boosts came in the form of kicks from steel horseshoe boots with treads meant for ice, and only pats on the back when things started to go right.

I look back on it with some semblance of pride when it was decided I should be a spotter;  My knack for visual detail had made the choice obvious.  Sureshot said my old lust for short-term exploration would be great for mapping, and so had been sending me out to look around for scavenging opportunities.  It was a good balance against my tainted confidence with rifles- let the better ponies use them while I gave them direction.  I never did get over that.

The times between half-day excursions were spent in the tower hut turning back and forth, while through scratched lenses watching a world which never changed.  Like a picture, really, only it moved.  The placement wasn't much, but it was comfortable, and Sureshot and I did get closer.  For better, or for worse.

The years that passed once I was a tower pony were relatively uneventful.  I say that because watching bullets cleave through errant animals and ponies became commonplace.  Glancing from an external perspective to which I'm uniquely able to commit in Resilience... Well, I guess the southern ponies would call it “paranoid and buck-headed.”  If it was a white coat or moved strangely, it was a target.  If it had fat saddlebags, it was properly warned by one of the pickers well outside the gates.  We had too many raiders loading up with bombs and trying to blow a hole open in the walls.

The days leading to my original exile at least had some events that got me thinking outside of my then violent little frame.  I can recall it easily, though there was little in the way of pictures I could attach to it.  I doubt anypony would want to see that kind of unceremonious red from the teenage years anyway, besides the deranged.

That day, though... The first raider pony was tiny, in the binoculars.  The distance didn't mean they were able to hide.  Far from it; I'd laughed when they ended up standing, tall and proud, atop a crystal growth that placed their bleached coat against the blue mound.  As they looked about, I'd picked their length of their hooded head out against the color.  They were getting a lay of how the snow had shifted, thinking their camouflage kept them safe against their own stupidity.

It was a Resilience coat, altered as per the norm for the gang.  White, like the others I'd been pinpointing around  the city in recent days, with a black dot down on what I perceived as the flank.  A crude snowflake, usually drawn with liquid garbage, or ash.  I only knew, of course, because of how close I'd gotten from looting them in the years gone by.

“Smile for big brother...” I said to myself.  That had become a casual and satisfying phrase to me.

The deafening boom, the lift of his rifle. The flower of flame from it's mouth, and the rib-shaking thump of the weapons recoil.  As I watched from beside him in the tower, the bullet was punctual.  To my utter and grinning delight, there was a fat, red puff.

Sureshot brought the muzzle back down, nipped the bolt mouthgrip, and shunted the still hot casing.  It was a crass shell, clapping off the top of the tower encasement and jingling to the street below.  Sureshot swore.

“You need to stop taking such close shots with that.” I said.  I peered along the recent scrawl of paper. Adding a tick mark to the tally, I followed up by nestling the pencil tip into the parchment.  One dot, placed at a rough estimate of where the body had fallen on the map copy. “There's less to scavenge with a good hit.”

He just grumbled, and danced the bolt forward.  The magazine fed the beast, and into it's throat another lovingly polished shell was stuffed.  “Quit smirking over this shit.  It's not funny.”

“That's not why I'm smiling.”

“Right.” he said.  He used a forehoof to jab my shoulder, then pointed back out.  “Get another bead, something was moving behind it before I shot.”

When I found the rock again, I discovered he was right.  I could discern shadows, and a single black dot.  It was mobile, bouncing within the snow and kicking up divots.

A little more squinting and calm attention, I gleaned the shape of a muzzle opposite it.  It paused at a tall, oddly straight jut from the ground- it had one flat side, I realized, when the dots of the pony vanished behind the angle.  I could see the color of the muzzle -grey- sneaking a quick peek from behind it.

There was a tiny bit of a very strange color, which I at first thought was a blemish in the binoculars.  After a second or so of waiting, I realized the speck was not a scratch on my binoculars; it was cobalt in color, that had been exposed from the wind.  “The dark blue spot.  Aim for that.”

“You're sure?”

“It's a nine-hundred meter shot.  Looks metal or crystal.  You'll punch through it easy.”

He sighed.  Partially, in annoyance at my insistence.  The other half of the breath was that sleight-of-body he always did: emptying his lungs before tonguing the trigger.

BLAM!

Through the binoculars, I watched as a white pinprick suddenly appeared near the center of the fleck.  Something fell at the corner, and the snow began to blacken.  After a while of watching, I could reliably place the color.  The other spotters called it “Headshot red.”

I wasn't positive it was the right shade, though.  With what the Snowflakes tended to wear, it was hard enough to tell where they were.  There were tricks, certainly.  The piled snow had a sheen in what columns of sun briefly punctured the film in the sky; their coats were soft and didn't pick up light, framing them against the pools of light when they wandered.  The weather didn't move much on flakeless days like that; they did, and never moved from sky to ground.  And their breath, blurring a grey sky in the repetitive puffs from lungs...

Even with the arsenal, I couldn't see anything moving.

“You hit em.” I said, still smiling.

“But?”

“But nothing.  You probably tore em in half, again.”  Regardless of the admission, I didn't scribble down another tick.  I scanned, carefully, the ache in my neck likely leading to a sublime migraine later.  I didn't mind, if it got me killing more raiders.  Not one bit.

“Goddamn trick shots.” he mumbled to himself.  He said nothing as I continued to watch, and listened to him cycle the bolt.  After a clink, though, he swore again.

“Gotta stop wasting that rifle.” I said.

“It's not a waste if it's a hit.  Besides, hearing the thing is enough of a statement on what we think of them, let alone what it actually does.”  In went the fresh shell.  The gun was always hungry.  Especially in the past few weeks.  “So, why do you have that stupid look?”

Feeling that the corners of my lips were still tightly knitted into a smirk, the sudden consciousness of it didn't let it weaken.  I kept tracing the ridges and voluptuous curves of the white land unfolded before me, resting only upon sharp outcroppings or what I perceived as mobile.  Columns of sun went through the armored sky, turning milky and freezing once they spilled through the badly stitched blanket of clouds.  Scrutinizing little of “worth,” I allowed myself the distraction of a reply.  “Watching you shoot is fun.” I said.

“You've been giving me that excuse for... What? Ten years?  It was old by the time we emptied our first clip  together.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I'm really not that jaded over my big brother still being awesome.”

“Or maybe your big brother notices when you get those stupid looks.”

I stuck out my tongue past the mouthgrip.  “What's that supposed to mean?”  I fiddled with the focus disc.  Vision swam in and out of detail.  I zoned back in on the headshot red near the metal.

“The Snowflakes.” he said.  “You smile, when they die.”

Realizing exactly what he meant, I instantly frowned.  “And that's bad?”

“Most of em are from Resilience, Snapshot.” he said.  He tracked a little, the head of his gun moving in such a concentrated flow he appeared to be still.  “I don't like thinking I'm shooting somepony I knew as a colt or filly.  You shouldn't be happy for this... Situation.”  He was trying to voice kindly; he rarely did such.  He wasn't doing so for their sake.

“How is it bad?” I repeated.  “They knew what they'd be getting into, if they stepped outside the walls.  Especially without any intent to come back inside.  They abandoned us, they're no longer welcome.”

“Don't put it like that.” he retorted, the wind picking up to a soothing whine.

“Okay, then.” I said.  The coat fuzz around my cheeks and ears felt all the hotter.  “Then how would you have me put it?  That they knew they'd be castrating the caravans just for the sake of first dibs?  Picking each other off just to stay warm?  Goddess damned leeches...”

There was a loud pang, and the shriek of a ricochet.  The sound of the gunshot followed quite shortly after.  Skimming off the metal pipe that made up our tower, only a few inches to my side, the feel of the impact made me flinch.  There was little space to use- I couldn't dive, so I simply let myself fall back.  I clutched possessively at the binoculars, an instinctual motion that reminded me of something.  To the rest of the ponies in Resilience, the device I held was probably more important than I was right then if I happened to “lose my mind.”

Sureshot already had his rifle propped, the huge thing impossible to completely hide.  He had dragged it back, the length of it still leaving a good head-long jut resting on the edge of the tower window.  Not budging, he groaned, and tugged his hood down.  Behind the plates, we'd be relatively safe; the towers were too tall to toss a grenade inside, too close to the city to get a reasonable shot without retort.  Whomever had fired at us was likely doing so for the sake of some revenge.  And, already drawing the... Unfriendly response of the other Tower Ponies.

Distant yells rattled off from the towers around us.  Another zip of a poorly aimed bullet followed, while Sureshot and I shared glances.  He rolled his eyes.  It wouldn't be the first time that the Snowflakes tried keeping us out of play, especially with Sureshot and I in a tower.  Did they know our names, or had we been given monikers?  After another shot, I stopped thinking it mattered.

I rolled to my belly.  I had to grind and wriggle a bit, compacted tight next to my similarly retreated brother, and pulled out my pistol from the shoulder holster.  Nudging the mouthgrip with my tongue, I let the magazine slide halfway out.  Filled to bursting, I showed him a little surprise I'd been saving- tracer bullets winked from the stamped out holes in the clip.  I bobbed my brow toward him after flaunting them, and slid the clip back inside.

“Don't-” he tried to say.  By the time he would have continued, my head was already over the left side of the elevated box, swiveling on my sore neck in a second-long glance.  I could hear another bullet whip past just before I retreated, the sound of the gunshot arriving late.  It was a dumb thrill.

I scooted back toward where the first shot had hit- lightning, after all, never struck the same place twice.  Especially with aim that bad.  I peeked up, sighted in on the vague area of that distant blue spot, and fired off a single round before crouching back down.  The hot bullet singed the air, leaving a streak of orange-red light that vanished after several meters.  I knew it wouldn't hit.  It was enough, though.  For our snipers, tracers always were.

I heard more than a few of the other towers a couple seconds later.  It took them some time to actually find where I'd shot- aiming for a dot in binoculars with a pistol was a fools errand, likely leading their precision astray.  With the way the sound of gunshots bounced off crystal and snow, however, it was better than searching from where a targets shots were coming.  Three separate rifles snarled at my attacker. The first one was to my left, then the other two in almost instant succession to my right.  The one to my left fired once more, followed by a wary yell.

Sureshot held his hoof up to me, and gestured down with it.  “Give it time.” He said.

Buck.  That.

Not caring much for my skull (would it hurt if I lost it so suddenly, anyway?) I gently placed my pistol on the hut floor.  My ears tried to flick in the little hood pockets, brushing against the soft, filthy lining.  Seeing the boxcar's dot, feeling the drumroll in my chest, I pushed the binoculars so tight to my face the cushioned rims bruised the flesh around my eyes.  My heartbeat made the wandering view pulsate.

When I found where the fleck disappeared into the snow, I saw more headshot red.  A long, dark line was near it- I recognized it as the shape of a rifle akin to what some of the tower ponies had.  The contours of a white body was well above the blue, on the corner.  There was more cobalt visible, too; apparently in trying to move, they'd brushed off a good chunk of whatever they'd been aiming from.

“Wounded, crawling.  Can you take the shot?”

“You know I can.  But-”

“WILL you take the shot?”

“What happened to wasting it?”

“Well then, don't miss.”

Sureshot grunted.  He shouldered the rifle, lifted it by the mouthgrip.  Despite listening to him heft the weight and plant it upon the hut edge, I jumped the instant the gun went off.  

When I returned to look back at the body, it had stopped completely.  Shards of (what I hoped was) brain, and  annihilated clothing peppered the sky around it with still airborne color.  Elated and energized, I sucked in air through my teeth.  “Yes!” I hissed, stomping a back hoof hard enough to vibrate the hut.

Sureshot, against what I was expecting, planted his own rear hoof into my ribs.  The thump against me hurt- the feel of an oncoming bruise only had me giving him a confused glare.  Before I could even say a word, he rested the rifle, put a forehoof atop my head, and shoved me back down.  His face was so close I could smell the cloud of his breath, his nostrils flaring.  “The shift is over.” he whispered.

“We still have an hour-”

“Not after that.” he said.  “Mark the kill, get down the ladder, and go back home.  I'll send you out to pick again.”  He sat back, sighing.  His eyes closing, his head lowering, he put a hoof to the bolt.  He waited some time, before waving me off.  “Ever stop to think that the attitude you have in killing shit,” he began. “Is the same kind they had, before they left?”

“That's crap and you know it.” I said.  Shrinking back from him, insulted and disgusted, I sneered. “Since when have I stolen or shot somepony just for what's in their saddlebags?”

He shoved the bolt up, hooked around, and tugged it back.  Clink.  He swore, yet again.  “We shoot them because we knew they'd shoot first.  They do the same thing to us.  Then what do we do? We take what's in their goddamn saddlebags.  I'm not asking you, I'm telling you- you need to respect one fact as all that matters.”

He clopped his hoof against the magazine release, and caught the bottom of the clip.  bracing it up, he examined the shell still in the magazine from several angles.  “For you, for me, for everypony,” He leaned in to expose the magazine to me, the huge bullet shining.  “Everypony out here gets to thinking they may only have one last shot.  That's what scares everypony into doing the shit they do.  It shouldn't ever have to be that way.”

My lower lip stuck out toward him, I put the binoculars down.  My neck stiff, it was hard to get the pencil into the proper place.  The corners of my jaw searing hot, the pressure in my neck finally settling into the expected headache, I dropped it and let it roll. Scooping up the paper with my teeth, I tossed my forehooves over the back of the hut.

Shouldn't have to? I thought.  I wanted to scream at him.  He was paid by kills- What would WE do without it?

Below, the streets were silent.  Shining with poorly powered, flickering lights, the cracked crystal roads were awash with amber light from the scavenged Stable-tec floodlights.  The ladder, ragged horse-hair, was nothing more then interconnected ropes. It was made of varying colors; everypony in the city contributed to them, eventually. It swung mindlessly in the wind, and for a moment, I paused to realize some of the darker parts might be my own.

I stewed.  Chugging down an argument I knew would only be easily defeated verbal flailing, I hopped the rail, and began the descent.

“And pick up the casings.  Line em up at one of the tower legs.”

I'd done so many shifts, had so many landed shots I was responsible for.  Not one of the “last shots” did I see him respecting.  Especially the ones that had murdered Book Worm.  Shouldn't happen? I thought again. Then why do I have to collect your kill cases so you can recycle them? Why not just let those ponies back in? Have a little house party.  I'm sure they wouldn't take absolutely everything we have.

Halfway down, I held myself in the air.  It was habit that prompted me that time. I'd dropped the conscious craving, once my old scrapbook had been misplaced.  There wasn't much point to pictures of a landscape, if they couldn't be saved and seen...  Or if I was too busy helping shoot and loot to take them in the first place.  Up on those ladders though, It was the only place to get a view of either of Resilience's two sides.

Hypocrisy against me wasn't something I was used to with him.  I should have known then, that he was planning to give my flank one hell of a well deserved wake-up buck.  In that silent, strolling frustration, it never did register.  Not until I messed up hard enough for him to commit.

[***]

The walls to Resilience had only gotten more massive when looked at from the ground.  I hadn't grown desensitized to them; I'd grown with them as much had been added to thicken them.  I still had to crane my neck to see their tips, and even then only got a worms-eye view.  Only the towers were tall enough to see over those walls, and whenever I was up there the alabaster world beyond stretched farther than even my eyes could discern.

The doors boasted a similar height.  Made of several layers of disassembled boxcars, the innermost being hastily attached panels of whatever my ancestors could locate after the last day, they'd been welded together long ago.  

They had a stigma attached to them.  Inside, the air was warm enough to let yourself exist.  When the snow fell, it turned to rain; once it hit the invisible bubble of heat the combined warming talisman's provided, the streets would turn slick and wet.  It tended to drizzle quite often in Resilience, and that too I'd grown up with.

Outside, though.  That was a whole other can of worms, when you were experienced enough to have that place galvanized by the memory of surviving it.  Even getting outside had it's own mood, one I'd never noticed until after Book Worm.

The doorman was the most massive stallion you could imagine.  Clad in in a hodgepodge of bent metal armor atop his coat, the scavenged pieces curled over his frame in intersecting, offset squares of varying size.  Thanks to the “rain” he never needed to clean it. He merely replaced it.  He always looked like he was covered in rust-flecked chrome, strapped to his body in the the symbolic binding that could hold such heavy sheets aloft.  Chains.

Whenever he pressed that button, half-broken klaxons heralded the opening of the doors.  Lights near the gateway edges, three to a side, spun and glowered from within thick glass domes.  It was a nice touch, a clean warning.  He always gave a nod- a perceived farewell- to those he was ushering out of the city's confines.

The doors would always sputter and grind.  Against the sound of the alarms and clattering chains, muffled by the cables and pulleys that swiveled to peel them apart, he had no distinguishable reception.  He opened the door so often with the full knowledge he may never again open them for the same pony, that I thought his voiceless attitude was more to keep himself sane.  Hell, maybe he was deaf and mute. I sure didn't know.

The edge of the organized talisman's effects, though.  It stopped at the doors.  It created a vicious threshold, like stepping into a sea of perfectly frozen air.  If one is unprepared for such, the cold takes your breath away like a sledge between the legs.  Your blood feels like it sinks straight to the ground through your hooves.  If you've been in one of the cities “rains,” you hear your clothing crack when you walk.

Your hooves greet the snow and the wind begins.  Whichever direction it is blowing, the chill is immediate.  No matter the thickness of the coat, being aware of how it encroaches is the worst part.  First, the skin goes numb. Then, the meat and bone.  Every warm part of you starts to feel like it's solid and simply stopped existing.  Feeling the thicker spit crackle, like a solid film on the lips and tongue, was the worst to me.

The doors never opened enough for more than one pony to go through.  As I crossed the threshold that time, though, something was different.  Normally, the body pickers would be in single file.  The number was usually six, and they worked in trios to cover the area.

That day, though, I was sent out alone.  So long as I was with others, and I could remain in the scoped tower view, I would be a lot safer from the protection of the Tower Ponies and friends.  Being by myself was a tidy discipline on Sureshot's part, for certain, though I could be sure he was watching me.

Still filled with that sleeping rage, I didn't care what he'd done.  The anger was all that was on my mind- mostly, trying to burn it off, or properly contain it.  As I stepped into the snow beyond the doors, however, the outside gnawed at me with creeping whisper of a frigid death.  There was no heat of immature anger outside Resilience.  It was a simple physical impossibility.

Whenever the real doors squealed shut behind me, its blaring yell always reawakened me to the noise that our homeland had.  There was none.

The white hills rolled like the surface of water that had suddenly stilled.  The soft quilt was marred with cracking juts of frosted crystal overgrowth, colored blue or completely clear, growing from the ground in keen but small formations that had too many angles to count.  A pony could see for miles, had the snow not gotten so steep in sudden drops, and had not so many taller things been buried deep enough to be mistaken for real land.

It was all cast in roaming pools of silver sun, through miniature tears in the clouds that had grown thicker than what I remembered from childhood.  That anemic light still held no warmth, passing too quickly to enjoy as the fissures stitched themselves up almost instantly.  Because of it, everypony else had also claimed that the outside had become somehow colder in the decade past.  

You know what?  They were bucking right.

I had been throwing blame around a lot in the past hour or so before my excursion.  At that point, it was the sun I tried mentally accosting.  I didn't have anypony else to talk to- maybe that's why I'd taken notice of all those glorious things that sought to drive me to a slow panic, especially the attempts of the sun falling so flat.  No goddess had the power to help me, then, so they deserved every bit of insult I could give them.

Past the goggles and through the fuzz, I looked toward where I thought the marked kills should have been.  I trotted off in the general direction, trying to spot one of the towers.  Of course, I didn't have any peripheral vision while equipped with goggles, and had to turn to see the tower.  Poking out of one, I could see the thick wedge of Sureshot's rifle; he'd been assigned another spotter in my absence, as was standard if somepony was otherwise occupied or killed, and all I saw was the sparkle of the the binoculars reflecting the snow.  I wanted to give it a rude gesture, but thought better of it.  It did, however, let me get a good reference point of where to start.

I took to a brisk trot.  Getting slogged was one of the more dangerous things outside of the walls in those days.  One might never catch their breath again, unless they dipped into one of the heated bunkers, or took to reclining at a hot barrel with it's talisman.  Both were equally dangerous- one for the fact you were a sitting duck until you could feel your legs again, the other for the fact the most traversed barrels were often booby trapped by the malicious.

I'd found that latter part out on one of my first exploits.  Ever seen a pony, grateful at the promise of warmth,  suddenly burst into flames?  Amplifying runes are a hell of a thing, even for warming talismans.

The more I recalled that fire and heat of the incident, the faster time went.  I arrived at the outskirts of where the dead Snowflakes rested, the echo of headshot red lingering on the land.  I fell to the snow, purposely, peering over the compacted ivory as it clutched around me.  I waited, ever so still, and watched.  There was no movement.  No noise, not even a mourning wind.

I decided to go for the furthest kill first.

I could see it had been a mare.  What was left of her was too small, too round in the backside, to be otherwise.  Her tail hair had been white, which explained why I hadn't been able to pick it out when I'd targeted her.  Ribs peeking from shredded, grey flesh and a torn coat, her entrails and last thoughts extended for several red meters.  They had already frozen, crystals of ice making the spread appear to be glassed paint sinking into cavities within the snow.  Her saddlebags were still intact.  Had Sureshot meant to save her supplies?

As I rifled through them, I found little of worth.  A pair of healing potions, a 9mm pistol (though spiced with rot and barely seeming of use), and a few boxes of paltry ammunition for it. The weirdest things, though, were the twist n' burn emergency hoof flares.  The paper on those was old and had begun to peel, but they were still rather heavy and their alchemical powders perhaps retained some value back home.  

When I was finished, I stripped what was left of her white coat from her body.  There was a particular value on them, to the ponies in the city.  They were a different cloth, thinner but just as well insulating.  They made good patches, and deserved some scrutiny on just how the hell they worked.  Resilience ponies had plentiful rumors (usually thrown over alcohol and food) for the material.  We never did take prisoners to find out.

I turned to the side after balling up her clothing into my left saddlebag, looking back to the other kill.  Glancing down, I saw the hoofprints that had been made so short a time before. They had already been polished by the wind, smoothed into dimples in the snow.  I traced them back to where my brother had ended them.

I found, to my surprise, a symbol.  It was sticking out from the snow, and spread across a wavy, thick piece of blue alloy that formed a wall I was all too familiar with.  It was that of a train car.  There was the emblem of something I'd not heard much of back then- that of a Ministry.

M.A.S. was emblazoned arrogantly in tiny and clean font beneath it, tilting as it stuck to the angles of the metal.  So many of them had been hidden across the landscape beneath ice, they might as well have been considered treasure troves.  Full of supplies, cold corpses, old world things that could be stripped and used...  Sometimes, just full of dust.

There was no body below the logo.  There was the blood, of course, which had already melted the snow from body heat and then hardened, making an organic and pretty splatter pattern.  An empty healing ampoule, the contents having been swallowed in a gulp.  Feeling rather proud I had known they'd survived, at first, I found a long ditch that lead along the back of the boxcar.  It ceased halfway along the boxcar's side.  To my right, there was another fairly steep hill; swept down into a nook that continued onward, eventually melding with the rest of the snow.

The other body rested motionlessly within the snow atop the car.  It was inside a dark, red gristle.  With no solid head to speak of, the pipeline that had made it's throat and spine were in full view.  One foreleg was draped limply over the side, the other crumpled beneath it's chest in a way that would have been painful to anything that still had a brain.  

The rifle, a rather wonderfully preserved specimen of one, was close by and already partly consumed by windswept snow.  I dug it out, nipped it up by the mouthgrip, and rested it by the corpse.

The saddlebags were filled in a very similar manner.  A rusty 9mm, one healing potion she hadn't used, and that strangeness.  Flares.

On top of it, though, there were two magazines of .308 rounds.  Those sure wouldn't go unappreciated.

After prying away her coat, I came to realize it was another mare.  Grey hide.  When I looked, I saw that her tail was also white.  Had they been siblings?  That was a gut-wrenching thought.

I tried to pick out the tower hut against the sky.  I stood there, rather dumbfounded I'd even come to the idea.  I shook my head.  If they were, it didn't matter then.  It wouldn't matter if I brought it up.  Right?

Like I'd done to the other Snowflake, I stripped her of her clothing and stuffed it into my left saddlebag.  The weapons and oddities went into my right.  I tried to give myself an excuse to busy myself further, as I'd done the first time I'd cleaned my pistol.

I hefted the rifle, and hesitated.  I hadn't seen her silhouette with it before.  Where had she gotten it?

The only place that held the answer was right under my hooves.  Stomping along the covered boxcar, over and over, I confirmed it was nicely hollow.  Peering over the edge I was on, the realization that the little ditch she'd carved in her escape stopped halfway along the tilted cars edge...  I hopped down, finding the snow beneath the first layer compressed and hard from repeated hoofsteps.  Sure enough, I saw a crack of buzzing green light coming from inside a divot, and tiny piles of snow to either side of the opening.

Dropping the rifle, I nuzzled at the holster for my own pistol.  Yanking it free, I put both hooves against the rung of the door, and pulled against it with my weight.  My pistol tugging me forward, I quickly spun my head side to side, looking for any tell-tale shapes amidst what I had first thought would be pure darkness.

To my left, there were wooden boxes.  Marked with the same logo as the boxcar, a thick needle of light pushed through the hole Sureshot had punched.  The first was large; after passing through whatever was in the boxes, the second was much smaller.

To my right, atop another one of the boxes, there was a console. Curious, I dragged the rifle in with me, and started to examine the device.  It was active by virtue of a cobbling of sparkle breeders, connected at either end to stripped wire.  A box of .308 rounds, an empty rifle magazine next to it.  Besides that there was a white-painted metal case, and stenciled on it was the sign of the gang.

Not being good with the old Stable-Tec consoles (the keyboard buttons were far too small), I decided to ignore it.  I found that the case was filled with a burst of hot air and provisions.  A medley of 200 year old food boxes, their adverts faded but visible.  Several bottles of water.  A warming talisman had been inside of it, too, keeping the water from freezing and splitting the containers.

I couldn't think of how lucky I was to have found that many supplies.  Instead, I was furious.  How the hell had they set this up within walking distance?  The hill it was on had given them the means to stay low and out of sight when they approached the door, but...  I could only think they'd done so at night, and with more than one pony.  Those consoles weren't, by any means, easy to carry.  The fact that it existed pissed me right off, but it was mostly over my own worries about it even being allowed.  I kicked myself with mental vulgarities.

Had I been lazy on one of the night shifts? Had the others been paid off somehow?  Was there an untouched bunker I'd missed, with a nearby tunnel connection that led to one the Snowflakes had found?  As I thought to check the area a little more thoroughly (perhaps the hatch was near the boxcar?), I was stopped in my tracks.

Conversation drifted from afar.

It wasn't the first time I had hidden from the Black Snowflakes.  It was, however, the first that I would be discovered.  The moment I realized they were heading for the boxcar, and quite out of view of the tower snipers thanks to the hill, my reaction was simple.  Silent panic, hoping that the two mares I heard jokingly insulting each other were about as well armed as their peers. Especially when they quieted themselves as they walked up the hill, and one mentioned the blood and fresh tracks.

I tested the door a little.  It felt loose.  At least I had that going...  I had to rustle about for my pistol, awkwardly tugging it free of the holster while trying to avoid making noise.  I never thought that I'd actually need it on yet another outdoor run like that... I never had needed it like that, up until then.  Their crunchy hoofsteps only grew closer in the interim.

I turned around, and took a bucker's crouch.  I aimed my one leg at the bar of the door, peering back over my shoulder.  I waited.

There's a trick, to an ambush.  It's just like my camera.  Patience, placement.  Planning contributes nicely, but when all hell breaks loose... It's all about the timing and luck, weather or not you actually accomplish what you prepared for.  Skill only makes it look good.

I saw the gun barrel first.  It peeked in, carefully angling to the corner furthest from me.  I kept waiting.

As the head swiveled, starting to aim the weapon at me, I saw her muzzle- a pale green.  I reared up, and the way my heart bounced against my ribs allowed the blood to grant me an omniscience to my own body.  I felt every wire of muscle tense, and as the front half of her face came inside, the kick made me ripple as I bucked the door handle.

The door tried to slide shut in an instant.  Her flesh and bone cushioned it, and I heard her jaw shatter in a damp crunch.  She was stuck there a moment, pinned and broken, the fallen 9mm sliding down to meet my other back leg as I pivoted.

With one forehoof, I curled a foreleg through the door's bar and yanked it open.  Resting the broken chin on my shoulder, I squeezed at her injured head to hold it aloft against my own with my free hoof.  I let myself thump down to the ground with her weight.  I lowered the mouth of my 10mm as the world came into glaring view, the door slinging open.

Her partner's gun fired.  Not even seeing the make of my attacker, whose bullets dimpled the metal behind me, I returned my own shots at the sound and light.  With a heavy swak! The rush of light was shaded by splintering flesh, and I heard a yelp.  The broken gleam of the weapon, pulling up from a red spot in the snow, resumed tracking up toward me.  She had a red hide, muzzle hidden behind a poor face wrap that clung to her pistols mouthgrip, and blue eyes slitted in pain.

I threw myself upwards, just to try and throw away the mare I'd been cradling.  The effort tossed her, blood slinging from the holes of missing teeth.  My meat shield staggered and tried to stand.  She was still aware.

I hopped beside her, keeping the view against me broken by the recovering, green-faced mare.  The wrapped one had no intent to shoot through her jaw-busted friend- unlike me.  When I fired another round, nearly point blank with my closest attacker, it took her out at the knee and she collapsed.  I kept my aim solid, firing over her at the red face behind her, the recoil punching at my teeth and neck.

Greasy chunks erupted from where I had shot.  I heard panting, and wet grunts.  I saw breath clouds and steam from warm, exposed muscle, and my  vision cleared from the the burn my readjusting eyes had given me.  I could see her wide, blue eyes blinking, as darker crimson began to spread through the snow and clothing from the glistening trio of staggered holes.

I leaped over the green, fallen mare.  Putting a forehoof to the red one's nose, I pressed her head into the snow, and my pistol just beneath her ear.  One turquoise eye shivered at me.  Without another thought in my mind, other than she might get up, I tongued the trigger.

I stepped back.  Streams of breath condensed on my gun, frosting it.  Her opened skull provided the sight of the sloppy mess inside, the black hole cradling it, and her ear flimsily clinging to her scalp.

As I turned to finish off her friend, there was a pained, wet scream of rage.  I tumbled, surprised, as weight hammered into my side.  With barely enough time to react, I slung my head backwards, tossing my gun away.  She wouldn't be getting it.

The other weapon the red faced one had was still close, though...

Seeing her crazed face through the fur of the coat surrounding it, a few things remain with me to this day.  The bloody gaps between teeth, spilling salty wine to spatter on my face and neck. The way her tongue puffed out against the empty parts during breaths.  The mindless murder lust in her eyes.  The last though, was just how pathetic she looked with what I did to her just a scant half-minute later.

I had enough space between her body and mine that I could coil up.  Using my back hooves, I kicked upward at the joints of her back legs.  I connected one hoof with the flesh wound I'd caused in her leg; hearing a vicious snap and gurgling scream, I rolled with and rested atop her.

I stood, and leaned away.  Bringing my forehead back onto her already cracked jaw with all the weight I could reasonably muster, I connected off-center.  Though her snaggle-toothed face cut a groove into my forehead, her jaw completely unhinged.

I left her there, wallowing with her face in her hooves, and looked about.  There were the guns, but with the stupefying pain then in my forehead, I just didn't care.  

My head was bleeding.  I was scared.  I had been hurt by these outsiders, again.

I went to her dead friend to rustle around in her bag.  Finding more of the flares, I took one out.  Holding the cold end with my teeth, I twisted and yanked the ignition end away with my front hooves. The thing sizzled to orange life behind that boxcar...  And well out of sight of the tower ponies.

I had her to myself.  The kind of useless, leeching cunts that had killed Book Worm.

I returned to her.  I waited, until her eyes opened from behind her hooves.  I stabbed at her neck with the hot end, and an acrid, vile smoke burned my nose.  It seemed to stick to her, as if glued, and when I pulled it away a bubbling mass of steaming liquid flesh stretched with it.

She tried to scream, pitifully.  I pushed one of her forehooves away, and put a corner of my hoof against the lower jaw.  I pried her mouth open, with ease, while she whimpered and tried to jab at me with whatever working and unrestrained limb she had.  I thrust forward with the flare again, and managed- with some effort- to cram half of it into her grossly open mouth.

I pushed, and pushed, and pushed.  I didn't let the fizzling cylinder to rescind it's approach until I felt it at the back of her throat.  I was nose to nose with her, staring her straight in the face, as I felt the heat burrow an unseen hole and allow the flare to sink even deeper into her gullet.

I looked her deep in those pretty eyes the entire time.  Desperation satisfied, and amidst the blind antipathy I had not realized I was capable of, her life faded in front of me.  There were soundless tears in her eyes, her weak legs trying feebly to bat me away.  Eventually, the blood vessels in her eyes ruptured after her throat cauterized against the front of her spine, dusting the flesh around her sockets apple red.  Her eyes rolled back, and she was gone.

I had come back down from the clouds at that point.  I fell back on my haunches, holding my forehooves up to try and push the scene away as it suddenly conceived.  Stars floated toward where I was focused, my brain drowning from taking one too many deep breaths.  The stars moved to highlight her smoking head, her nose and distended mouth billowing the stink of overcooked meat.

I'd shot ponies.  Well, shot at them.  The wrapped one was the first one I'd actually killed with a bullet of my own.  That was clean, fast, impersonal.

I'd just murdered a wounded mare.  I'd never realized that I had been waiting for that opportunity.

I was alive.  Two on one, and I was alive.  Why wasn't I proud?  I'd smiled so much behind the binoculars...

As more of my brain rebooted, the blood chiming through my ears drained back into my neck.  I was able to look around, take in more of the scene with every one of my senses.  I hadn't thought there were more of them lurking around; when the idea reemerged, I frantically started to scan.  I reminded myself that they were there for a reason.

As I scuttled to find my gun (which had been well down the snow dune leading up to the train car), the already frozen mouthgrip stuck to my tongue. In the middle of trying to pull my palette away from the trigger, I looked up.

I'd been wondering why there were so many scouts that day.  My concern had only grown with what little they carried.  They were featherweighted, for speed.  The flares had no purpose, or so I'd thought, unless they wanted to say a very dumb hello to the tower ponies.

There was a storm coming.  When I realized the type I understood the flares were probably meant for a path, or to mark safe points.   Maybe fire a warning shot with the flare guns.

It was the sort of flurry that most of the sheltered Resilience ponies only heard about, since the warming bubble always made them swirl on the outskirts.  One of the cursed ones, from which the Black Snowflakes had taken their name.   I had never actually seen one so close until then.

Ebon snow was fast approaching where I was in what Resilience called a Dervish.  A thick, dancing set of dark cones that tossed around frigid necromantic filth, the tips of which had their points siphoning air, snow, and rocks into an upward spin and leaving a deep scar in the snow that allowed me to see permafrosted ground.

As if the corruption in the world had condensed amidst the sky and given itself form in a low-hanging, demure dark cloud, the shards of ice sparkled with miniature razors. They were known to leave nothing more than the irradiated ribbons of unlucky ponies widely sprinkled in it's wake.  They were so small, so quick, seeing one while in the open meant you were probably dead.

The Snowflakes hadn't been trying to attack or scout the city.  They were returning to a shelter.  There I was, out in the middle of all their fresh corpses.  I did not dwell upon it beyond a few more moments, as the Dervish rushed to meet me.

I knew I didn't have time to escape.  That was what made them so dangerous, after all- they were fast and attentive.  That didn't mean that I was out of luck, though.  The Snowflakes had prepared, no matter how stupid and desperate they had been in it's placement so close to Resilience.

I put both forehooves to my gun, and painfully yanked a small patch of frozen tongue with it.  I ran back up that  incline, pausing at the mare- I dropped my pistol, and wrenched the still burning flare out of her mouth.  I winced at the worsening local odor.

I ran to the train car.  I jumped atop it, and hoped the brazen display wouldn't be seen as some kind of taunt by a poorer spotter.  I stood on my back legs and waved the flare about, before spitting it to tint the snow orange.  I pointed down at it, still completely uncertain if they saw my details.

I screamed at the top of my half-empty lungs as I waved.  “In here! I'm waiting it out in here!”  I gave overdramatic points and jumps atop it, praying...

I waited for as long as I thought I could.  Thank goddess, it was enough.  There came the sound of a single gunshot, loud and ringing off the hills, that momentarily drowned out the wind.  There was no mistaking what it was- Sureshot's rifle.  He'd wasted a shot, just to acknowledge me.  

Alright you glorious flank-hole, I thought.  I'll be back soon, weather or not either of us want me to be.

I dove off the train car.  I galloped to collect my pistol, kicking up wet dollops of flattened snow. The angle and grip I had on the thing didn't matter, only that I had it.  

As I looked back at the Dervish, the shrill storm had already covered half it's distance to me.  It turned in flight, precisely aiming, as if it had spotted me.  Gallivanting like a predator, it's icy teeth compressed as if it were imagining how delicious I'd be.

I ran into the train car.  Dropping the pistol to meet the 9mm on the floor, I used both hooves to shut that door.  Realizing the wind might well slide it open, I used some of the empty wooden boxes to wedge it so it was locked closed.  Not a flake or grain of that stuff could get inside, I'd been told, or I would take the chance of feeling it for hours to come.

I leaned back and panted.  The wind struck the doors with a lethal affection.

What did that thing have at its helm?  Whatever that was could go and get bucked- for a single pony like me, all that energy was more than overkill.  It was graveyard quality entertainment.  Maybe I deserved to be the butt of that joke, but I wasn't about to be walked into the punchline.

All around, the slamming tinker of tiny blades clanked like loud static.  I sat back in the green glow of the monitor, the only light source, and stared at the door.  It jostled a little, but didn't move enough to open.  I let out a relinquishing sigh.

By Celestia.  What kind of luck did I really have?  I had more than enough time to ponder.

Surrounded by green “light,” I just sat there.  The cold and violence had taken it's toll, but not nearly as intensely as the suddenness of my quarantine there.  Confident I was safe for the time being, I did what I could to make myself comfortable.

I took the supply case, and the warming magic in it went through my veins like a wonderful poison.  I had to use one of the Snowflakes bloody, ruined coats as a pillow.  Watching the door, tugging at my pistol to keep it close, I smacked my lips at the realization my tongue had been ever so slightly bleeding. I used one of the Snowflakes water bottles to wash it away.

I had to watch that door for hours.  I had to listen too, quite carefully, against the noise of the Dervishes persistent, shredding howl.  The clattering of old wood, frozen and fragile, had to be readjusted every few minutes.  Even with the talisman it felt difficult to breath, and an odor of ashen, ghostly carrion began to hang in the air.

Having an imagination is a bad thing when you're alone like that.  It didn't take long for my mind to start playing tricks.  False hoofsteps, the snorts of ponies three times my size, and the stretching metal baying in my head like a monster squealing to get inside. The thought of eyes, staring at me, peering through the gap in the metal that Sureshot's rifle had left...

The bullet hole.

Son of a bitch!

I grabbed one of the coat tatters from my saddlebag.  I ran to the entry point, and found my hooves slapping inside a sticky, dark puddle that had hidden in the shadows.  Some of the black snow had clustered around the hole, the fuzzy crap melting down in a thick and zig-zagging stream down the inside wall.

Through the puncture, the putrid air of the Dervish had been pouring into the car, and I got a cleanly focused breath of it before I could plug the gap.  I took one of the remaining boxes, tilting it to hold the cloth inside.  I repeated the exercise on the opposite wall, and found that the wind had shifted; the Dervish had changed it's spin, consciously, pushing the air inside again from the opposing aperture.

When both were corked with quickly blackening cloth, I trudged away.  I retook my place near the door, imagining that the terminal was putting off some kind of fake firelight.  Even as the far corners of the cart began to ice over, a solid encasement forming to fill the empty corners, I kept thinking about getting home.  What it was like to be warm without magic or a terminal.  Heat itself was an addiction all it's own to Resilience ponies.

It took an hour or so to sink in.  I'd screwed up, in one little detail; a dot of light escaping through a sheet metal wall.

I threw up.  Twice.  I retreated to the corner behind the terminal to do it.

A nimble disease marched to delight my heartbeat into skipping.  I grew numb, while well heated by the talisman.  Like a drunken stupor, yet remaining aware, I was thrown into fits of twitching, random chills.

I couldn't help it.  I kept arguing with myself, reciting one thing. “Don't sleep.  It'll get you.  Don't sleep.  It'll get in and it'll end you.”

I repeated that until the last moment I remember inside that convenient little tomb.  I recall the far wall freezing solid behind an inch thick layer of fragile ebony.  I remember the smell of regurgitated food and a sense of real, consuming hate, focusing in on me with all the subtle and patient intensity a colt like me could muster from behind a set of binoculars.  With all of it closing in around me, centimeter by centimeter, I was thankful for my next failure.

I did not dream.

[***]

The memories were just feverish hallucinations.  A swirl of crippled thought, the tastelessness of cold air a passing and jaded familiarity.  The dervish had weakened and dissolved, and I had left the car for home through the shattered remains of a black ice shell on the train car door.  The snow crept up to congeal on my hooves and coat in a flimsy crust, and I remember how I shook it off before ogling the Doorman again.  He had apparently been informed of what had transpired, and hadn't expected to see me.

I had tipped.  The sky and walls twirled.  Sounds made me sick, forcing my stomach to try and vent in violent and dry gags.  I thought it was kind of humorous at the time, laughing at the fact I'd long lost whatever food I'd had not halfway back to Resilience.

Time darted past like a curious insect. It stopped to buzz in my face occasionally, and gently tumble in the air around my head.  I remembered instants before they occurred, and was surprised by things that happened hours before.  Pillows, actual pillows, made the bones of my skull hurt.  Whenever I was lucid, however many seconds or minutes or hours it was, the marrow and jelly of my body felt like flowing sand.

After one long, amber view from behind my eyelids, the room bleated into form.  I awoke with pair of hooves slamming into my chest, making me gasp like I had dry gills, and with a syringe jabbed between my ribs.  When the needle left with a flit, I listed every nasty syllable I could come up with.  The words you can fabricate when you're half asleep can turn out to be gruesomely artistic.

With a whistle from the “doctor,” he stared at me with wide eyes and a mournful laugh.   He said nothing, merely pushed me back down into the bed.  With the pain hammering to escape the prison my skull was, how it burnt the back of my eyes and threatened to pop them, I was still pissed off enough to disregard it.  It took all my strength not to just coil up a foreleg and clock him in the throat for bringing me back into the world like he had.

What the hell had he given me?  Buck, maybe?  Stampede?  I'd let myself suffer that a couple of times.  It never ended without broken things and fuzzy memories like what I had been experiencing- bones and dazed but grateful mares, respectively.  Why I was taking it well enough to think then, brought me pause.

Just how far gone was I, if only that crap was able to wake my flank up?

A while of sweating through my eardrums and cheeks, I was deemed fit to visit.  What they hadn't known, though, was that I was also up.  I had been pacing for a long time in the nude, listening to my hooves click along the amber crystal floor, before Sureshot swung the door open.

Even from across the room, I was in his face and snorting like a bull.  Like always, he didn't budge.  He met my eyes with a slow squint, the power of that calm will walling him off from that incomprehensible chem-rage I was trying to drown him with.

“You alright?”

“No.” I said, barely before he had time to finish. “No I'm not.   What the hell happened? What was I doing?”

He drew his tongue over his teeth, behind closed lips.  “You... Walked back.” he said.

“... That's it?  I walked back?  That's all that goddamn happened?”

He finally took to shoving me.  Even with the fact I was thicker than him, my pain trained instincts knew my place against his.  He pushed twice with his shoulder, the last giving him a bit of breathing room against my weight. “You walked back.” he said, again.

“Yeah, but what-”

“You walked back from a gunfight, from exposure, and from a dervish.” he listed.  “And the first things out of your mouth were mutterings of what you brought back.” He shook his head at me.  “Not a single buck for yourself, you only wanted us to get the supplies.”

“Why does that-”

“You don't get it.  You weren't supposed to, I guess that's my fault.”  He nuzzled a cigarette free from the tin he had, sitting on his haunches to clap the button on the side with his hoof. A little flick later, and the tiny hood at the side had the stick lit.  “Didn't want to short change you, but...” He trailed off, streams of acrid smoke escaping his nose and lips.

“So what the hell does it matter?  Did you get what I found?”

“Yeah, and we used some of the meds on you.” he said.  “But you don't know what you stirred up for yourself, do you?”

I sighed over my teeth, and sat down.  Feeling like I was burning a hole in the floor, I also thought my hooves were cracking the crystal with the weight I believed myself to have.  “I didn't screw up. I know I didn't, if I'm still standing here.”  I'd said that a lot with him, and whenever I did, he usually gave me the what for.  I was ready for the discipline.  Take a hit, take a few insults, and after a little simmering we'd both be right as rain.  That's what a brother like him was for.  Maybe the drugs would mix things up a little, but...

Instead, he brushed a hoof through his mane.  “You walked back from it all.”  he said.  “That's the problem.”

[***]

It wasn't more than a few hours after the chems initial rush had faded that I was dressed up in a fresher coat and placed in what we called the auditorium.  The name was laughable.  It was an old stable-tec projector on a table, surrounded by mostly broken stools, pointed at a wall covered in patchy cloth.  Overplayed entertainment tapes were jumbled in piles about the small room.  The place had once been a large pet kennel, and the bolts and drains of where the cages had once been remained in the tile floor.

There were two other ponies there, about my age.  One colt, with a far-too-short yellow mane and green-blue hide poking from the neck of his coat.  The other was a mare, just a little shorter than me, brandishing the same garb.  She was a pretty little thing- gold crystal eyes that jittered nervously against Sureshot as he paced in front of all of us, a blue tint on her white hide and a well kept deep blue mane.  She nibbled at her lips over and over, looking at me like I'd been her accomplice in something.

Don't blame me, I thought to her.  Whatever I did, it was all my OR your fault.  I wasn't about to accept any blame for what she may have done, especially if that's what we alone had been called up for.

Sureshot took another smoke.  I hadn't seen him indulge himself so much, and couldn't fathom why.  He eyed the ashes indignantly in the old tray by the projector, and cradled it before giving me one long and very similar look.

“The city is dying.” He said.  “It's slow.  It's a goddamn disease.  It's... Well, it's been a long time coming, and we're in no way to stop it without some help.  It's why you're here.”

He sat back and rolled his head, both hooves at the back of his neck.  Looking to the ceiling, he laughed while clenching his teeth around the cigarette.

“Ever since the whole incident with a certain trader,” he said, looking back at me.  I visibly grit my teeth at him.  “There have been less and less of them.  Her getting killed scared a lot of them.  The way we have to handle letting them in recently has scared off even more.  The way the outside is getting, they can't really be blamed for wanting to stay away from this place either.  That'd all be fine, but...”  

I wanted to remark, but whatever I could contrive would have probably been meaningful only to me.  My brain was still working off chems.  My body still felt mostly empty, half-filled with bland food approved by the doctor, and only a few thoughts could properly articulate through the combination.

“The raiders have gotten braver, the storms are doing nothing but spreading.  The cold is getting so bad we're running out of talisman's, and we can't recharge enough of them reliably to stop the hydroponics pipes from freezing and breaking.  A full supply route needs to be established, before we need to leave.”

“Leave? What leave?  Nopony said anything about leaving.” The little mare was a flurry of quick, barely intelligible speech.

“We have plenty of reasons to stay.” Sureshot replied.  “Not enough of the resources.  Hell, the brass the tower ponies use is most of the same stuff we've been using for years.  We're running out of ways to clean syringes and synth up potions...” He laid it out in unflinchingly plain speak, his knowledge far more thorough than what a normal stallion of his caste was.  With his kill count, he really was well liked by the ponies in higher places than the towers.

With that, though, it meant the elders had made him a part of whatever that meeting was supposed to represent.

“Son of a bitch,” I said, under my breath.  “Here it comes.”  The other two peeked at me, as if what I'd said was some kind of blasphemy.  To hell with you, I thought.  He's my brother, I've got that right.

“If we don't get a steady resupply,” he said. “We're going to have to pack up and head south.”

“How is that even possible?” I asked him.  Not once had he spoken up about that to me.  Not in private, not in the towers.  I did not appreciate being out of the loop, and he knew that.

“It isn't.” he said.  “We've gotten too soft staying here.  Not many of the ponies know how to travel in the cold.  Fewer still are capable of putting up a fight like some of us can.” He rubbed out the cigarette, and before long, had another one smoldering in his lips. “Most of us would certainly die in the exodus.  Goddess only knows what kind of reception we'd get in the south.  A good chunk of them stopped believing we even exist, with the few traders that do show up to carry stories back.  Can you imagine what would be said about us if a few hundred just suddenly showed up with a need for food and water and homes?” he laughed again.

“W-well what are we supposed to do about it?”  The mare asked again.  The colt was oddly quiet, as if paying attention was consuming all his mental fuel.

Without missing a step, Sureshot answered.  “We need to get more ponies coming here.  We need to let them know, and not through some caravan rumor, that we're still here and can sustain. Or, just make a few ponies rich in other supplies.  Somepony needs to make the Long Trot south to do it.” he said.

“Yeah.” I told him. “Because that's going to go so well, right?” I shrugged. “You just said, we got soft.  What makes you really believe we can do anything?”

“You're the pickers.” he said.  “You've all survived out there.  You know what to look for, you know where you should go to try and stay safe.  Best of all,” he peered between us all, resting that unrelenting gaze in each our faces.  It made me sneer back at him. “You can give that to southern ponies.  You can be living proof that the Long Trot is still possible and worth it, and you can tell them how.  We can stay, they can profit.  Everypony wins.”

“Oh buck off, Sureshot.” I exclaimed.  “What are you gonna do without us right where we are, huh?  No matter how weak the city got.  If anything it's just going to make things worse here while we get picked off.”

“Maybe.  But that last part is mostly going to be your own fault, isn't it?  Besides, you don't have much of a choice.”  He held the tray close to his face, using his lips to slap the cherry on the side and dust it off.  “I suppose you've seen a distinct lack of familiar faces in the past couple days.”

I couldn't agree with that.  Though, I didn't know how long I'd been out.

“You're a late wave.” he said.  “The others are already gone.  We're scattering out as many as we can, with one goal in mind.  Getting traders to come here.  Bribery, inspiration, blackmail. We don't really care.  What matters is Resilience needs it.  If we don't get a concrete trade started, well,” he shook off the cigarette one last time. “A lot of us are going to die.  The walls are going to be abandoned for the rest of us trying to make the Long Trot, and this place is going to be just another hole in the ground.”

“Is this the best you could come up with?” I asked him.  He looked back to me with one open eye, slitting it toward me.  “If anything, it's only going to make certain ponies want to stay.  There have got to be more ponies willing to see the bitter end with high heads than what you're suggesting.”

Sureshot waited.  He wanted to stay smart.  To stay the logical one.  I, however, knew exactly how to piss him off.  I'd exercised it quite a lot, too; just question what he thought was right.

He gave a point to the others.  “You two.  Get out.  Ask the door stallion for your supplies.”  He began to walk toward me.  Though the mare was mumbling nervously to herself, she did as she was told. The colt had lowered his head.  He was crying.  Crying!  “I said,” Sure shot smacked his shoulder.  “Get. Out.”  It took a couple weak bucks to his flank, but it got him moving.

It left me alone with my brother.  My stubborn, pain-in-the-ass brother, who'd I'd just found out had been keeping secrets from me.  The instant the door was closed, he found himself against it.  Lifted entirely from the floor, it was the first time I'd ever used my strength against his.  With the residual drugs still in my veins, the extra pounds I had over him despite the inches in height I lacked, I found out something I never allowed myself to believe I should have abused.

I was stronger than him.

He sneered. “That's right. Get it out of your system.”

“You think this is good shit, don't you?” I asked him.  He made a move only to brace himself against my front hooves, stopping him from being strangled.  “Why would anypony here want the pickers to get killed off?  What did you say to get my ass sent off, huh?  What are you pulling?”

I knew what I wanted him to say.  That he hated how I acted, no matter how good it was for the city.  That I was right for once, and it needed to be done and it was all for the politics.  And so he did.

It's one of the things I regret most in my entire life.

“Yeah, that's right. Blame me all over again.” he said.  “Do you even remember when the pickers started?” he asked me.

“Yeah.  Right after Book Worm.”

“No.” he said. “No!” he yowled again.  “They started a year after that.  When they saw your flank running around in the white shit, still a kid, prying through the garbage.  Sitting next to your brother in the meantime, no matter what that meant.” He didn't struggle, merely pressed both front hooves around one of mine that had him pinned.  “Not even the tower ponies had your nuts, or your energy.”

“I was only trying to eat.”

“Aren't we all.”  He kept on going like he hadn't even heard me. “And your pictures!” he tried to laugh, but his compressed chest couldn't.  “You don't even know what you had there, did you?  I don't think anypony did but me.”

I was alight with contempt.  “Don't bring those into it.  You never looked at them.”

“Of course I didn't.” he smiled at me.  “I never cared you could snap copies of a map that led us to some of the biggest scavenging finds ever.  I never cared that they showed other ponies that the inside of bunkers weren't so scary, and that they could come back alive if they just-”  I dropped him.  I just wanted to shut him up, to hit him, over and over.  The pull of dissonance kept my hooves still.

He rose to stare into my eyes.  “Looked at your pictures, and learned from them.”

“Bullshit.” I replied.  “I haven't taken a single good one in years, and you sure didn't try to help me set up for more.  The towers were more important.”

He walked back over to the projector, and from beneath one of it's corners, produced a book.  The flaking cover was green, the pages thickened by several pages of parchment.  It was familiar- I'd “misplaced” it a long time ago.

“You call them scraps.” He held it up with both hooves, in a stark jolt that kept it upright in front of me. “The other pickers called them education.”

I put a hoof to my head.  I'd been just a teen when it vanished.  How could he?  Those were his brothers.  They were MINE.

Sureshot marched back to me, stuffing it into my face.  “You never had to learn, because you were just doing it.  You didn't even care.  You didn't even stop to look sideways at what you were doing, not once, and ignored everypony else but me and you just to did it.”  He sighed. “Do you know how hard it was to keep the rest of the tower ponies from sending you off when you hit mating age?  To do this exact bucking thing?  You were a natural at it, and all you wanted to do was,” He laughed once more. “Stay here, and help us, without even being told we needed it.”

He started to cry.  Sureshot, crying.  I thought I'd seen everything.  “You've done so much more for us than you know, because you're so tunnel visioned.  Stay with family, keep the town around at whatever cost to your life that could mean.  You're still that stupid, which makes you perfect for this.”

“So why now?  If I'm such a damned burden being around, then why the-”

“Because you were the inspiration a crystal pony can make the Long Trot.  None of us have been south- none.  You're the first pony to head out willingly and come back.  You walked back from the worst of it that we know, without greed from a good cap run fueling you.”  He scooped up my scrapbook and waved it about. “What's more, you can prove it.” He shook his head with another morbid laugh. “Not just to us, either.  To the traders.  The other waves might have guts, but they sure don't have pictures...”

“Then it means I shouldn't leave.  Send the book off with one of the others.” I stumbled for excuses.  I tried to convince myself I was afraid, but terror had no say.  I was sick and angry and reeling- but not scared. “I could teach new ones.  Make some runs, get more pictures. Give us a better chance.  Besides, if there are so many others, why me?”

His chuckle festered the longer it played out.  He lowered his head down, and inhaled through a wet and dripping nose.  “We got some word from the early waves.” He said.  “Death notes brought by cowards who just didn't cut it, mostly.  This is the last wave I've been able to convince the others to send.  Do you really think those other two are up to it?”

He slapped the book into my chest.  I caught it, and looked down at it.  I brushed it off a little, across the dimple of where the broken leg of the projector had been resting atop it, sinking halfway into the material it was made of.

I was still unconvinced.  Though the words had flawlessly gouged a hole deep in my soul, one I still haven't covered, I was undeterred.  “I'm not leaving.” I said.  “You know you can't make me, now.  You need me.”

“Yeah we do.  We need you out there, on the other end of the Trot.  Doing what you've been doing all the while.” He pointed to the scrapbook.

“Buck off.” I said, slapping the forsaken thing to the floor in a crisp clap.  I pointed at him.  “You don't own my flank any more, and if what you said is true I can do more for this city than... Than...”

Sureshot smiled.  He put his back to the door, and stood up against it.  One long gaze toward the ceiling, he lit one more cigarette from his tin.  “Not up to me.  But colt, did I ever try.”

He pointed toward the projector.  On one side, there was a saddlebag I hadn't noticed prior.  I went to it, slowly upon his behest, and nosed it open.  Inside, there were unfamiliar things.  A pair of syringes, filled with a clear fluid.  Small, metal cylinders, tiny dots meant for the needle to pierce, at their head.  There were many of them, too numerous to count right away.

Sureshot put a hoof to his head.  “You try to stay, I promise.  We'll kill you.”

“You're sick, then.” I disregarded him, rolling the many trinkets around with a hoof.  I knew what he'd just said was a complete load.  I closed the pack back up, still unawares of what they even were. “I'm not going.  Burn me if you want, but I'll do better for you when I'm here.”

He kept right on laughing, and had to catch his breath behind sniffling breaths.  “Nopony else is going to need that stuff.” he said.  “Not me, not the ones walking the streets, not the other pickers with you.  Nopony else but you.”

“Why not?”

“The numbness in your skin?” he said.

I nodded.

“The jab the doc had to give your heart?”

I nodded.

“You didn't survive the Dervish, Snapshot.”

What?  I put a hoof to my own chest to prove I had a heartbeat.  I traded my eyes between the saddlebag and my brother, and took to jostling the contents once again.

His voice drew across a polished razor.  The words bled to death comfortably in my mind.  “You walked back, but not in time.” He said.  “The doctors couldn't purge the corruption from the storm.  You're turning Wailer.”

“Bullshit.”  I said.  “It kills first.  Reanimates.”

He shook his head.  “Not for a crystal.” he whispered.  “You know, like dad?  Remember how he always just... Smiled, through closed lips? Started wearing that facewrap all the time?”

I started to inhale lung-popping breaths.  I shoved the saddlebag, and it clattered when it fell to the floor.

“I guess I remember it better.  It's nice and quiet.  Comes from the heart.” he tapped his own chest with a hoof.  “Think happy thoughts... Right?”

Or else...

I turned to look at him again.  I started a slow and viciously intended return.

“That'll slow it down even more, or so the doctors tell me.”  He put both his forehooves forward toward the bag, as if presenting a grand and fantastical artifact.  “Turn off parts of your brain.  Make you a little happier for a while, so the corruption can't get it's pilot light going.”

Even as I closed in, he didn't budge.  He never budged.

“It was the Trot,” he murmured.  “Or throw you to Sorrow.  Put another name on the incinerator wall after popping your feral skull.”  He consigned his eyes behind his hooves.  He squeaked when he talked.  “You have to understand.  You have to forgive me.  I just couldn't do that.  I just...”

My lungs and heart reached a hammering crescendo.  The next thing I knew, he was on the ground, his cigarette bouncing amidst small orange flakes.  I could taste his breath, reeking of smoke.

“So that's what it's down to!” I screamed.  “Get a liability out of the city!  Hope that maybe the one guy you want gone would save your pathetic flank?!”

“Yeah.  For everypony else, maybe.” He shook his head, breaking into a despondent cackle.  “I trust you.  You did so much without giving a buck. You've gotten so strong without accepting or even realizing a moment of praise because you just thought it needed doing.  But you're an asshole, Snapshot.  That's what makes you perfect for this in everypony else's eyes.  You're a bastard without a life to lose, but you're too stubborn to give up.”

We shared tears, one set of mourning, one of rejecting, speechless animosity. “I tried to tell you, Snapshot.  Sometimes...  Things get so bad that it really does come down to one last shot.”  He rested his hooves, giving me the ideal, unfulfilled opportunity to break him in half.  “It shouldn't ever have to.”

[***]

Level up!

Improv: Conventional weapons are expected, so you've learned to switch things up in order to retain the element of surprise.  If you pass a perception check on mundane items, you can use these normally non-lethal items as close combat weapons, modified by your melee weapons skill.

The Long Trot: The First Day

Fallout Equestria: The Tartarus Contingency

Chapter 3: The First Day

Let me be by myself in the evening breeze,

and listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees.

Send me off forever, but I ask you please:

Don't! - fence me in.

–

A day to rest. Two full canteens, covered in cut furs so they wouldn't freeze, and two days of boxed food wrapped in a roughly hewn bag. A couple healing ampoules and a package of gauze. Finally, a pouch filled with a few hundred caps, for “persuading” traders to the far north.

This was the value Resilience placed on whatever remained of my existence.

I was allowed personal accoutrements, thank Celestia. What to take was an easy bit of brainstorming- My pistol, of course. Some ammunition and pre-loaded magazines. A few flares. My binoculars. My scrapbook and my camera, and a roll of parchment to reload it.

Finally there were the syringes, and the seventeen tiny cylinders of liquid that had three doses each. Thorn, Sureshot told me it was called. A fun little narcotic for crystals, it was a diluted poison that I was explained kept the mind sterile. He'd given me the recipe for it, thinking I could make use of it. It was mostly Chillbramble, a thorny root that looked like sharp veins running through our excuse for trees- the blue pillars of crystal that rise from the ground like large shards of glass. The rest was water, med-x, and brewing time.

Even though we, the pickers, were all armed mostly the same, I alone was insulted as “overloaded” by the only words I'd ever heard from the doorman. I told him to go and get bucked. I smiled when I saw he was not used to that.

The klaxons sounded, as they always had. The doors screamed and the chains jingled, as they always had. I stepped into the cold first, feeling the film of warmth turn to frost. I turned back around.

Two pickers remained at the doors, waiting for me. The doorman nodded. Sureshot, dragging off just one more cigarette, was standing there to see us off. Unfamiliar faces paused as they passed in their chores within the city, as if only to mourn. Snapshot had his coat up, and was hiding from me behind the fur. Even though a day had passed from the initial shock and the flat apologies, he couldn't look me in the eye.

I pulled my own hood free, and lifted the goggles. Even as my sockets began to freeze, the tips of my ears going quite numb, I barely acknowledged it. Thorned as I was, it was a welcome side effect. I looked back at him unabashedly. I wanted him to see my face, for that last time, while the doors began to shut. He finally looked up at me when I moved.

He didn't speak. He didn't look away. He waited, and didn't budge. “No goodbyes?” he asked me over the noise, the gate halfway closed.

I shook my head. “I think I got all those out with the bruises I gave you.”

He continued to watch me. As the view inside grew to a sliver, he had to lean in order peer beyond the door. “Don't let this get to your head. Resilience deserves to survive.”

The other two pickers with me glanced. They had already started walking, while I had lagged behind. They had paused for me, knowing our chances were so much better when a full troupe. What I replied to my brother with scared them.

I let out a unfaithful laugh. “We'll find that out soon enough I guess.” I yelled over the door's croon. His head lowered, and my home of twenty three years was sealed away behind that wailing and dense gate.

I clothed myself again, hood up, fuzz and goggles taut and comfortable. I turned around and grazed between the other pickers. They watched me with a worry that, I have to admit, satisfied me on some morbid depth of what my spirit then was.

They looked between each other for a while. I knew what they were thinking. The dose in my veins, still active since what Resilience excused as daybreak, kept me comfortably aware and resistant to whatever they could have said.

They were lagging then, uncertain if it was worth it to even follow me. “You coming?” I yelled back, continuing along.

With that, the two of them sluggishly took a place behind and beside me, wary enough to keep me in their sight. That made me feel dangerous.

“Where are we going?” The colt asked.

“There's a train station one of the other pickers marked a while back. From there, we follow the rails south.” There was the call of wind, making the coat fur at my face ripple and swipe.

“That's it?” the mare asked.

“Keep an eye out for movement that isn't ours. Besides that, yeah. That's it.”

Ten minutes in, we'd passed the only unique landmark. The train car. It's exposed corner was enraptured with frozen black muck, and large pink chunks in crimson stains.

There was a few hours of walking after that. A few bunker hatches, open wide, large red X's drawn on them to show they'd been pillaged by Resilience. We swiveled our heads over samey hills, twitching at errant flakes in the corners of eyes. Only the jaded sky and tender wind kept us company, the cracks in the clouds skirting sun around us.

With whispered conversation behind me, I had to give the drug credit. The way it kept my skin unfeeling, I never got cold enough to care about the things around me. It quelled my interest in what they were saying, and the claustrophobic blankness of the wastes as we traveled through it.

We reached the station without incident, and my vocally indirect partners galloped ahead to enter it's doors with a greed to get inside and rest. Thorned, I let them, only smirking as they distanced from me. The vague thought to scout it first with my binoculars quickly vanished. I didn't feel like a bastard, letting them play the distraction game for me. I knew I was, but the sensation of what that could have meant to me simply didn't register in my core.

Besides, I was intent on joining them then. It marked the end of the first day's trot. Being outside at night would have rendered a dervish invisible, the cold too intense. Still rather fresh, I never thought we would settle to sleep like we did- cozily, ignoring what we left behind, our eyes upon daydreams to be realized.

[***]

The hoary station was not forgotten. Inside, peeling wounds in the paint of the roof and walls had been plastered over with layers of random posters and bent nails. The light was from neatly tucked boards, with a single missing plank in the center that let me peer outside through a once elegant circular window.

“Is there even enough stuff to burn for the night?” The mare with me asked.

It was a big rectangular lobby. There was a door beyond the large, oak reception desk. That desk was more like a short wall upon which there were two terminals, their faces shattered and cradling broken tubes, and a nest of scattered tickets at their sides.

There were hoofprints in the dust, long swipes that had organized some of the little papers into a fan by one of the consoles. Canterlot, Ponyville, Manehatten, Hoofington. Those were only the names I knew, mind you. I pocketed the ticket that read “Crystal Empire” locating bitter sentiment in that it had a departure stamp twelve decades prior.

I read off more names in my head. Fillydelphia, Las Pegasus, Detrot... It was a veritable list of the scorches on the skin of the world. In reading them, I realized I had feelings again. The Thorn was wearing off, and for it, my dreamy, magazine perception of the old world began to clarify into nearly pitying the lost places.

While we continued to wander for supplies, I only found a few broken globes below a boarded window. One dingy orb still contained an unfamiliar and pointed tower. I tapped it, and the flakes of plastic inside spun upward into a miniature white out. What a twisted trinket... How could anypony want to make something like that in the north, let alone sell such a thing?

To distract myself from disgust, I pretended to care, and asked: “What's your names?” Being the first thing real thing I said to them as ponies instead of partners, they were surprised, but sighed in relief.

I had found a door behind a pile of garbage behind the desk while I talked; it was locked, but still I began to work at the knob. It didn't move.

You know how a crystal pony picks locks? With their rear hooves. I sent the glass jingling into the room it walled off. After kicking away the sharper shards that had remained, I stuffed my hoof through the window to slap around what I found was a push-lock on the opposite knob.

The mare spoke up first. “I'm Quartz Step.” She said. She started to drag a wire-mesh trash bin, scraping it against the cracked tile floor in a noise that made my flesh shiver. She smiled shyly when she saw my reaction, and stopped early to rummage around inside. She left only the paper and empty food boxes within, tossing the rest about behind her. She sat back, and produced a decadently engraved lighter from her own saddlebags – one of her own personal items. Smart girl, I thought, as she brushed a hoof over the flint wheel and lit the papers. She began to knead the fire to life with her breath.

“I... I'm Miser.” the colt said, after a long set of stares between Quartz and I.

I laughed at the name, then felt instantly apologetic. I had to remind myself I was trying to be “nice.” The gesture, to me, meant I had some soul left. “What do you do?” I asked. I grunted at the lock; it was rusted shut, and I had to beat on it a few times.

“Well, I... I'm good with caps.” he said. He had nothing more he was brave enough to say, and was watching me and the mare actually work. He was waiting, annoyingly lazy, or simply afraid to get in the way.

“That'll be hoofy.” I said, cheering for myself as the door clicked. Caring little about whatever life story he was ready to present, I began to tug at the front knob. “What about you, Quartz?”

Her cheeks slowly deflated as she distracted herself on me. The fire crackled. “I can dance.”

Fine. Neat. Whatever.

Then I realized these two were probably more useful than me, at least in a more immediate sense. She could boost morale, certainly, just by virtue of being cute or with smooth moves. He was good with money, and that was useful anywhere. I sure as hell didn't believe that what I had to my name held any value at the time, even with what Sureshot had done to reassure me about it's use to the pickers. Once again, I distracted myself, disrespectful of the value in my work. “Hey Miser- see if you can peel some of those posters down. We need to keep the fire up.”

As I pulled the door open, the dark recesses spilled clumps of metal and plastic trash. A pair of skeletons tumbled free amongst it, the bones splitting at the joints to become nothing more than pieces amidst the refuse. I hadn't expected that- my first sighting of the black bones inside had them embracing one another. At least they'd died together... Grumbling, I stepped amongst the litter, and began to search. “Well, I'm Snapshot.” I said. “I take pictures.” They looked at each other, and shrugged.

Mentally, I entertained myself in believing they were chatting about me. “Well, at least he isn't a complete asshole. It would be a lot worse if he was.”

There wasn't a useful thing on the shelves. The place had been rather clean; whomever first passed through must have ransacked it, then stuffed the garbage into the closet for comfort's sake. I then thought that our predecessors to that place might have organized the skeletons into some grim joke for a pony like me to imagine.

I rummaged around inside the closet, muttering to myself while I moved more and more pointless pieces. Beneath a wad of dented and empty cans, there were two fat pull-string bags. Inside, there was a plethora of unopened envelopes. “You know what? Forget that. I got something we can use.”

I dragged them toward the fire, and one of the bags threw up a collection of yellow letters. An object skidded to a heavier stop ahead of the others; a pair of letters, to which was tied a little metal thing. It was about the size of the other envelopes, though it was about an inch thick. One edge was curved, the other having a flat and once-shiny metal depression. To me, it looked like a book with magnetic tape inside, visible through gills on the surface. It had a small logo on the “spine,” one we all recognized- Stable-Tec.

Quartz found it immediately interesting, eying it pensively. She drew glances between the busted terminals and whatever it was, and grimaced when she realized we had no way to “read” it.

In taking up a knot of the remaining papers in my teeth, I was about to dump them into the garbage pail. Quartz stopped me with a hoof.

She took one from me, and opened it up with a long and tearing sway of her head. She unfolded it and started to read. I tried to dump the rest of what I had, but she insisted- “Wait a bit, huh?”

I rolled my eyes. “Warmth or peeping.” I said, over the paper crumpling in my teeth. “Pick one.” The cold was still sharp, and hung in the air like an invisible fog. I was not one to stand on another ponies whimsy for history. Not then, anyway.

She looked at me, then turned to toss the letter inside the bin. “Alright... Gimme those.” she said, pointing toward the letters and trinket. I slid it over carelessly with a hoof, despite her “careful” acting to make it look like she hadn't been the first one interested.

I took mouthfuls of the letters, and burnt them. Old wishes, what I assumed were ancient and poor attempts at poetry, kept us tepid. I had Miser crack the circular window to vent the smoke. Having loosened the string on her little treasure, Quartz overturned a flowery pink envelope with a bizarre and cruelly cracked wax seal. She opened it, and her eyes darted about the contents. She laughed a little.

I was about halfway through the first bag when she started to recite. Miser had taken a place next to the pail, and unfurled from his catlike placement on the floor to flick an ear toward her voice. “To my dearest and sweetest,” she began.

I know what you're doing. I have to say, I hate it. Please, I beg you, don't take that the wrong way- I hate what this war is forcing you to do. It just isn't you that has to do these horrible things, but I feel like it's you that's shouldering so much of it. The rest of the family keeps talking about you, wondering why they never see you... I know you so well, and I just can't believe you would want to do this out of some intent in the echoes of your heart.

Every ounce of me misses you. Not just you, but everything you mean to me when I see you. The warmth and understanding. All the strength you give, merely by being here with me.

You know where this war is going. We both see it. You're still out there, killing and gathering scars by the hour. I'm still here in the city, doing absolutely everything to keep the smiles and eyes bright with what few things I CAN do.

I just wish we could be together again. It's a need, a hungry wanting. You don't deserve this. None of us do, and I only wish every other pony out there could see that.

If you could just take off a few hours. Ride a train. Visit me, for even an instant.

Just let me tell you now. No matter the cost, no matter the time. No matter the wounds you have, no matter what you abandon. You know I won't judge, I won't care. You'll be here again, and that will be all that matters.

I'll wait for you, and you know there isn't a thing in this world that could stop me.

Come home. Please. I don't even care if you're in one piece. I just want to see you again.

“That's all there is.” she said, examining both sides of the paper.

“No signature?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. Not even an address. It's just a number.” She held up the envelope, and though it was hard to see in the feeble light, I could tell it was written by an accurate and artistic hand- too fine to be done by anything but levitation magic. 198149147. It was wrapped in a scribbled heart.

Quartz folded up the letter at it's creases and put it back in it's envelope, gingerly filing it into her saddlebag.

“You're keeping it?” I asked her.

“Of course!” she said, rearing back upon the question even being asked. She looked between Miser and I, whom shared offhand smirks. “What?” she asked.

“Nothing.” Miser said. “Other than it's so goddamn gooey your bags will be leaking before dawn.”

“Oh buck you!” she exclaimed. “It's sweet. Well, I mean, romantic. Wouldn't you like somepony at home writing to YOU like that?”

“I dunno.” Miser said, with a smirk. “Sounds like I'd want to stay out for a while longer to keep the clingy mare away.”

I snerked. Even though I rather agreed with Quartz, her suggestion was only a sardonic hope for myself, and I had to at least be realistic. I'd certainly never met anypony like that, though the letter did make me wonder. How hard had I ever even tried?

She grunted. “Goddess, whatever happened to romance? Chivalry?”

“Being in a matriarchy castrated it.” Miser laughed. “Almost literally! That was before the megaspells even dropped.”

“Here's a better question-” I held up a hoof to her. “Romance and chivalry? What would you do if you actually encountered it out here?”

Neither of them had expected that. There came no replies, only an uncomfortable silence as they tried to grasp at a reasonable, purposeful answer. When I asked it of myself, then, I wanted to apologize again in some way for even bringing it up.

I didn't have to. Quartz took to playing with the other letter, maybe hoping she'd find something she could use against my inquiry inside it. She had quite a time; the seal seemed much, much stronger. She had to pin the envelope to the ground with her forehooves, then tug upon the bottom edge with her teeth. Even after all that, it took several seconds of solid effort on her part (which Miser and I both mocked). She couldn't open it, no matter how it stretched.

The seal was glowing when she gave up, and in her attempts had gotten brighter and brighter. It bled a milky violet light, which almost drowned the orange of the fire. She angrily tossed the envelope into the bin, and I just had to watch it.

It didn't burn.

The hell? I thought. I buried it beneath another wad of yellow papers, suffocating it's glow. No use for the relics of unnamed memory, I thought. Especially if they wanted to remain private for eyes long dead.

Quartz fondled the metal thing, and pursed her lips. She glanced once to the terminals. “Well, damn.” She said, and spun it end over end.

“Hey, wait!” Miser said. “Keeping that is a good idea.” He said. “We might be able to sell it. That's got to be Stable-Tec, it'll be expensive.”

Huh. Maybe the little guy had something to offer after all.

“... Provided you don't break it before that happens.”

Suddenly aware of what she was doing, the tape went airborne as Quartz tried to stop it. She bounced it between her hooves once, twice. It hit on it's corner, and clattered to a stop in front of me. She hissed, her hooves at her face.

We eyed her a bit. She pouted. “Buck you.” she said, curling up to lay down. When I took up the tape in my mouth, I waved it at her from the gripped corner with a tensing of my jaw. “Stable-tec.” I said. “You probably couldn't break it with a sledgehammer.”

She raised up to stick her tongue out at us, causing Miser and I to laugh again. At least she could take a joke.

I pocketed the thing, and took the first watch. I played it off how Miser had- just some toy to sell to an over eager pony. It's with no small admission I can say, the mere idea of what might be on it had me charmed. So too, had the letter... I couldn't say that then, could I? Not to them, not to myself.

When I was sure they were asleep (Miser's nostrils whistled as he snored, and the sound gave me confidence he was out), I took to sating the flames. I opened many letters that night, and read quite a bit before I burned them.

Some of them had several pages. They were just rambling worries that had been realized, many years ago. A lot of those numbered and unsigned envelopes were inside, all of them individual while saying much the same as the first.

Several of them had pictures. Foals standing next to mothers, wearing ribbons and giving half-full smiles. Some of them were pictures of soldiers against the backdrop of a Celestian flag. Even back then, with all they had and accomplished, they didn't have enough energy to care beyond their own individual bubble. If only they had known about what was coming, what would they have done differently? Would the smiles be brighter before the last day, or would they have occurred at all?

Would those photographers, like I thought myself to be, have even allowed them to falter in front of the lens?

There was an old superstition about my camera that I played with. The camera could capture souls. Burning the pictures would bring misfortune on the pony if still alive, or if dead, would release the captured entities to be judged.

Honoring the old idea, I burnt every picture I found. I swear to this day, I heard whispers as flames consumed faces. There were no screams, no cries, no words I could discern. The sound was there, palpable, and each picture felt dismally heavy until they curled into nothing more than a black soot.

It made me go over my own book again. I convinced myself I just wanted to refresh myself on the photo's- swap up the technique from the angles and bad focus. In truth, being where I was, I wanted to burn the whole damn thing then and there, especially that photo of Book Worm. I always was selfish when it came to that picture.

It came to me that the envelope in the fire was still undisturbed. The flames danced and tumbled around it, tinting it orange. Realizing I had a chance to retrieve it, I didn't improve the fire for a while, letting the pail cool off until it was nothing but a set of smoking embers. I stole the envelope, with some fumbling effort, dragging it quietly to the lip of our fire place. When it was free, freckled with ash and still warm, I bagged it.

Maybe a unicorn would know how to open such a thing, I thought to myself as an excuse. Maybe it would be a neat little diversion for emotion. Maybe the enchantment would be something a pony could reverse engineer, if such a thing were possible at the time, and that could be worth a well polished cap. It could have had pictures inside too, and the souls would need to be freed.

I looked at my partners. At the time, Quartz was apparently having a sweet dream. With nothing better to do I unscrewed the bulb on my camera, so as not to wake her up with the flash, and took a picture of the unsuspecting smile. I didn't bet on any of us surviving, not that we wouldn't try. I had planned to write upon it's back “burn me, if you find this on a dead pony.”

Miser awoke to the noise of the camera's printing. I bagged my toy before he got really awake, picture and all. I took the opportunity to make him take the next shift, and handed him the other bag full of letters. We had to restart the fire with our breath, but we managed, and eventually I used my own bag as a junky pillow.

It took a while to greet the day. I could hear Miser pacing, to the window, to the door, to the counter. Cowardice certainly granted a way of being alert, I thought to myself.

His hoofsteps were loud. The violet envelope and silver book grew petulant until warm darkness took me. I slept, and I did not dream.

[***]

The Fields of Hungry Earth

Fallout Equestria: The Tartarus Contingency

The Fields of Hungry Earth

–

“Do you even realize how you've shattered the land, Twilight?  Do you think it has any reason to forgive you?” -Shining Armor

–

Waking up on the second day had been tough.  The cold puts you down deep, and stumbling out of freezing sleep with only a few hours supporting your eyelids can make them hurt quite nicely.  I told Quartz and Miser to go outside while I made sure the fire was out, so they could scout for assholes- “just in case.”  I took the moment to Thorn up, quietly.  Then, we all took a bite of food, exchanged some reminders toward one other on our respective gear, and The Trot continued.

Two hours passed.  A thought occurred in that time; below my hooves, the tracks had not broken.  Heck, most of them were clear and clean, though there was some ice in the divots between the wood.  I could spot small scrawlings every few yards.  Each block of alien text repeated on the rails themselves, deeply grooved into the metal.  They were similar to the writing usually circling a warming talisman- it wasn't hard to figure out what the writing was from there.  The Trot continued.

I kept wondering to myself how the talismans recharged.  I didn't know the method, but I did know the energy needed to replenish.  How the hell did the rails work differently?  Did the way the runes were written have something to do with it?  More importantly, why hadn't they been stripped?  Seemed like a waste of good metal, especially if hanging it in your house could keep the chill out.  Another hour passed, and we reached another train stop.

It was more of a porch and a vertical closet, really.  A large one, but it remained as just a ramshackle room.  A snack vendor was leaning on it's sister, a soda machine.  “Golden Laurel's Quick Eats” was sprawled on one, with “Crystal Cola” on the other.  Next to them, a door led to a tiny bathroom.  To our disappointment, the pipes had long since been stripped.  The tiles had been peeled up, and that which hadn't been taken was split from the cold and beneath a thick layer of ice.

We quickly got to work checking everything else out- all that remained were some scattered old-world bits, broken glass, and two bottles of a strange, clear drink.  The vending machine we got it out of was fascinating to us– it's paint hadn't tarnished that badly, since it had been inside for so long.  It was shades of bright pinks, blues, and greens, organized into jagged and once shiny shapes, which had obviously been polished to a purposeful sheen.  They were cartoony images of “Ice bushels,” the jutting blue bushes of spiny crystal the pickers had come to know.  The fact that they had shades other than blue would have me feebly entertained until we set out again, but for then, we simply stopped and took a break.

We stared at a poster that had been there and tried to make sense of it.  Most of it had been scribbled on by previous passerby's.

Leave some for the rest of us, huh?

Fuck you, I do what I want.

The image was mostly violet.  Flowing, stylized sparkles wrapped around a sunrise.  “Working toward a warmer future!” Proclaimed the poster.  M.A.S. Was in the bottom right corner, loosely attacked by markers, pens, and pencils.

Damn do I wish I'd had something to write with back then.

The Trot continued.

… And I screwed up.

We saw the spires well before we actually reached them.  Dark gray and frosted brown, even from the mile or so that we had to cover in dingy wind.  Needles that had been used by some sort of giants, and scattered over the field in some poor attempt at emulating grass.  Though, when I got to inspect one near the rails, it was more accurate to say that it’s closest simulacrum was what I believed to be trees.

I had to examine it to make sure.  The trunk of the broken thing was hollow, at least a pony in diameter.  It’s rusted edges gave way to a hole, and for a few childish seconds I wondered what kind of trees were that hollow and browned from water.

After tossing a rock inside, we found that it was far too deep to descend safely.  The sound clanked after a rough count of five, give or take, and we sure as hell weren't interested if none of us knew how deep the hellhole went if it took five straight seconds.  The rest of the broken tree had “branches”- small outward juts that suddenly shot up along the same angle as the spire, only the branches were thinner, and tipped at their ends by shattered lights.

Some of the spires had tilted or outright fallen, leaving the place to look like a jagged, pre-fabricated forest.  No leaves, unlike in the magazines I had read.  There were never any leaves where I'd lived.  That green idea had stuck, though.  Was the place some kind of cruel joke for the north?

Had this shit been made to look like trees?  The makers concept of “A warmer future?”

Cunts.  I'd thought, cursing them out on the precept.

I took out my camera, and slung the strap over my neck.  A pair of quizzicle looks later, I'd gotten a few far away angles to bag, and let my camera hang while we continued on.  Then we reached the first whole “tree,” which was not more than a couple feet away from the rails, we found chickenscratch.  Another marker.

Most of the attempts at graffiti had been cut into the metal with sharp objects.  It was all barely legible, or were poorly scribbled angles of aroused stallions presenting themselves (with a few hearts around select parts).  Through the disgusting display, one iteration had been done with a paintstick of some kind.  It was elegant and readable, and had not suffered any further marring.  It had, in fact, been completely avoided, as if holding a place of honor.

We have starved the Earth.  Every one of us He eats, is just a morsel.

I almost smiled at it.  Almost.  Poetry on survival never accomplished anything in the wastes, just made lasting another day feel that much more grand.  Wasting paint for that was nothing more than arrogance.

I took another look around.  That was the mistake I'd made- getting curious introduced a slew of problems.  Besides the trees, there was hardly anything to care about.  Fields of white, some pale wind.  No burn barrels, no markers besides the one we were next to.

Just those damned needle trees, going on for miles in every direction.

When I spotted it, I was sort of relieved.  A small, blue splinter was coming out the edges of a square building in the distance, seemingly placed in the center of the dead place.  I hid from the wind behind the tree, and mouthed out my scrapbook to take a glance at the map.

I made a few assumptions (like one ought not to do out there).  There was a hoof-written circle with some text that had turned to jibberish from the quality of my camera.  Such a broad stroke over so much land had to have covered where we had been, right?

There were two bunker points.  Thinking to pray on the luck we'd been having in meeting anypony else, I picked out the closest one and asked my traveling companions.  “There are a couple bunkers,” I said.  “I think the building out there is hiding one.  There is one further down though, and we still have a nice block of daylight.  Want to try for the next one?”

They were both looking around, distantly listening to me.  Quartz was turned away, sitting on her haunches like a standing cat to try and peer at the top of one of trees.  Her earhoods flicked.  “... Yeah.” was all she said.

“Miser?”

“This place gives me the creeps.  I vote moving.”  His eyes kept shooting back and forth, and his neck kept craning to peer around tree trunks.

Two on one.  Arguing would have only killed daylight.  I snapped my book shut, and stuffed both it and my camera into my bags.  Out came the binocs.  “Alright.  Gimme like two minutes.  I'm going to see what that building is.”  Then, I started to trot toward it.

Idiot.  Moron.  I can reliably call myself that now, and not feel like I'm cheating myself of being anything better.  Kind of cathartic, if you can believe that sort of thing.

I kept trying to get better angles on the building through the lenses.  It did have a sign, but I couldn't make out the tiny, snow swept text.  The trees kept getting in the way, once I had cut some of the distance.  I heard the humble whine of ice, bracing weight- mine.  I figured it was just another slick beneath the snow, even if it sounded a bit off, and dug my horseshoes in to keep my balance.

The moment I did, snow began to fall into cracks that shot away from where I was standing.  I took one look back, watching a web form beneath and from me, and spotted Miser watching in horror as I began to sink.  He cried out for Quartz's attention, and she snapped her surprised gaze toward me.

Then, I was gone.

Everything went dark, but my eyes were still open.  I hadn't even realized I was falling, and thus hadn't even screamed on the way down.  I bounced once, rolled off a jagged incline of rock, and continued to plummet.  When I slammed into the hard earth a few seconds later, my forelegs compressed beneath my chest, and the impact on my lower jaw shattered the delicate mouthgrip of the binoculars.  I spit up metal parts and blood, while the tinnitus took a sudden hold.  My camera had spun on it's strap behind my neck, and my body painfully cushioned it's weight.

I pawed at my bags, opening one.  I rolled the contents out of each, and when the wave of ringing cleared, listened for the skitter of glass.  I took up one of the ampoules, fidgeting with my bruised forelegs to stand it upright, and cut my nose open as I used the side of my face to snap the thing open.  Chugging ampoules with a broken jaw... I should've named the trick.

While everything knitted, I heard the warble of Quartz's voice inside my head.  It was mostly condensed, panicked swearing.  I couldn't reply for far longer than I would've liked; if you move while the potions work, especially in the cold, things just don't heal right.  This is especially true if you force the broken bits to, as quickly as the potions tend to work.

“I'm fine!” I lied.  I opened my eyes as the vertigo left, and I felt the cut on my nose squeezing shut.  There was barely anything there; the hole I'd opened up in the cave roof was some of the only light.  The area ahead was pervasively empty, with softly sparkling blue gashes deep within what appeared to be stale rock.

I sat up, and turned about.  First things first- belongings.  Salvaging pride waited until after I'd gathered everything else.

Two fuzzy hooded silhouettes peered at me from the dot of light above.  I sat back and looked up, trying to search.  “I... I can't...” Quartz was busy scanning.  “There isn't a way down! Everything is too steep!”

Down could have easily replaced up and meant the same thing.  I looked back.  The blue earth-wounds had a good number to them.  I was in one hell of an open place under the ground.  It felt like a small field, empty of snow, which had been hidden just under the surface.

“I... Shit.  Rope!  Maybe there's some back at Resilience! We can-”

“NO!” I shouted back.  “No!  The bunker ahead- keep going.  When I can-” I corrected myself.  “If I can find a way back up, I'll catch up.”

There was a pause.  “Are you sure?” Miser asked.

Quartz looked straight at him.  “You can't be serious!” She yelled.  “Resilience will be fine for a couple extra days Snapshot!  We can come back with some help!” She stammered.  “J-just hold out!  We all need to make it south!”

“I said no!” I replied.  “Get it in your head, Quartz.  As many as possible need to make it south.  That doesn't have to include me.”

Right then and there, I secured her disgust for me.  Knowing what I do now, I only wish I'd done more.

I located my scrapbook on the cave floor, which had been neatly cradling one of the flares.  Thinking providence would have laughed had the thing twisted on all it's own, I opened up the book to hoof out the map again.  “The bunker is... East of the rails.  Not a far clip, should be at a-”

“You have got to be kidding me!”

“Town?”  I tried to read in what I had of the light, disregarding her cussing while Miser remained notably absent out of our exchange.  “Quartz, there is a town near that bunker.  Ruins, at least. Get there, it might have something you can use.”  I finished gathering everything together while she tried to reason with me.  I scowled at the shattered binoculars.

“The other bunker.  It's got to have something.”  Miser said.

“What? Didn't you just see what happened?  Do you really think you can get there?”

“No- it's a good idea!  It's got to have something!”

“It was a rhetorical question, Quartz, not a bucking-”

“Miser's right on this one.  Just stay there until we can come back, okay!”

“You're.  Wasting.  Daylight.  Get to the next one, even trying for this one isn't safe!”

“Shut up!” she screamed.  “We're making it down there- all of us.”  She motioned with her head, and the two vanished.

Arrogant bitch!  I fumed to myself.  If even one of us was going to make it down there, it wasn't going to happen by getting sidetracked for some asshole.  Overconfidence -exactly what I'd just fallen pray to- was the first thing to get a pony killed.  The more I think about that, the more I realize she never believed it.

I turned around, toward the luminescent blue cuts.  I stepped out of the natural light, procrastinating enough to let my night vision kick in.  It didn't help much.

I started to trot, lightly.  I made sure when I stepped, it wasn't “ice” I was standing on again.  The closest wound was inside the cave wall; past the opening, I saw inside the glittering edges of fine crystals in the rock.  I paused there, breathing in a strange, unwelcoming heat, absent of anything but hollow silence otherwise filled with a distinct, frail crackle.  Like thin glass, somehow being crumpled into a ball.

It took me a while to go on.  I was thrilled, I guess you could call it.  Being scared was hard while on Thorn.  The adrenaline had helped to weaken the narcotic, though, since I then realized I'd actually felt pain through it.  It was still not a comfortable excitement.

I took one last, deep breath before I went to the next light-hole.  Just a morsel...  To Hell with wasteland poetry.  At least pictures were up-front in their meaning.

[***]

I'd been wandering for so long, the duration had become meaningless.  There were cave walls, blue crystal gashes, and the occasional Stable-Tec light that left divots of caged golden light.  Those parts were mounted on metal jutting from the rock, the same alloy I had seen rusting above.

The roots of the trees I had seen had been driven deep into the ground, with mouthpieces that gave air which tasted like bits, and dripping vents surrounded by flaking emergency paint.  There were almost always in open caves.  Those were beautiful places, even with what had been so implanted.

The caverns were wide and tall, with ice scabbing over sinkholes above.  Crystal crept from smoothed slices in rock, or peeked from cavities and emitted a soothing blue glow; others had grown into sharp bunches of thorns aimed down from the roof, and had curled upon itself to form jagged curves far from where they had sprouted.  After my eyes had adjusted, their shine even seemed bright, and hairline growths had cottony glitter wafting about like sparkling sheets of webbing.

The Stable-Tec lights burnt the notion of natural light away with some kind of internal deviltry that had kept the bulbs snapping and lit from behind glass imprisoned by bars.  What was cast from those felt warm, without sincere heat.  They were just trying to be effective, even after all those years.  Being welcoming was not what they had ever been meant for.

I didn't fully appreciate the light from the still working technology.  I used it, but only because I had to.  The same could be said of the air.  The vents and mouthpieces in the underground treetrunks gave me a steady supply of coppery breaths when what was down there became too thin.  I had to inhale the foul flavor, since the floating dust coming from the crystals had clogged my facewrap, and frosted me several times before I had learned to break it off by shoulder-slamming a wall or stomping it off.

It wasn't unlike being wet in the cold.  The difference was that it simply wasn't cold.  Everything down there seemed to remain at a comfortable temperature without a breeze, with pinpoints of heat that weren't meant to be rushed toward like the heat barrels or bunkers on the surface.  They were meant to be taken in, scouted for wandering things I kept imagining were there, and to shake off crystal flakes that had collected in my short travels as a dry shell that felt like I was soaking up glass.

Some of the lit places had lockers.  Most of those hope-instilling boxes were open, and pitifully empty.  Others had bones surrounding the bases, cocooned by rotting, synthetic cloths.  They were usually near a set of decrepit mining tools.  Their fleshless faces were always bare.  Always smiling.

One corpse I came to had the bones pinned to the metal of a trunk.  It was was in a hall that led to a fork in the path – both were lit by Stable-Tec, though only one had the lovely, humming blue.  Neither direction was natural.  Water doesn't dig paths that straight, nor does it put down the base of bulb lit metal spires which extend into the sky at every hundred steps.

The pitted remains of a pick was holding the skeleton up between it's ribcage, the wood covered in patches of moss.  It's teeth were still clutching at the mouthpiece of the alloy trunk, the horn on the skull having been gored into the metal to keep it still.  The floor was grimy with a large black stain, and the shattered remains of legs still attached to hips.  Apparently those old miners couldn't even trust each other with breathing.

If something that brutal was happening back then, maybe the old pony ways hadn't been so different than the new.

I tried to figure out the order of the body's demise.  The pick to the torso, or the destruction of their lower half.  Creativity, as something visual, is awfully cruel.  I started to think of how it had happened.  Breaking somepony's legs in a manner that the bones could be so spread was difficult.  Was it sledgehammer? Jackhammer?  Maybe they had used some mining explosives stuffed in an orifice.  I was used to ideas like that, luckily, and stopped giving a shit when I realized I was wasting time.  I filed the methods away with the sour creep of disgust in my throat.

Tactile imagination is just as bad as visual, I should mention.  Crunch, crunch.  Was that the cave floor, or did I step in something brittle?  I snorted a sickened laugh to keep myself entertained.

When I reached the first locker, inside was a pleasant surprise.  Of the things the ages took, the porn always did seem to be well kept in comparison to anything of value.  I bagged the issue of wingboners with a smirk.  The poster was too delicate to take.  Too bad, too – it had been of silver, crystal mare, whom had “the shine” to her coat when the picture had been taken.  Regular crystal ponies had lost any claim to that magnificence a long, long time ago.

True to creativity being a bitch, I started seeing bones in her transparent coat.  Organs and veins.  I hurried to the next locker to keep occupied.  I fumbled with the door, the lock seeming jammed, the door itself distended outward.

I swore a few times, focused on the locker.  It was a reprieve, but only lasted as long as the syllables I used.  What if I couldn't find my way out?  What if I started to look like her?

How long would I last down there after I died?

I got violent with the locker, still using my imagination to it's limits, and fighting it all the while.  I could hear weeping in the halls, suffocating the bang of the locker, as what I thought I could be approached from one of the paths I hadn't yet traveled.  I left hoof sized dents in the brittle metal, tearing it in places.  The echo of shambling steps got closer between snotty breaths, sending my heart into a beat that felt volatile.  A coat dragging on stone, steel horseshoes worn and rusted, limped down otherwise quiet paths.

“Screw this place.” I growled, to nopony at all.  With another slam, the lock crumpled, and the place was silent again.  Nothing was around me.  I took a long time to check, trying to breath all the while.  I was going to need a lot more than a peevish locker to keep my mind from speeding off into the caves, but I used what I could.

The locker I peeled open had a jumble of tools in it.  They were densely packed, and they fell over me like a bad joke (“you found something, shithead!”).  I picked myself up out of the pile, shaking off – of all things – shovels.

I took one up, and examined it in the light.  Around the shaft a once white sticker had been applied, on which had been written “Crap storage.”

Well, how goddamn nice.  I thought.  It was a valid label; trying to dig through the frozen earth, let alone stone, was a fantastic waste of time in the north.  It was why Resilience burned the dead.  I gave a poor smile at the idea I might figure out how to dig up.

The shovels all had a pair of emblems upon them.  The logo of Stable-Tec was grooved into the mouthgrip, a dark, polished wood that had preserved the sheen of its manufacture while in storage.  The back of the black heads were painted with that of a card, the Ace of Spades.

Comedy is best when you need it, so of course I laughed at the pun while I was there.  I propped the shovel I'd perused on the locker, and rifled about amid a webbing of cloth strips that had been intertwined.  Carrying straps, with hardly a care to how any of them had been stored.  I recited to myself the mantra of the pickers, One Stallion's Trash.  

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, take worthwhile stuff, before it all rusts.

To hell with wasteland poetry.  It programs colts to survive without thinking.  The bit that had me tightening that shovel to my side, though, was keeping me alive.  I didn’t really deserve to complain about what worked.

The shovel wasn't heavy, all things considered.  The straps held it tight to the side, and had a loop with a snap button; I chose a stubborn one.  I didn't like things getting plucked off of my body if I had to squeeze through a tight space.  More effort to peel the thing off and wield it wasn't a problem in my mind.

I was feeling alright after that.  I didn't find any right-flank carriers, so just left the rest of the shovels where they were.  They were awkward things, for certain, and hauling another one around would've slowed me down badly.

I looked up to see the fork in the caves.  One side had gone nearly dark.  One of the lights had started to fade in and out.  A bloody red reflector squeaked as it spun around a bright bulb, sending a wedge of crimson light around and around.  It hadn't been doing that when I found the locker.

Squeak.  Squeak.  Squeak.  An unseen speaker spewed crackling noise, which sounded like synthetic whispers.

The air had stilled.  Icy stone crackled.  I stiffened my flesh around my bones, locking in place.  A hollow howl made my coat fur barely drift, and then everything was perfectly motionless.

A dollop of something wet splashed on stone.  The red light in the distance faded, and I was suddenly in darkness.  The light above started to squeak, squeak, squeak, bathing me in red as the reflector rotated.

I peered through the gills of the locker window, pretending to be infatuated with how empty it was.  The light beyond was eclipsed by a shape.  It was the shadow of a pony standing nearby, hushed of sound and movement.

I didn't dare let it notice me moving.  How had it gotten so close, so quietly?  I shuddered, keeping the corner of my eye focused on them, lifting my foreleg to paw at the back of the locker.  I kept my hoof braced, and drew my gun behind the door.  I took a deep breath, closing my eyes, and when I had opened them discovered they had advanced several feet closer – all without making a sound.

When I presented myself, I was certain they knew what I was armed with.  The stance I had taken was irregular, undecided on fleeing, or firing.  The gun mouth was pointed directly at them, and as their head sluggishly began to lilt on it's spine, I tried to talk to them.

“I didn't mean no trespass.  I fell in, was only looking.”

It paused, then kept tilting.  The sound of dry sinew, stretching and snapping, accompanied the appearance of holes in the black as the head continued to lean in curiosity.  The shadow gave way to the world behind it as the head continued to twist, going limp on the spine before inverting in an impossible cant.

It was like staring into water that swallowed light.  There was no skin, no veins, no organs, no bones.  The moment I searched for it's eyes was the moment it grew one, the blue cornea opening in it's neck like an erupting blister.  The eye crawled up it's body as it snapped back to attention, a second ocular forming in it's chest and slithering up it's face to finish the pair.  The second eye had been vividly brown.

It never answered me.

I stepped backward, sending a shot into it.  The bullet punched clean through, as if they hadn't even been there in the first place.  A grin lit up on it's leg, the teeth scattering and clinging to it's surface.  They reorganized at it's face to give me a fanged smile below offset eyes, all of them drifting within the mist that made up it's body.

It's eyes squeezed tightly shut.  Tears spilled out and down it's cheek, slapping the stone.  A whimper went through the crackling speakers.  When the lids opened, they had turned to lips.  Glistening, silver-toothed maws wept drool.  They extended out from it's head on the edges of thinning stalks, reaching for me.

Famished teeth snapped, but it made no other sound as it began to chase me.

[***]

I'd been playing a game with the thing for some time.  I don't know how long.  The rules were easy to learn, though I hadn't been given the option to break them.

Squeak, squeak, squeak.  I was sitting back against the alloy trunk, feeling it breathe.   The light above me started to spin like the others had, pissing out red light in a wide cone.  That was the marker of rule one: When the red lights came on, the thing was close.

There were speakers on the trunks, too, I found. They were small boxes, stamped out and bolted together, hanging by blue-red plastic veins.  They had been just as strong as the shifting lights, though they were lousy with rusted holes that showed their shiny transistor guts.  In perfect quiet, white noise trickled through the central mesh circle.  When the thing decided to think, it did so too loudly.  The speakers were it's voice, even though it only spoke through unintelligable, floating whispers.  That was rule two: it never made any noise but those whispers.  If I could hear those, it was closer, and thinking about me.  I tossed the first empty flare down as it sputtered, reaching for another from my bag.

I twisted the second flare of the night up.  The only reason I knew it was dark outside was that the ice above had grown black, leaving only the few crystal growths and trunk lights as respite.  The thing wasn't afraid of the crystals, dimming them after I'd run past and spitefully turning them ebony.  The flares, though; it really hated those.  Whenever I paused, I could see the reflection of them shivering in dozens of glossy orbs while they blinked at me.  Just as many teeth free floated in murky fog, organizing into smiles that only showed at the corner of my vision.  That was another rule: It couldn't maintain itself, if it was stuck in bright enough light.  Not the teeth, anyway.  I had popped so many eyes beneath my hooves my steps had gotten slippery.

The most important rule was that the thing was hungry.  I no longer had a tail to speak of.  It had snatched that away from what peeked from my coat just a few moments into the first sprint.  The base remained, but the hair had grown diseased at the edges, crackling to the touch.  It had dug a couple of scratches into the coat, too, and snagged the lip of a saddlebag.  A tin of Cram had fallen out, and one of the mouths picked up the scent.  While it fought with it's other faces, I'd made some headway in no direction at all.  I'd used the rest of my food in much the same way, purposely tossing it, but the thing only ever slowed for a minute at most.

I took one deep breath from the mouthpiece at the trunk.  I had to prepare for another run.  Eyes were squirming over themselves like yolks on a griddle, and it was smiling again.

Up came the flare, and down went my head.  Crush the eyes, bash the teeth.  I thought.  Run like hell.  You can do this.

The question I never let myself ask was for how long.  The thing did, though, licking it's chops while it murmured through the speakers.

It's hard to remember halls and caves when they all look the same.  Trying to get a lead on my own shadow, I didn't even care that I was following old arrows on the trunks, or scrambling over clothed bones.  Trying to breath, only to see the light start spinning...  Air barely mattered as much as being ahead.

  I paused, wheezing so hard my facewrap dripped with spit.  It mixed with the odor of the flare, still clenched tight and keeping one side of my face dryly burning. There were two trunks at the mouth to another opening, one to either side, yellow and refreshingly bright.

The world fell away over the edge.  Below were the barely visible tips of unforgiving crags, visible only from the light.  There was the trickle of water.  It was so distant beneath me I didn't even bother to make a guess.

Squeak, squeak, squeak.

I started to search, as the light of the flare shifted.  They always burned different toward the end, as a built in warning.  I put it down on the cliff edge, realizing it was only a gap when I saw another pair of lit trunks on the opposite side.  There was the glow of two wires and a large box with windows – wires, and a tiny, broken cable car barely clinging to the metal rope. I looked up, and sure enough, saw pulley sunken in just above the mouth entrance.

Down went the flare, if for nothing more than to buy enough time.  The head-high control panel was busted open, it's front peeled apart and it's contents hammered to pieces amid even more bones.  I stepped atop it, yanking on the wires; they wobbled, but there was no give.  The pulleys, at least on my side, were still sturdy.  I had a shot, if I could use something to slide across.

I unbagged my last flare, hearing the whispers again.  I tapped it to one hoof.  No, too thin.  Papery, flammable.  What could I…?

Out came the shovel.  I returned the flare to my mouth, hooked the shovel across the lowest cable, and hoped I was small enough for it to hold me up.  The second flare burnt out, and I slid over the edge.

The cable sliced against the wood, cutting a deep groove before I'd even made it halfway across.  Sparks started to fly as it cut down to some metal core within it; the wood around it started to smoke, the metal reinforcements glowing faintly orange.  I met the loose cable car halfway, dinging my horseshoe off the tilted roof as I passed by.

The mouthgrip end of the shovel hit an outcropping as I came to the opposing edge.  It spun me out of place, and I tumbled into the opening.  I landed on my side, and let out a pained yell as fresh bruises sprung up and burnt before I slid to a stop.  When I stood, panting, I grabbed the shovel and quickly realized- the flare I'd had in my mouth had been thrown when I yelped.

I started to search in every place I  immediately could, the faded red paper nowhere in sight.  The cables started to squeal and bounce, and the car started to swing.  Squeak, squeak, squeak.  Wherever the flare was, it was then in the dark, or camouflaged in spinning crimson bulbs.  I left the then invisible thing behind, the shovel still in my mouth.

The tunnel I reached was wide, and the path was split down the middle by a flaking yellow line.  It was flatter, the walls pre-fabricated plates that had been drilled into place.  The floor had been smoothed into a downward ramp, straight and filled with garbage.  When the hall threw me into the room, I found hanging lamps had been stapled to the ceiling, and some were still leaving dusty cones of amber over large benches and tables.  There was enough room for more trunks on either side of the huge open square, four to a side.

I scrambled through the huge room, seeing plates and cups and all kinds of empty food boxes.  I tripped over more bones in the lanes between them, and saw even more leaning on the tables.  If they had skulls, they had a hole in them, and each one had stains on their plates where they sat.

At the opposite end there was another ramp.  It lead to a door, which framed on either side by two more lights.  I dipped from hanging lamp to hanging lamp, crawling up over tables and shoving clattering bodies out of the way.

There came snipping noises.  One of the lamps behind me fell with a ringing clatter, the glass shattering and the light vanishing.  I turned upward to see the hall was fading between darkness and red wedges.  Above, the ceiling was still black, and the patter of drool was drizzling across much of the area I'd already covered.  The light from the trunks darkened and started to spin, and I darted toward that last bit of light ahead.

I went to hop over another body in the dark.  I tripped on it, meeting with something much tougher than bone.  I got up and gave it one look – green armor was torn open, fleshless bones surrounded by casings and empty magazines.  I shot to my hooves as it disappeared into a red wave, and another lamp crashed to the ground.

I slammed against the door.  It was some kind of twist lock, like what I knew of the bunkers.  I turned the wheel, spitting curses over the wooden shovel shaft in my mouth.  When I heard it clank, I pushed forward, and the lights above it started to squeak.

It opened only an inch before I was shoved back.  I stuffed my body weight against it, getting only another few inches before it pushed me back again.

Not, I shouldered it.  Like, I shouldered it again.  This!

I turned around, to prepare to buck.  I just had to turn around, didn't I?  Couldn't I have done anything different?

The ceiling was a teeming, quivering mass of staring eyes.  Jibbering, slavering gullets were on the dollops of what looked like dripping, ebon smoke, whose limbs curled and bubbled over itself.  The mouths oozed down on tendrils or rose from the floor, grabbing at loose items.  After tasting them, they dropped most from up high.  When they drew some of the bones upwards, they snarled and gnashed at each other, separating the bodies at their joints and sending shreds of clothing to flutter toward the ground.  They began violently tugging on ribs and femurs and skulls.  When they snapped them open and found the marrow dry, they dropped only splinters.  The hungry fog of the earth crept closer.

I took one panicked breath, reared up, and opened the door the only way I knew how.  Whatever had been on the opposite side fell away from the hit.  I ran inside, wielding the shovel like a bludgeon, and slammed the door shut.

A gun went off.

10mm.  I recognized the jingle of the casing before the sensation.  My chest started to burn, and even with the terror of that thing behind me, I just couldn't keep going.  I collapsed, my legs still trying to manage a pathetic crawl, as I looked toward my attacker.

“You... Dumb... Bitch...” I muttered, my lips twitching the words toward a wide-eyed Quartz.  She ran to me and dropped her gun, looking over me with all the expertise of a horrified foal.  “Door!” I tried to scream.  “Lock door!”

Miser acted faster than she did.  He was on his hooves and twisting the wheel before she pointed to warn him.  Banging came from the other side, from a number of very small, very sharp things that scraped on the metal and made it cry.

Then it was quiet again, it was well lit, and I was allowed my time to bleed on a grungy bunker floor.

[***]

“I'm sorry.” Quartz said.

“Forget it.”  I had taken an inordinate amount of time to play with the ice pick.  It was covered in a thin layer of blood that had browned on the surface.  Quartz's inelegant and hurried surgery with it had gotten the squashed bullet out, but by the time she'd offered up the apology any point in it being made had long since past.  The whole thing had left me livid on top of the coling fright, and the two ponies with me knew it.

“I mean, you kicked in the door and you just ran in, what was-”

“I said forget it.”  I snapped.  I picked it up, finally, and began to wander through the room looking for somewhere to hide it.  I had to get it out of my own sight; my chest was aching with the flash-healed scar, and getting rid of the tool would do my brain some good.

At least it wasn't another set of slimy eyeballs.

The little shithole had almost nothing in terms of comfort, besides the fact the talisman slot had still been functioning.  There were some busted open hooflockers that had been overturned, and very old, very organized papers were still resting beneath undisturbed pens on a desk.  After the potion, I'd turned on every working light – desk lamps, spare mining hats, a work light still hanging by a thick wire and attached to a sparkle battery.  I'd turned everything to the ceiling, the ladder to the top entrance.  Most of them were aimed at the doorway.

“Snapshot,” Miser said. “Look, I...”  he was tripping over his own words.  I just looked at him with a raised brow.  When he realized I wasn't looking away, and slowly lowering my head into a squint the longer he delayed, he did the only thing he could think of and changed the subject.  “What happened down there?”

“Something tried to eat me.” I told him.  I was in no mood to sweeten my words.  “Forget about it.  Not like it hasn't happened before.”  

The place had an even more abrasive feature.  Instead of at least some girlie poster, there was a huge list of names that took up the entirety of one wall.  Colored lines and dots and gouges were all over it.  It was an ugly, plain list whose text had been completely printed.  No life in the writing besides the scribbled colors.  Reading might have helped, like it had last night.  I doubted I would find anything like the letters again, though it wasn't for lack of hoping.

“I get that, but.” He leaned back, unable to look me in the eye.  “You're not really being... Uh... Calm about it?”

“I broke my legs.  I crushed my binoculars.  I lost both my healing ampoules in a little under twenty minutes.  Then I got shot.  It's only the second day.  I think I'm being as calm about this as I can be.”  You little shit. I added mentally.  Shut up and give me this at least.

“Yeah, but-”

“You're scaring us, alright?”  Quartz admitted.  “You're okay.  You're alive.  That's what matters.  Please calm down.”

I whipped the icepick into the wall, shattering the thick needle from it's base.  The hungry thing wasn't there.  It had been at least a couple hours of safety.   But I... I just needed something else to think about.  I didn’t want to worry about it coming back, or the fact it might simply be waiting outside.  Were we breathing it?  “You just shot me, Quartz.”  I started to spew more poisonous words, using it as something to focus on.  Something I could see.  “Every...  Iota of me is screaming at me.  I want to take this shovel,” I said, jostling it in the webbing.  “And I want to crush your pretty little head in like a grape.  But I'm not going to.  You know why?”

She took a defensive stance, going from sitting, to a slow, cautious stand.  She kept her eyes on me.  Miser held his breath.

“Because I'm being as calm as I can be about it.”

Quartz glowered at me.

“I'm not like that.  I can be.  Oh do I ever want to be.”  I half lidded my eyes and looked over the list.  I had turned away on purpose, just in case she wanted to feel like she had some sort of advantage.  I didn't want to scare them...  If I was going to survive, I'd need them.  I wasn't about to lie to them either, because I really thought I might have already been going wailer-nuts.  Not that they knew.

“It'll pass.” I said.  “It'll pass.  Because I'm as calm as I can be right now, I know you didn't mean it, and I can wait this out.”

I heard Quartz's gun leave the holster.  Neither of them had been convinced.  I don't blame them.

“I'm not like that.” I said to myself.  “It's gonna get me killed, and you're probably gonna see it happen before the week is out.”

“Okay okay, wait!” Miser held his forehooves up, pressing to an invisible wall.  “This is just a bad moment, right?  We'll get through this.”

“Far as I'm concerned, we already have.”  I replied.  “Just let me burn this out.  Don't say a single word to me.”  I kept my eyes on century old names, in Arial font.  “That's all I need.  Just let me get rid of this.  We all need to get down south, that's what matters.  Weather or not we like each other when we do is moot.”

I turned in time to see Quartz not more than a few steps away.  The gun barrel had been neatly focused on my head, and I was looking past the leveled sights into her eyes.  When she spoke, it was over the cushion of the mouthgrip.  “Alright.  There's two ponies that are going to be on watch tonight though.  You are going to be one of them.”

“I get it.”  I nodded.

After several seconds, she backed off.  I knew she wasn't in a place to actually shoot me again.  If you can enunciate without tonguing the trigger, the safety's on.  She didn't turn around.  She sat down and watched me, and the gun stayed in her mouth the entire time.

It had been the second time I'd felt a gun like that.  Oh, that fact stayed with me for a long time.  Especially with what I had gotten away from, and had run into that instead.  “You ever been shot by one of those?”

Quartz didn't reply.

“Hurts like you wouldn't believe.”

“I can imagine.” she growled.

I'm sure you can. I thought.  If luck is just, you won't need to be creative for that.

I needed some kind of project, any at all, to get that leashed rage out of my veins.  I turned completely away, and busied myself with names.  Read, read, read!  I thought to myself.  Get it out of your head!

Feeling incredibly sour, I started at the far left of the poster.  I didn't care one way or the other, at that point.  I hoofed out a helping of thorn while I was turned away, stuck it in, and depressed the plunger.  Nothing was said, but I was well scrutinized.

Evacuation protocols:

1. Keep calm.

Screw you. I thought.

2. Ensure your workers are safe.

3. Keep the injured stable.

4. Prioritize evacuation slots in the order names are listed.  Failure to do so will compromise the contingency plans, and will diminish the priority in which your location is attended by post-disaster aid workers.

Please refer to your contingency manifest, labeled “Tartarus,”  for elaboration on evacuation goals and procedures.

I looked at the desk, and moved slowly enough not to startle my “companions.”  Quartz was watching carefully, and Miser, hearing the movement, was prompted to do the same.  I nosed away the dried pens on the desk, moving delicate sheets from atop the small collection.  Nothing with the name of Tartarus was there, it was merely industrial statistics put to paper.  Pounds of crystals, yields from varying spots.  I stupefied myself with numbers for a time before returning to the list, once I had exhausted the pile.

Names.  That's everything and all that poster was.  It was in tiny print, extending nearly the entire wall.  I counted (and lost count) of just how many there were.  A few hundred, at least.

How many of these are bodies in the caves? I wondered.  I used my imagination to recall the bones while my eyes passed over a name that had been crossed out with red pen, and ruinously deep.

Then, the distraction I had wanted hit me.

I counted the reddened names.  Most of them had been near the upper left of the list, though they were scattered.  I had seen about twelve bodies down in the tunnels.  There were many more names that were marked, though, and the red ones had reached the three's on it's front number in the double digit marks.  I held no confidence that I had seen the entirety of the caves, either, and had no idea on what other bodies might be resting there.

The more of the red names I muttered to myself, the more they sounded... Unified.  I tried to be more precise in my recall, and picked up a piece I had allowed myself to notice before, but not acknowledge.

Every set of the bones I'd seen before that... Thing, showed up.  Every one of them had a mining tool next to or inside it.  Whatever that thing outside had been, it hadn't once used weapons.

I turned to Quartz, whom had started to doze.  Miser was already committed to the dreamworld.  I quietly spoke up to her. “Help me with something?” I asked her.  Her eyes shot open, and she grunted.  She looked to and fro, disoriented at first, but quickly shaking it off when she realized I was still awake and perked.

I waved her closer, and began to point at the poster.  She did approach, but kept herself out of what she thought was my striking distance.  I rolled my eyes, but stepped aside and pointed at the board.  “These names- do these look unicorn to you?” I asked her.  “The ones in red.”

Quartz sidestepped to keep me in sight, peeking at one of the names from the corners of her eyes.  She squinted to read them.  “I don't know.  Should they be unicorns?” She asked.

I shrugged at her.  I honestly didn't know... It had just been an idea.  A bad one, but something that had seemed to make sense to me.  Maybe I was just attaching horns to the bones out of the thought I needed to make the bodies significant.

Quartz had kept scanning names.  “Wait, I know this one.”

“What? How?”  The fact she knew a pre-war name was strange, at least at first.

“Well, I know the family.” she scowled.  Families weren't uncommon in Resilience, though I'd heard that was different in the south.  Great granddad had been Long, granddad had been Trick, dad had been Quick, and my brother and I had been Sure and Snap.  “Bunch of assholes if you ask me.”

“Who?” I asked her.  She put her hoof to a name.  It was outlined in green.  I didn't give a shit about whom it was.  The moment I saw the color, I started to look at the other green names.  Each green name was almost directly beneath a red one.  In some cases, several red names.

Prioritize evacuation slots in order.

I had remained angry for most of the night.  Not just for the new scar, but the fresh knowledge.  I kept thinking about the armored guard I'd tripped over, the bones at the cafeteria tables.  The idea was not going to leave me, no matter how hypocritical it made me; I'd have done the same in their position, if that thing had been loose.  It had even replayed in a small way, with me on the losing end.

It still hasn't faded.  Even though I know how the story ends, every unspoken piece sickens me.

I got to thinking past it (or at least around it).   A family had gotten to Resilience from whatever that underworld place was, at least.  Somepony that had a foal, anyway.

Something about it wasn't right.  Not just about what I'd escaped, but from what I'd seen and then read.  I brought my camera out from the bags, and snapped a picture of it.  I’d have some reminders, at least physical, of what was down there.  Maybe some proof, if I found more.

Quartz watched me the whole time.  I said “bang!” and gave it a little jostle while the camera was aimed at her.  She upturned the corner of a lip and shook her head.  I sighed, turned to the poster, and resumed reading while the thorn set in.

Grape Shot was circled in green.

My jaw tightened.

[***]

Note Added: List of evacuees.

Level up!

Perk Gained: Paranoia.  Some ponies laugh at you for being afraid of the dark, but you have your reasons.  In very dark places, you gain a bonus to PER when determining where enemies are.  In those locations, however, you suffer -15 to all skills and sleep is only half as effective at removing exhaustion.

The Quiet Ones

Fallout Equestria: The Tartarus Contingency

CH 6 - “The Quiet Ones”

–

“The forgotten are light sleepers.”

–

Treating Quartz with respect that morning was hard work.  Not having slept the entire time had only compounded the matter.  I was eager to go, as one wouldn't expect.  I had climbed the ladder to the upper hatch a dozen times to peek outside, freeze my face, and see when light would come.  It arrived later than I thought, but being nervous made time stretch into durations that were mind numbing.

I'd gotten her up with a love tap and a stare.  She had risen to her hoofs with her gun, grumbling when she realized she wouldn't need to pull the trigger again.  I made sure her angry eyes were watching when I took to rousing Miser with nothing more than a couple stern words.

I had to let them take the lead once we'd squeezed ourselves through the hatch.  Well, one of them anyway.  Quartz wasn't keen on me being behind both of them.  I hadn't known the path they had taken to get there, and wasn't about to take another dive into the abyss below.  They'd gotten to the bunker once; getting out was on them, even after their tracks from the previous day had been polished away.

Back outside in the cold and comfortable familiar of silver snow, we took to the tracks in the spire forest, and began making our way south again along the Long Line.  It had already become routine, but tricks of the old magic in the metal had started to present some strange and welcome aberrations.

Strange shimmers had come in clouds every half hour or so.  They lifted from the rails and made the path ahead seem to warp when looked through.  The zones were breathtakingly hot, surrounded by pools of brown, steaming water, and the metal parts of the tracks seemed to have an orange gleam.  We avoided those hotspots once we got used to them being more than a childish curiosity.  Wet hooves chilled instantly once removed, and the horseshoes we had cooling and warming too quickly could get some painful warps and bends remedied only with a crowbar and something to bite down on.  We had neither.

The more we trotted, the better I felt.  Without sleep, thoughts wander enough to ignore a lot of things.  Like what I had left behind in the mines.  I never would be completely clean of the place, that I knew- distancing from it was an invaluable boon.

We investigated a metal shack before stopping.  Inside had been a hot barrel.  More inquiry revealed the barrel itself was clean of overcharging, and there weren't any of the telling orange dots that some luckier bastards had used to safeguard their travel points.  We rested a while, and got to hating each other just a little more.

I had shied away from the fragrant box offered to me at first.  Cram.  My stomach had already become a twisted bundle of dry cloth by midday, and I hadn't wanted it knotted by a blow of hay so drowned in old world chemicals that it had survived the end.

Quartz hadn't taken well to the rejection of her kindness.  Come to think of it, I don't believe I ever saw her accept that notion from anypony.  “You know the rule.” She said.  “Can't sleep, eat.  Can't eat, sleep.  You haven't done either since yesterday.”

“Don't mind me.” I grumbled.  “I'm not hungry.” I said before waving her away.  I hadn't been lying.  Even trying to think about food with that thing in the mine mess hall had caused my throat to gingerly vibrate.

Miser spoke up with his usual lack of tact, with one cheek full of chewy, vinegar drowned daisy broth.  He drooled a little as he talked.  “We aren't in a bad way right now.  You could catch a few hours of closed lids.”  His cheek swilled the mass.

I turned back to the hot barrel, and let out a sour grunt.  Getting that rest wasn't up to the parts of me that were thinking.  “I could try.  I'm not sure I'd get anything out of it though.”

They both withdrew.  Quartz stared dryly at her container, watching the packed hay strings slosh about in amber gelatin.  Miser got his wide nose stuck in his can for a few seconds, watching me more than what he was doing.  He sipped out the last of the soup he'd been sucking down.

“Never thought a guy like you would get so messed up over getting shot.” Quartz said, with a nervous laugh.

My forehooves lifted from the barrel, and the talisman's tingle drained away.  It left me frigid, and every part of my seated posture sunk.  Except for my eyes.  Those rested on her, past quickly fogging goggles.  The two of them kept still, wary of the nutjob staring at her.

“Bad taste?” she asked.

I nickered, and somehow did it with a smile.  I could appreciate humor like that.  It was honest like my camera.  “No worse than what you're pretending to eat.” I replied.  I put my hooves back to the barrel.  There was plenty of reason to start something with her comment.  None of it would have gotten us anywhere.

So, I explained rather than instigated.  “Had a friend die the same way I almost did last night.  Only difference is the shot wasn't an accident.  Same gun, same caliber.”  I grunted.  “Small world, huh?”

Quartz closed her eyes in a sort of apology, then put her tin to the barrel.  It was the pickers way of cooking with a talisman.  A convenient way to avoid conversation, too.  It was too easy to overheat small things.

“Speaking of bad taste, I'm using the gun that killed her.”

Quartz kept herself shut up by stuffing her face, despite having only spent a few seconds heating her food.

“Took good care of it.  Can't look a gift horse in the mouth, right? Especially if you're looking at that mouth from over a gun barrel.”

She shook her head and sighed.

We huddled together for a while, gathering enough heat to continue.  They asked where we were going, and I replied with the most obvious answer:  “No idea.” and a shrug.  “The Map has it circled, says it's called W T Reservation.  Had a big cross mark on it, like what the old maps of Resilience had for hospitals.”

“A med haven huh?  Sounds like providence.”

“I don't believe in luck like that.  Not for me.”

“Maybe that's why you don't have it.”

Oh, she did have a sense of humor I could get used to.

[***]

Billboards.  There was one on either side of the rails- one faced away from us, the other stared at us from behind a pair of sapphire eyes that had then still had some sparkle upon the wind torn image.  Cobalt coat and regal, starry mane had been waving about behind the tall, long-horned mare.  The signs were sprouting from...  Well, the strangest thing I'd seen in a long, long time.  Dirt.

That was the first time in my life I'd ever seen thin snow outside the walls.

When the three of us stopped to look, curious and unbelieving, we found our original giddiness to be over something too good to be true.  The base of the billboard was surrounded by a broken ring of golden, old world coins.  Within them, there were fresh etches.  They were jagged and straight, but they seemed familiar.  When we realized what the tiny, indecipherable words were from, confusion took us.  They were warming talisman's, homemade, and plentiful.

We were surrounded by the bleak white, and the two billboards.  Below both, a “hot ring” had been made, and both seemed to have been tended.  There were broken bits of ladders replaced with makeshift rungs.  Pipes, rebar, and a few bones had been tied or nailed in place.  When I looked up to see the other billboard, it was no different from the first.  The blue mare, her mane out of focus, her stature leaving her proud against the backdrop of night.  The words had been painted over with all sorts of colors, which had since darkened with age, and in a strange cobbling of language in which few were recognizable as letters.

Around us?  Nothing more.  Just the tracks, the wind, and the snow.

I narrowed my eyes.  “Something's wrong.” I said.

Quartz quieted her groan.  Miser looked up toward the billboard, then upturned a hoof and the corner of a lip.

“Somepony kept these things decent.”  I said.  “Only reason to maintain a picture is if you want to keep it.”  I tapped my saddlebags, jostling my scrapbook within.

I looked down while they returned to photograph.  There were tiny divots in the snow – not more than a talisman large, shallow, and split up the center.  They were cloven.

I was still for several minutes, staring out over the vast horizon to scan.

Nothing.

This was a lesson I'd learned barely a day prior- whatever a pony sees in that desolate and white place, there is always something.  Especially if there are landmarks with writing.

When I was nudged, it was without lenience against my shoulder.  Quartz had gotten tired of waiting.  We moved, and it seemed I was the only one with weight on my mind.  Let me say now, willing to be right is a complete pain in the ass.

[***]

It wasn't more than a ten minute hike along the tracks before we came a field of dirt.  Rocks jutted up from tan soil, the cracks filled with that familiar blue.  The hairline veins shimmered with inner light, some of them growing the crystalline edges of razors that crackled beneath careful, steel shod hooves.  We were able to watch the patterns of light roll across each others coats while we trotted among it, finding barely buried discs of grooved gold that had been scattered about.  The ground followed the curve of the hill, and it was at the base we'd found what we'd been searching for.

Nestled in a ring of mountainous crystal growth, we had found the “W T Reservation.”  The entrance was a dip in the crystal; a ramp led to the opening, either side carefully inlaid with peeking gold in the earth.  We approached slowly, weapons drawn, and eyes darting about to cover what we knew as “zones” and corners.

Inside, there was broken concrete sidewalks, and a glossy cobblestone lobby.  Surrounding the cul-de-sac's edges there were crumbled houses, filled with still standing stairs and stubborn doorframes amidst brick rubble.  Across from the entrance, there was a huge, rectangular building, it's windows long since boarded off, the inside dark and mute.  Within the center, though, there was a large, fragile building that was the strangest thing we'd ever found on the Trot.

It was a greenhouse.  Many panels of the frosted roof were missing or broken, but out of them there was slithering the brown bark of a curling, still living tree.  It's coils wrapped around the crumbling greenhouse supports, constricting one side slightly inward and lifting the others, while the garish door curved into greenly rusting flowers and vines over wilting glass.  The windows to the place had tinted with the filth of a century and then some, but they still had a shine on the outside between the crap.  Not to mention, several swirling patterns of colorful and fresh paint that had somehow managed to stick.  Quartz, mesmerized by the eldritch and still growing place, called dibs on searching it first.

The last place we cared for was the an old diner, pill-shaped and on wheels, which had barred windows shuttered by dense metal curtains.  Many of the panels had tilted out of place, allowing us paltry views of what was thrown about inside through the slits.  We all recognized the boxes and cans.  Quartz gave me a look.  “Yeah, yeah.  I'll get inside.” I conceded, starting to circle it with distracted eyes.  She dragged Miser away, lifting her tail to keep his attention.  For somepony like Quartz, I guess he was an easy little guy to peg.

The door was sturdy and locked.  Through the already broken glass I could see another vending machine which had been tipped to brace the door closed.  Below it, there were unfamiliar bones.  They were very thin, very long, and very frail looking.  The head was smooth and the snout quite long, especially for anything equine, and it was far larger than one.  It was wearing a thick, padded vest, which was black and printed with the word “POLICE” across the chest.  Below it, in much smaller print, was an alien word none of us would be able to pronounce- “QAELTAQA.”

I looked around the “town.”  This place had cops?  I thought.  Way too small for more than-  I snorted the thought closed.  After that little epiphany, I began to circle the building.  Things turned out to be easy enough: a ladder was behind it, the back of the diner facing one of the blue crystal walls confining the town.  Though it was cramped, getting up wasn't otherwise difficult.  It was getting the roof hatch lifted that proved to be the problem, though after some tugging the age gave way and I was able to flip it on it's head.  A burst of dusty air shot into my face, giving a layer to my goggles and wrapped face.  It wasn't anything new.  I had been sucking the stale smell from the mine for a good few hours.  The smell of old food was more refreshing.

I hadn't gotten more than peek inside before I heard Miser machine-gunning the word “Hey!” from below.  When I turned to him, he was jogging in place.  He kept looking back in the direction of the greenhouse, turning his entire toward it, than back to me.  “Problem!” He said. “Big problem!”

I slid down the ladder, my weight causing it to clatter, my hooves thumping sharply on the stone.  At least it's not my fault, this time.  I thought.

[***]

The inside of the greenhouse was plucked out of one of the old magazines.

Warm.  Humid.  Green.  Funny how that last one had never been real until I'd seen it.

One massive tree stood amid a pool of jade, whispering grass as tall as I was.  Around it was a ring of water, while the roots were strangling the fountain's centerpiece to nourish itself on the moist dirt below the broken stone.  It had been growing for so long, the deformed, twisting branches had taken to prodding the greenhouse walls and curling it on itself, or wrapping around the iron bars through the gaps of shattered glass.

Even further from the epicenter there was more dirt.  It had been obviously moved, or exposed from moving the cobble to expose the warmed earth.  From it, bushes had grown.  Roses, berries I didn't know the name of.  They had mingled and fought as they had grown.  One half was a set of creeping vines that formed a blooming lingerie around the tree trunk.  The roses formed a curving, uneven wall, each one in different colors.  Blue, red, yellow, violet.  Some of the necks had been snipped, the decapitated stems having long since dried.

Large plates and pots -some of them made for plants, some made for cooking- were filled with dirt and blooming all sorts of flowers I could never properly name.  A veritable schmorgisboard, except for some of the lighter violet ones.  I remembered those from “Colt's Life” - Nightshade.  Some of the containers had been hung or braced up well off the ground, their bottoms and sides painted with strokes of color like the billboards and glass.  I was starting to get even more worried – the paint formed patterns.  Vortexes of color, encircling large dots of yellow so bright it appeared white in the wrong light.

Within the bark, scars were so deep that even the cloud covered, glass-filtered sun was able to display them.  The tree was tattooed upon every inch, with those same swirls.  The dots at their centers had been both dug and painted, the craters filled with ivory color.

Somepony had done this.  Willingly, and with a hoof that knew not to kill even the humble growth of a tree with their carvings.  Yet we had seen nopony.

Something was very, very wrong.  I knew it, and I had assumed my traveling companions had as well.  It is a sin, perhaps, to be the only one correct, and to never speak up.

All throughout the place was a pungent, pleasant odor.  The bark was scarred with carvings and sigils,    White blooms and yellow stalks crept out along the spindly, sturdy branches.  What hung from them was strange.  There were circles, the centers adorned with purposeful patterns of webbing.  They were made of old branches, or cable, or even surgical tubing.  They had been woven, as if by spiders, with wires or fishing line or... Sinew.  The spiderweb disks were wobbling against the tree in many different places, brushed by wind and decorated with soft accoutrements.  Leaves, and white feathers.

Between the edges of the bushes, Quartz was sneaking about, craning her neck to peer past and around blocked vision.   She'd poke her head up now and then, looking around.  She was talking quietly, urging somepony: “It's okay!  We won't hurt you.”

Her voice, having been lowered to the delicacy of the flowers themselves, was swimming through the brush.  Miser and I waited where we were.  What else was there to do, when a feminine touch was reduced to nothing more than a cautious whisper?

Faces peeked from everywhere.  Pink noses, at first, sniffling at our unfamiliar scent.  Long snouts, coated in ivory fur and tipped with glistening nostrils, were surrounding us.  Then, from behind the tree came a face.  It was brave amid her peers, oogling us from behind the scalp of a teddy ursa gripped between her teeth.

She was no more than a few years old.  Her coat was that of snow, her bright round eyes blinking.  As she drug her stuffed friend into the light of the ugly sky, I saw she had brilliant ruby eyes.  Her miniscule spine and paper coated ribs were peppered with long black spots, her tuft of a tail curled downward, ready to shoot up and signal the others watching us.  Around her neck was a trinket in the form of a small ring, with weaves of fishing line and wires that formed a web.  From it hung three downy feathers.

That poor little deer.  I can only imagine how we, armed even as poorly we were, appeared to the tiny, wide eyed doe.  I laid on my belly, curling my forehooves beneath me to appear as small as I could.  I tried to motion Miser down, but it took him far too long to get the idea.

I grew even more worried seeing the kid.  Without a doubt, somepony had carved the tree.  Somepony had painted the billboards.  Somepony had grown the flowers, food or poison, with intent.  Children clutching a teddy ursa rarely knew the meaning behind “art” or a green hoof.

“Hey! Hey.  It's okay.” Quartz said.  She took a queue from me, and laid down.  She was trying to appear harmless.

Her eyes were very quick.  She dragged a small blanket up, wrapping herself up within it before presenting herself behind her teddy shield.   She sat herself down in front of us, at the base of the tree, where she could see each one of us without having to turn her head.

The blanket was strange, and morbid.  It was furred on one side.  The other was rough, cross-stitched together and covered in patches.  Some holes had been punched through it, and she took the knotted edges between her cloven hooves to pull it tight around herself.  It was leather, the fur of which was the same color, and pattern, as her body.

“What's your name?” Quartz asked her.

“Sunglow.” She replied, in a tiny voice as smooth as warm water.  She was hard to hear.

“That's a pretty name.” came the reply.  “What about your friend?”

“Growly.”  She held up the teddy ursa and wiggled it's button-eyed face.  “Rrr!”

I snorted out a smile.  Her ears and eyes swiveled toward me.  “Rrr!” I replied, as weak as my voice would allow.  It was still enough to make her cuddle Growly up close.  Quartz gave me a flat look.  I rolled my eyes, but took the hint.

“What are you doing out here all alone?” Quartz asked.

Sunglow, confused, took a long look around.  The children had been in so many places, and were small enough to fit in spots we hadn't considered.  Dozens of big red eyes were staring at us from below things, atop of things, and from behind things that kept them under the cover of some level of shade.  Many of them had the shapes of what they believed to be weapons in their mouths.  Little hoof-held rakes, shivs made of greenhouse glass or pot shards, hedgeclippers that were far too heavy for their bodies to wield, and dirty little gardening shovels.  “But I'm not.” she replied.

Miser and I kept looking around, and he shook his head at her.  She started up again.  “Okay, you're not.  So, where are your parents?”

“They're everywhere.” Sunglow replied.  “They're all in the long sleep.”

We all went quiet for a moment, while the strange little girl kept peering at us as if we had just asked something incredibly stupid.   Quartz swallowed a lump of air.  “Can you show us?”

Sunglow nodded and stood up, her webbed trinket wobbling and not making a sound.  She and Growly led us to the outskirts of the inner greenhouse, which the warmth hadn't fully touched.

Snow tumbled in from outside through the holes in glass, and the gaps between warped iron supports.  At the far end, there was a large hole in the greenhouse wall that had been made through broken glass and warping iron, supported by old wooden planks and piled junk.  Near that rear entrance rested other another unfamiliar and large shape, facing toward the opening and laid within the snow, having sat so long that their white hide was covered in small dunes.

The body had the color of flowers and grass before them in a plate, untouched offerings the children had no doubt placed.  They had clothing beneath the frosting of snow.  The extremities were furred, the thick leathers tightly bound by wrappings of... Sinew, and more thinly cut leather.  The surfaces had been dyed lightly blue and patterned with the same swirls as the tree, in sways of white and yellow.

She was huge.  Twice the height of any of the pickers, half again perhaps what I was.  She was also armed with a small rifle, hidden behind a cloth wrapping of hodgepodge grey-white camoflague which left the chamber exposed.  Around her, and the entrance, there was the glitter of filthy brass casings wedged into the cracks of the cobblestone.

There small divots in her skin, visible through holes in the cloth.  The pair of bullets holes had stained the cloth to an almost brown red.  There was no steam coming from her half-open mouth.  She didn't move.

I grimaced a moment, while Quartz closed her eyes and rubbed the back of her neck.  Miser just stared between the body, and the kids around him.  This just kept getting better and better.

I took my place as the asshole of the group, and went to jostle her.  After moving her limp form an inch or so, she still had no reaction.  “That's not going to work.” Sunglow said. “I've been trying to get mother up for a long time like that, we just have to wait.”

She just had to drop it upon us like that, didn't she?  “Are they all like this?” I asked her.

Sunglow nodded.  “Some are long-sleeping in the buildings outside.”

“What about you?” Quartz chimed in.  “Who did this?”

“This?" she asked, looking at the body. "The mares in white.” She said.  I grit my teeth at the notion.  “They talked with mother and father, then they argued with the guns for a while and the white mares left.  We were all supposed to go to the long sleep.  Mother told them the children don't need the long sleep, so they left us to tend to the garden for when they woke up.”

Quartz grunted.  Miser kept looking back and forth between us, nervous to the point of confusion.  “This is bad, really bad.  What if they come back?” he started to jitter out words of warning we already knew.

Quartz sighed.  “How long ago did this happen?” She asked.

“Thirty nights.” Sunglow replied.  Having become worried with what we had just tried to do to her mother, the child continued. “The long sleep is very deep.  They said we need to stay awake in case Luna tries to take us all.”

“Okay.  Sunglow, you keep, uh, doing what you're doing okay?”  I waited for her response.  She just hooked her forelegs beneath Growly's, and sat back on the blanket.  “I've got to talk with my friend.”

Quartz was already glaring at me when we huddled.  We talked in whispers.  “Don't you dare bucking say what I know you're going to-”

“No.” I mouthed out.  “No.  What the hell are we going to do with one kid, let alone a dozen?”

“What else can we do?” She snapped, barely above her breath.  “We can't just leave them here like this.”

Miser was a bit more down to Earth.  Maybe a bit too much for Quartz.  “They've got a lot of food and water.  Enough for a really long time.”  Quartz gave him her needle-thin eyes.  “I'm just saying.”

“He's right.” I said.  “If we can get south, we might be able to get somepony to come back that can do something.  Maybe even get them out of here.”

“Yeah, some southern prick that's only out for the eats?  It would literally be taking candy from a baby. Who would pass that up?” She was practically spitting.

“The Snowflakes, apparently.” I replied.

“And us.” Miser said.

“Yeah, but...” She shook her head.  “Why?  It's not like the Snowflakes have a heart or anything.  They're probably just getting reinforcements to move all the shit they found here.”

Sunglow spoke up. “I can hear you really well.” She said.  “Why are you worried?”

It startled Quartz.  Miser took to shame quite suddenly, leaning back to grumble something about hating kids too smart for their own good.  I leaned back, and gestured with a hoof- “Be my guest, Quartz.  Answer the girl.”

Quartz opened her mouth halfway, showing teeth.  She gave an angered whinny, and brushed past me to address Sunglow.  “Okay.  Look.  We can help you alright?”

“We don't need help.” Sunglow replied sternly.  Smart ass kid...

“Sunglow, please.  We can help. You just have to trust us.  Your parents aren't waking up.”

“Not now.  But they will.  We just have to wait a little longer.”

“I... Sunglow, you need to leave.  They aren't going to wake up.”

“Yes they will!” Sunglow snapped right back at her.  I kept eying the body on the ground.  It still hadn't moved.  Sunglow tied up one of Growly's arms and slung him over her back as she stood as tall as she could.  “They always do.  They always come back.  You've only been here for minutes, you don't know.”

Quartz had taken a couple steps back, and sat.  She tried to plead by moving her hooves about.  “They've been shot, Sunglow.  You know what that is, right?”

“Yes.  That doesn't matter.  They've been shot before.”  Some of the other children were starting to emerge, wielding their tools as menacingly as they could.

I tried to get Quartz's attention.  “Shut up, Quartz. You're making things worse.”

“Piss off.” she snarled.  “Sunglow, you have to leave.  You're parents aren't waking up, and we can help you.”

“We don't need help.” Sunglow said, as if addressing someone of her own age.  “You're starting to sound just like the mares in white did before we made them leave.”

I almost laughed at the surprised lift of Quartz's lip.  Tell it like it is, kiddo.  Then again, I had to wonder how the kids had driven off the armed Snowflakes.  Not to mention why.

“We aren't leaving our family.” Sunglow said.  “If you try to make us, you'll regret it.”

Quartz released a deep breath.  She lofted her forehooves as if in front of a gun mouth.  “Alright Sunglow.  Alright.”

I decided to end it before before Quartz added a “but” at the start of a new way to argue.  While it was amusing to watch her get told off, neither of them deserved the agitation.  “Hey, Sunglow.”  I said.  Quartz whinnied at me.  Sunglow turned to me and perked her ears.

If the kid was going to take charge like she had, I figured I had better treat her like a leader.  It's not like we were there to ruin anything for them.  Heck, we might have even made new friends, as bizarre as it was.  “We need to rest.  Is there a place you'll let us?”

The question seemed to confuse her.  She pouted and looked down at the ground for a while.  A few of the other kids came out to look at us, then approach her and talk so low it was impossible to hear.  Sunglow continued to listen from every angle as she was assailed with near silent words.

“I saw an old food building out front near the entrance.” I said.  “We could use that.”  All the kids looked up at me from their blankets to where I sat, and then back to her.  Then, under the eyes of her little peers, she nodded at me.

“You son of a bitch.” Quartz said to me.  “Whatever happens to these kids is on your head.”

“Then I guess you can hate me later if anything happens.”

She lifted her head a moment in disdain.  “Just... Just take a picture.”

I raised a brow toward her.

“Something like this is a lot easier to believe than our word.  Going to need that if these kids are going to get any help.”

“Yeah, I know that.  Just having you ask me to do something is new.”

  I motioned toward the door we'd entered through.  Miser and her started to trot, and I shuffled out my camera.  I snuck my head through the strap, and lifted it to my face.  The kids all started to retreat to their respective hiding places, albeit slowly, and backing away from me the entire time.  Sunglow took a step back, staring at it curiously.  

I should have known.  The way the kids were hiding.  How when I lifted the camera, the look in Sunglow's eyes was like she'd been caught in the lights of some screaming machine.

“Say 'grass!'” I said.

Click.

No sooner had the picture started to print than Sunglow started to whimper.  The circle of children gasped as they vanished into their respective hideaways, and she scrambled away in a backpedal.  Then, she screamed.

Sunglow pressed her hooves to herself in scattered places over her face and chest, looking at them like she was bleeding from her pores.  She cried out a well pronounced worth that was jibberish to me, then screeched into a weeping yell once more.  I leaned forward, motioning a hoof down ward. “Whoa, whoa. Calm down.” I tried to tell her during her hysteria.  The flash bulb hadn't even been in.

Miser jumped at the noise, bouncing on his hooves in place like some attack was coming from everywhere at once.  Quartz snapped back at the sudden mania of the doe, looking at me, then to her.  “What the hell did you do?”

I gave a beleagured shrug.  “I took a picture!” I said back.

The sound of a gasp came.  Air went across a dry throat to fill huge lungs.  Miser and Quartz went wide eyed as I turned toward motion.  “Mother” and I stared at each other a moment, her lifted head blinking off sleep with the adrenaline of her doe's sudden wake-up call.

She looked at me, she looked at her daughter.  She snapped to standing faster than anything hooved I had ever seen, darting over to scoop up her daughter with a foreleg where she dangled helplessy at her chest.  Standing on three legs, “Mother” started sputtering a flurry of words I'd never be able to properly pronounce.

“Whoa, whoa!  No harm meant! No harm!” I tried to say, exposing my hooves.

“Mother” asked Sunglow something.  Sunglow shrieked a reply in the same indecipherable tongue.  Then, “Mother” looked at me with flames and brimstone, pupils wide as plates from behind narrowed eyes.  She threw her head back and let out a sharp, earsplitting whistle, over and over.

The sound of galloping hooves came from several angles outside the windows.  Miser danced in place to look left and right, seeing nothing outside the dingy walls but darting shadows.  The hooves gathered near the hole in the back of the greenhouse, one set sliding to a stop.

Biggest son of a bitch I have ever seen.  I had to look up, while standing, just to watch him lower his head to enter the greenhouse.  He was dressed like the others, but taller, and meatier.  His chest was covered in thick fur, his ragged ears below a set of huge, sharpened, five-pointed antlers that dangled with small trinkets on short string.  Feathers, a couple tiny skulls, and several flat teeth.

“Diner!” I ordered. “Go, go!” I turned and started to gallop, my camera jingling at my chest all the while.  He roared something after me, with more words I didn't understand, and started to give chase.

Miser made it to the door first.  He lowered his head, threw his weight into it at the shoulder, and tore it straight off the hinges with his weight.  He kept right on going, swearing something about how it hurt, but never missing his stride.  Quartz was right after him, her more elegant steps swooping her through the door.  I managed to get through it, but with it came a smash.  I turned to look behind myself, and the buck hadn't been able to fit those antlers through the door as he stood. He pried them from the broken doorframe, disappearing into the greenhouse, as at least twenty other massive doe's and bucks spilled from the outskirts and rushed after us.

“Ladder on the side!” I screamed to the two equines ahead of me.  “Door is screwed!”

Miser leaped and managed to skip a pony-height amount of rungs, yanking himself up toward the roof.  Bullets formed small geysers, without noise besides small chirps that barely registered over the stomping of hooves behind us.  I took another look back, finding “Mother” trying to take careful aim between the bundle of deer heading toward us.  Unable to aim without danger of hitting the others, she snarled and dropped the gun to head back to the greenhouse, and her daughter.

Miser yelled something as Quartz crested to the roof. I saw him pointed.  I turned around just in time to see it, diving to the side as a pair of softly ornamented antlers tried to scoop out where I had been.  I skidded to a stop as he reared up, planning to put his weight behind those sharp bones.

I yanked out my shovel.  I held it up and braced it.  Go ahead, asshole.  Fall right on.

Too bad it was the head side that was down.  The mouthgrip definitely left a bruise, and the sturdy neck of my “weapon” let me hear a snap.  He stumbled to the side after sinking the sharp end several inches into a cobblestone crack.  I stood and yanked the spade up out of the ground, and as he looked back to yell something else, turned my shovel onto it's side and swung.

He crouched and turned, but too late.  The edge had enough force to wedge into the base of his antler halfway.  We both noticed it was stuck at the same time.

I twisted.  He flailed his head.  The antler snapped off and started to bleed, the the sudden ooze leaking into one eye.  It gave me another chance, so I took it.

He hadn't risen.  When he tried, I hit him so hard with the flat side of that thing my bones shook.  His chin bounced off the rock below him.  He spat out teeth and weakened, still furious words while he wobbled into a stand.

Nope.  Another swing, and his nose ricocheted off the diner wall.  He fell again, and kicked to try and get up with broken balance.

The large body was blocking the rest of the path well enough to give me the time I needed.  While two does dragged him out by his back hooves, I was climbing.  When I reached the top, Quartz hauled me up with an exerted scream.  “Bust the ladder, drag it up!” I said.

She kicked at it, but it didn't give way.  On my side, I put my weight behind the shovel.  The tip slipped beneath the panel that bolted it to the diner, and I pushed the shovel like a lever.  It tore the bolts free, and I shoved Quartz aside to get the next one.  It clanged as another, fresher, thinner body filled the path below.  The doe was started to climb, giving us a new problem.

If she kept the ladder, they'd have just as easy a way in.

“Shoot her!” I said over my grip on the shovel. “Get her off the damn thing!”

“What, and kill her?!  That'll just make it worse!”

“Not the time for moral reservations!”

“Oh, you can kiss the hardest part of my-”

Miser solved our problem.  He emerged from the open hatch, wielding between his teeth the connected wire of an old-world toaster.  He stood on the ladder rungs that lead into the diner, rearing up, and threw it straight down the ladder.  With the ding of the devices bell, it slammed into the climbing doe and plucked her off.

I didn't wait.  I gripped one of the rungs with my teeth, and motioned for Quartz to finish what I'd started so we could pull it up.  She followed my first example, and the second panel split free, rusted bolts squealing.  We pulled it up to the roof once it was free, and stood there a moment, waiting and breathing.

Please don't let them be able to jump this high.  Please.

We all peered over the edges.  The group had started to circle, saying things to one another in speech so quiet we would never have known they'd been talking had their lips not been moving.  We got worried, angered looks from them, nothing but red eyes and furred bodies fuming.  A few tended to the buck I'd wounded.

“Lets get inside.” I said, watching them coalesce around the diner.  “We need to find a way out.  And maybe reinforce that front door.”

Quartz squinted at me.  Miser leaned back with a long, unwinding sigh, and descended back down. With that we followed him, and our night with the deer began.

[***]

I slid the empty soda bottle back and forth.  The counter was covered in grit that made it a little game, trying to get it from one hoof to the other without falling.  I had been playing for a few hours.

Behind the counter, Miser and Quartz had been resting.  They had laid themselves down after a short flurry of activity.  We'd all run around the inside of the diner, looking for loose things to pile up at the front door and around the already tilted soda machine.  Couldn't be too careful, even with the barred windows and off center metal shutters.  Once that had finished, we'd found some more old world food that hadn't been touched since the place had been sealed off.  Quartz had questioned why, but then I reminded her of the greenhouse- the deer had been growing their own food well enough that they'd lasted this long.  Why bother with what we had just found?

We had too much time to think about one another while inside the place.  Pondered on getting the stove working to stave off the chill, but it clicked wrong when we tried, so left it without power just to be safe.  Mulled on the images of the vending machines as we had a days travel back, and found that the Crystal Cola machine still had some of its supply.  The tiny flecks of crystal in the drink were a strange addition that gave the stuff a glitter inside the clear liquid when shaken, and had started to glow bright enough to look like a starfield once night had hit.  I had been the only one brave enough to try it, and had lost any reason to sleep for at least a few hours thanks to whatever minty things had been used in the concoction.  I was on the third bottle by the time the deer had started to peer between cracks in the metal shutters.

They were watching us from outside.  They made no noises.  Dozens of red eyes glimmered when their pupils caught the flickering florescent light in the ceiling, seeming content to watch.  They waited, the image of their gaze distorting through the bottle when I passed it in front of my muzzle.

With what I'd left back in the mines, I was in no condition to take their looks for long.  I leaned back and started to play catch with myself, tossing the bottle up and cradling it over and over as we waited for the day to break.

“You really have a way of screwing things up.” Quartz grunted at me.

“Aww, thanks.” I replied, wagging the bottle at her.  “You really should take credit when it's due, though.  It was your idea that scared the little doe.”

“But you went through with it.”

“I bet if nothing had happened, you'd be a lot happier to admit it.”

Quartz snorted, but shut right up.  Miser kept trying to peek over the counter, hoping the ones outside were gone.  No such luck, of course.  Their silhouettes were still framed against outdoor lights that had clicked on with some sort of automation, framing through shuttered windows what could be seen of the exit.  It was beyond the wall of angry, patient, whispering bodies.

I took my shovel out, and put the bottle next to a set of cracked plates behind the counter.  I braced it on the dense old wood, looking it over.  Ace of spades.  Who in their right mind would give something like this that kind of a corny title?  That was as bad as naming your kid after a gambling game or drug and expecting them to be an outstanding, honest pony.

Well, almost.  The old world, I guessed then, had different values on things.

I took to scraping off the card image on the shovel with a steel-shoed hoof.  It took some time, but wasn't difficult.  I retitled it “Shovel,” and after blowing away the chips of paint, was satisfied with the fresher look.  The paint hadn't been stamped on- it had been some kind of thin crap, the black head of the shovel retaining the alloy's tint below the emblem.

Miser piped up.  “It wasn't a bad idea.” he admitted.

Quartz raised a brow toward him.

“Well, okay, it was.  But we only know that now.”  He took another peek, and getting assaulted with open red eyes, sunk back down behind the counter.  “Doesn't look like they really use too much mechanical stuff.  Maybe Sunglow thought she got shot.”

“Not funny.” I said, remembering Book Worm's picture.

“I... Wasn't trying to be.” he said, confused.  Then he grimaced when I went quiet, occupying myself with the shovel while I took the stares of two more sets of eyes.  “I think stuff like that just scares them.”

My camera was still slung over my neck.  I waved at the still attached picture with a hoof, catching the edge repeatedly. I hadn't gotten the time to remove it during the chaos.  I joked with myself that it seemed to be a growing, bad habit.  “I don't think so.” I replied.  “We got shot at on the way here.  If they're smart enough to keep a rifle in firing condition, they're smart enough to realize a camera isn't dangerous.”

Out came the scrapbook, and off came the picture.  I started to leaf through it again, confident the wind wouldn't whisk away of the looser contents.  I made a note to find some adhesive of some sort, and do it soon.

Quartz grumbled, while Miser gave another half hearted peek.  When he did, there came a long, shrill scraping noise from one of the shutters.  We all looked, then.

I recognized the face, whenever the jittery light above illuminated it.  It was the buck I'd injured on the way in.  He was drawing the pointed tip of his remaining, decorated antler along the shutter through the bars.  Others had stepped back, letting him sharpen it on each shutter, shoving hard occasionally.  I came to realize he testing each one for weakness.  He had started to pace when he hadn't found any, muttering things too silent to hear at us whenever we looked out at him.

Though we stopped checking nearly as often, we knew they were there.  We could hear them passing breathy speech amid one another, and what words we could piece together were still no more than jibberish.  Then, we started to hear one of them singing a song.

It came from beyond the rest of the deer.  It was accompanied by crying and sniffling, the same noises Sunglow had been making after I had taken to somehow frightening her.  Though it was in their strange language, I knew the melody.  Hell, all three of us trapped there knew it, having been submitted to it to drown out the crying on bad Resilience nights.

“Hush now, quiet now, it's time to lay your sleepy head...”

Miser and I both crested the counter in order to look.  One of the street lights was shining off of Sunglow's blanket, the doe curled up, and completely alone in the light.  Her mother was nearby, watching her from a distance as if she had been stricken with some lethal disease.  She was singing the lullaby, trying to comfort the doe as the little thing pleaded in their language.

Just what the hell did they think had I done to her?

The buck hissed something back toward the distant scene, and 'mothers' long ears perked to the words.    Her shadow suddenly stopped, the singing abruptly ending and giving way to silent movement.  There came a distant chirp.  The glass of one of the windows shattered inwards.  There was a window above the stove, above which there were cooking tools hanging loosely on hooks.  A pot gave off a loud pang as it was thrown from it's hook with a wound the size of a golf ball, causing everything on it to clatter and resonate.

Silencers.

If she had been any better with the thing, we'd have been a pair of pickers instead of a trio.  At least we knew then not to look up from that point on.

The pot had bounced to a ringing stop.  As it clanged upon the ground, I heard grunts and the pained snarl of air sucking between clenched teeth.  Even though my heart was still beating from the sudden noise, another idea clicked.

I waited until the ringing had stopped.  I needed to be sure.  I took one of the empty bottles, and threw it at one of the hanging pans.  The gong of the impact and the shatter of glass heralded a yowl from outside, while I got another one of Quartz's venomous looks.  I heard the buck yell one word, three times, each yelp increasing in volume with the final recitation a roar.  With the strange pronunciation of our language, registering it took some time.

“Kwi-eet, kwi-eet, kwi-eet!”  He started to spit more phrases in the below-the-breath intensity, no doubt cursing us out further.  Maybe he was making some grand speech to inspire his fellows.

Quartz traded glances between the swinging pan, and me.  Miser did the same, peeking from beneath his forelegs, which he had ducked beneath after the bullet passed by.  I gave them a wide-eyed smile.   We had something, at least, but we'd need to get a hoof on it.

“No.” she whispered.  She kept motioning her hoof to the ground, as if doing so would nail me into place.  “No! It'll just make things worse!”

I hefted another bottle, and threw it.  The pan tumbled from it's hook- and, so did most of the other utensils.  They came down in a jumble as the bars holding them gave way, the things scattering to either side of the stove, and a good chunk of them onto our side.  I managed to grab a skillet and a ladle.  I had to apologize to Miser- he'd caught most of the things with his back.  At least the hooks hadn't been sharp.

Quartz pinned my foreleg down with a hoof, leaning her weight onto me.  It was atop my scrapbook, compressing the pages.  I halted immediately at that.  “Not this time!” She sneered.  “Do you really want to piss them off that badly?”

“Of course not.” I replied.  “But if things do turn south, I want something.  Besides... I need to know what I did wrong.”  Quartz squinted, confused.  “I'd never hurt some weird kid unless they were shooting at me.  That little doe out there is the only one that seems to speak our language well enough to get an answer.”

Miser had taken to wielding some of the fallen utensils, but had held himself back from ringing his steel horseshoe off a saucepan when he saw Quartz restraining me.  She let me go with a start.  “You selfish son of a-”

“Hey, hey.  If I can unbuck this, it might get us out of here alive.” I said.  “Well, you guys maybe.  They aren't stupid, maybe they'll just look at me when they decide on who screwed them over.”

Miser gaped.  “You are really good at finding ways to get yourself killed.”

Quartz couldn't hide her laugh completely.  A snort escaped.  I grinned.  “Just one of many talents.” I said, with a grunt.  I was released, and rubbed off the print she'd left on my foreleg.

I lifted a few things over the counter as a test against “Mothers” eyes.  The skillet went up first.  Nothing.  My shovel, then, with my goggles wrapped around it.  Nothing.  I hoped the exercise had been entertaining, at least.

Finally, I took the one thing that had gotten all of us into the mess.  I slung the neck strap of my camera over the shovels mouthgrip, and lifted it.  The instant it crested, I heard the clatter of cloven hooves scrambling for cover.  There were a few whispered words passed outside, and when I dared a peek beside it, found they had all retreated from the slits in the shutters.

Really?  Bucking really?

I crept back down and took it away from the shovel.  “Well, that's another thing they don't like.” Quartz so wisely reiterated.  “Might be able to use that too.”

“Why though? It's not like the thing is dangerous.”  I turned the lens to face me, looking it over.  “It didn't kill Sunglow.  Didn't even open up her skin.” I started to crack a stupid joke.  “It's not like it...”

I blinked.  I fell back down to the scrapbook, staring at the picture.  The wide eyed doe, glancing outward from the backdrop of flowers, cobble, and frightened, hiding children that were out of focus.

It's not like it steals souls or anything.

“Quartz, I'm going to need you to make some noise.”

“What? Why?”

“I need to get on the roof.”  I looked around for what I could.  The last bottle was all I could use.

I held the picture of Sunglow with my teeth, and poked my head out.  I saw the eyes watching, and the glint of a scope in the distance.  I waved around the picture, my head in full and stupid view.

Nothing violent happened.  They stared.  They squinted and spat more curses.

I returned behind the counter.  Then, I snapped my scrapbook closed, and slapped Sunglow's portrait atop the cover.  I started to fold it, over and over, until it was about as thick as a twig.  I took the bottle, and stuffed the picture into the hole while Miser and Quartz watched.

“Okay.  This is going to solve our problems.”

“Or get you killed.” Quartz insisted.

“That's a solved problem for you, isn't it?” I snorted.  “Make some noise.  Stop when I yell.”

Things clanged.  The ringing of metal on metal made the quiet ones shirk painfully.  I got into the kitchen, and in it's back near the fridges we'd ransacked, was the ladder up.  I had the bottle clutched in my mouth the whole time, the spit making it slippery while I climbed.

I threw open the hatch.  The bottle wanted to freeze to my lips, but I kept them wiggling just enough to stop it from adhering to my skin.  I walked toward the edge, seeing catlike stances covering ears with hooves wrapping their own heads in blankets.  Even 'mother,' at her range, was crouched and trying to block out the sounds.

I took the bottle from between my lips, and yelled out “Hey!” as strongly as I could.  It drew across a cold throat, the breath painful.  The metal din from below stopped, and I hefted the bottle.  I waited, to let the deer see me.

I hurled the bottle past the rising bodies, and red eyes below.  They watched the bottle smash into the cobble, cringing at the impact.  After a time, 'Mother' approached, using the edge of her gun to brush away some of the glass.

When she smoothed out the photograph, she kept it pinned.  She started to call out with her abnormal words, gathering to her the attention of the one-horned buck.  As he circled her, I can only say they were talking among themselves. I was too far away to know for sure what happened.

He took up the picture, and began to walk.  He snorted at Sunglow, gesturing with his head, toward one of the low street lamps.  Several of the other deer trotted off toward the two of them, forming a circle around them as the sniffling Sunglow was brazenly shoved toward them.  One lifted her from the ground, balancing her demure figure atop her own head, to be near the brilliant light.

The buck gave her the picture.  She continued to breath deeply as she submitted it to the bulb; it was hot enough that, after a time, the photo began to curl.  Soon, the smolder of ash was lifting from the corner, stealing the photograph away and making it vanish into drifting, orange flakes.

Once it was done, Sunglow was allowed back down.  The other deer surrounded her, 'mother' given space to approach and finally embrace her.  The scared doe was calm as her mother again started to sing the lullaby, brushing over her ivory scalp.

“I didn't mean to hurt you.” I called out.  “I didn't know.”

Every eye settled back on me, rebounding from the cradled Sunglow.  They started to re-approach the diner, one by one falling back into a crimson-eyed mass.  “Mother” released Sunglow, moving arm her gun and take a stance... With me on the roof, in plain view.

“Sunglow, I didn't want to hurt you.  I didn't know.”

“Kwi-eet!” The buck screamed again.  He gave his head a shake, the ornaments swinging below the  gleaming edges of his remaining antler.

Sunglow unsheathed Growly, holding him close. I could see her own red eyes glimmering from where she was, refracting the light of the street post.  “I didn't know.  I'm sorry.” I repeated, saying it rather than yelling, hoping she'd hear me.  “They're gonna kills us.” I finally growled.  “You're going to have to watch, and you're the only one that's going to know what I even said.”

Sunglow stared at me from her place, far and away.  She clutched at Growly, and blinked as her elders approached and her Mother cycled the chamber.  She spoke, or so I still believe, and the rest of the deer suddenly stopped.  They turned back to me after she was finished, spitting out more words- to me, that time, as I stood on the roof and left myself exposed.

“It was a mistake.  I didn't know.  I don't have any reason to hurt any of you, unless you give me one.  Just like you, right?”

Sunglow spoke again.  The crowd collectively narrowed their eyes, but relented in their advance.  The buck spoke up, and Sunglow returned his speech to me in words I understood.  The world was quiet enough in that place, I could hear even her from the range she was at, though she had to yell at the top of her tiny lungs.  “You are not our enemy?”

“We didn't even know you were here.”

Sunglow passed it on, and the group paused to collect thoughts from it's attendants.  The buck spoke to her again, and she got on all of her hooves to argue over Growly's head.

I'd seen brave things before.  Most of it was actually just disguised stupidity- a lot of that I can claim for myself.  Watching that little doe bark defiantly from behind a stuffed animal at a troop of angry, shadowed bodies... Well, who was I, from then on, to judge?

There was complete silence for a time.  I was watched again, and there were whispers.  I felt like I was back in the mines for a moment, panicking in front of the wall of eyes and fanged smiles.

“You are not our enemy.” she said.  “But you are not our friend.  If what you say is true, you must be judged.  Come down from where you are cowering, and talk for a while.  We will make our decision.”

I let out a breath I had never known I'd been holding.

At least we weren't dead.  Not yet.

[***]

Too afraid to touch my camera, the deer had kept me at gun and antlerpoint until I had packed it away. I was then separated from my two traveling companions, though not by distance.  I was surrounded and watched, a tall, sour-faced deer to every side.  Both the buck, and “mother” were close behind the “wardens.”  One with her rifle, the other with his weight and his sharp, severed antler in his teeth.  Miser and Quartz, though stripped of their weaponized cookware once they'd descended the tilted ladder, were allowed to walk together and whisper between themselves, albeit while being carefully watched.

Lead by Sunglow, Growly waggled in the string that held him on her back.  I could see her through the thin legs of the deer in front of me, her small figure trying to say things toward the others.  They disregarded her almost as if scolding, but much of it had seemed like it was laced with caution more than urgency.

Each one of them had been within the thick, fur-lined leather.  All the does had a small disc strapped atop their foreheads, made of whatever they could have found.  They were cut out of metal, mostly, the jagged edges put into beige surgical tubing.  Atop the metals where was webbing made of stitching wire, which led down to tiny accoutrements that usually rested just above their brow.  Every one of the discs had a hole cut into the center, and the web was always neatly stitched around the gap.

We were brought past and around the green house.  The boarded up windows of the stoic hospital remained dark, tiny sparks of red glinting when they caught the street lights just right.  All around were the chipped, broken remains of crystal overgrowth, having once encased the barely functional light posts.  There was a mingling creep of ivy and crystal, the former slithering from within windows, and the latter glistening from the cracks within the walls it had been climbing.

The reception doors, despite the still solid wired glass, had been curtained off with doctor's scrubs and labcoats.  Having to brush past them, the bodies (and watchful eyes) pushed in on all sides and ensured I would not move.  Beyond that first layer, there had been decorations of truly strange weight.

Many feathers, broken antler tips, and the dried bodies of insects that wouldn't fit in a hoof.  They had been hanging from fishing wire, the various bristly and weird items licking at all of us as we escorted through the second set of doors.

The lobby's terminals, though the husks remained on the half-circle desk, had been covered in the twirling scrawls as the tree had been.  Their backs had been hollowed out, the insides lit with by groups of fireflies that had been attracted to small glass dishes filled with an aromatic liquid.  Their monitors hung from the ceiling as shiny decor.  The chairs were covered in fur blankets and stuffed pouches, patterned in a way I only recognized from my then most recent experience- the black dotted fur of the deer.  I didn't have to think hard to discover where the hospital's tools had been used.

The things they had done to survive...

Though, they were doing alright for themselves, weren't they?  Not like Resilience had been.

From the tepid light of the barely functioning monitors, several more deer were inside, resting on more blankets or hospital pillows.  Patient trolleys were used as places for weapons, most of them rifles, and all of them rigged with silencers of either pre-war quality, or duct tape and plastic drinking bottles.  The ones that the then standing guards were using, though, had their barrels painted with, again, the weaving patterns that extended up to the mouth of each gun.  Most of them took up their arms, pushing from their seats to make sure we knew one thing- they weren't going to tolerate anything about us.

The deer with Miser and Quartz fanned out, though a buck remained close to each one.  I was kept imprisoned between three bodies, before one moved from in front of me, and took a stance near Sunglow.  The doe laid down in front of me, and Sunglow hopped onto her back.  She clutched at the adult's neck, keeping her head peering from between the white, long, furry ears.

Exposed to the lot of them, my companions included, the first question was asked by the doe.   Her voice was quiet enough that I had to strain to listen, yet could still not understand.  Sunglow flicked her ears attentively, and translated, loud enough that we could understand.  Courteous little doe...  “Why did you come here?”

“Night was coming.” I replied.  “We needed a place to sleep, or at least rest until morning.”

“Didn't you see the warnings?”  was the next question asked.

I grimaced.  “I did.  I can't say if my friends did, though.”

“Then why did you approach?  Especially during the long sleep?”

“I...  We didn't know that the paintings were warnings.  We didn't know anypony... Anyone was here.”

“Even with everything that was in your way?”

Quartz interrupted from behind.  “We've never seen anything like it- what were we supposed to think?”

“That some “pony” had the sense to organize the things that were right in front of you.” came a scowled reply, translated from my right.  “Being stupid is one thing, but being dangerous and stupid is something we cannot abide by.”

“We didn't know.” I said, only able to mirror Quartz's attempt at controlling the conversation's hemmorrage.

“So, it was ignorance?”

“Yes, until we found Sunglow.”

There was a collective quiet, where their language floated on whispers between several of them.  Sunglow tried to hide behind the white scalp of her “podium.”  “What did you think then?” came the next question.

“There were children with food and water-”  I shook my head.  Then, sat back, and gave a shrug.  “What were we supposed to think?”

“Mother” snorted from behind me.  “Easy pickings.” came the instant, simple answer, floated across Sunglows conversion.  “That's why you tried to steal her mind away, wasn't it?  To have some leverage in case of retribution.”  Sunglow was doing an excellent job with herself, and the direction of her fellow's words.  Though her eyes watered as she looked at me directly, her voice hadn't even cracked.

“That isn't what...” I had to calm myself.  I knew things could get very bad, very quickly, if I did so much as literally raise my voice.  “That wasn't my intent.  I didn't know what it did-” I grunted.  “Would do to her.”

“Ignorance again?”

“I didn't want to hurt her, okay?  The children all had food and water.  We had to keep going, but I needed proof they were there.  Without you-” I pointed toward the one holding Sunglow up. “Any of you adults up and moving, we thought they were alone.”  She reeled a moment, forcing Sunglow to clutch tighter, and climb back up from the inches she'd lost.  “We thought bringing the photograph to somepony more capable would bring help.”

“Then why take her?  Why leave the rest?”

“We didn't need her... Your food or water. We didn't have enough to feed all of them in travel.  Since I didn't know the picture wouldn't hurt her-”

“You are not arguing for yourself very well.”

“I took the picture as we were starting to leave.  We had to keep going, and we had enough for ourselves, but no more.” I lied about our supplies, mostly about myself.  “It's not like we had the urge to get more.”

“Keep going?” was next asked.

“Yes.  We're on the Long Trot south.”

All the red eyes in the room narrowed.  The din of complete silence, marked only by the sway of their ornamentation, was all that permeated the room.  I could hear the strain of my coat when I moved, to give a look toward the two other ponies behind me.  I could barely see them, and their eyes went from mine to give cautious looks to the angrily leering deer.

Sunglow grew confused. She started asking questions of the one beneath her, then turned up to try and breathily call the same inquiries to “mother.”  I looked back at her, and she whispered something back to quiet her.  Sunglow furrowed her brow and puffed her cheeks up, squaking a complaint in their tongue.  Several rolled their eyes to the words, and grumbled.  Then, the one holding her up leaned down toward me, close enough for me to taste black breath.  “Cris-tal?” she said, drawing the word along her teeth like a knife on flesh.

I didn't budge.  Whatever it meant to them, I was going to be honest.  “Yes.”

Sunglow went wide-eyed and stood on her podium's neck, blinking.  The doe, twice my height easily, squinted.  She said something, then, and Sunglow took a few surprised moments to speak.  “Southern trotters have passed us in many days and many ways.  Recently.  Why was it you that stopped?”

I sighed.  We wouldn't be going anywhere but a circle.  “To find a place to rest in the night.  We thought there might be medicine, too.”

“So you knew we had medicine, and wanted to take it.”

“We didn't know you were here.  We knew that there was an old hospital here.  Forgotten things from the old world.”  I shook my head for the final time.  “We didn't know anypony was living here.”

Sunglow relayed the message, and that was very nearly that.  A few hushed arguments came, Sunglow herself seeming to make the most significant.  She, “mother,” and several others were the most vocal.  Several began to handle their weapons, obviously dissatisfied with my plea; Sunglow was the only thing (and even in that, I can only guess why) which saved our flanks.  She was speaking a little story both to her mother and to the others-

She made some exaggerated motions, and finalized the monologue by holding up her hooves.  She kept them slightly apart and made a click noise with her tongue.  It her pantomime of a camera.

Her mother snorted, and took herself away from me to approach her daughter.  She tried to address Sunglow, but the little doe argued back.  Then, all the eyes fell back on me, and there was a hesitation.

“There is too much you do not know for us to console ourselves in killing you.”  Sunglow translated.  “So, we will teach you.  Then, soul-stealer, you will have no excuse for yourself should you ever return.”

[***]

I was led down a long hallway, darkened as it was by the windows and the night that had fallen.  The lights above had long been burnt out, or purposely broken, as walking on glass felt like a common theme.  Along the walls and floors there were flowers growing upon spindly stalks.  They were the predominant light in the halls, luminescent and pale green, within old bedpans that had been filled with soil from outside.  The rest was lit by winking fireflies that crawled along the walls, or floated through the air.  They illuminated cracked or cut pipes, to which had been adhered the gold of the homemade talismans.  The drips were caught in buckets, beakers, and vials, leaving many containers of perfectly clear water.

Things seemed to get more humid as I was forced to continue, and looking into the rooms, I was not a question of “if.”  They had been labs of some sort.  Sterile rooms, with desks and tables.  Old glass vials had been taken and filled with soil, single plants of all sorts growing from them.  Some were flowers, some were many leafed things that had buds or tiny fruits upon them.  The wet roots were visible from them, tended to what looked to be teenage children in every room we passed.  They stopped to watch me, alien as I was to them, and peered their heads out as we passed.  My escorts tried to scoot them back into their rooms, likely sending warnings in their tongue, but that stopped absolutely none of them.  The escorts gave up on trying, as Sunglow's ride continued onward toward the hall's end.

Rebar, dirt, concrete chunks, and plants coalesced into a jagged wall.  There was no cold; it's edges had been lined neatly by more bit-talismans.  More of them, I suspected, in the venture to it.  We stopped there, and Sunglow started to chat with her podium.  The doe sighed, and said something back.  Then, Sunglow pointed with a forehoof.  “That's some of the rubble from old world.” she said.  “That's where the story starts.”

“All right.” I said, indulging the kid.  “I'm listening.”

-*-

“We came to be here by the will of many ponies, long ago.  Things were said to move us from our  forests in the south, and we tried to argue that we deserved our place where we first had been.  The ponies would not listen, and they were strong with old weapons and with numbers.  So, we were forced to come here, and learn the ways of living in cold and with machines that the old ponies gave us.  So we did for a while, and we learned the way of machines that helped ponies and deer alike.  It was a nice time.”

It fell when the old world shrugged, and when the Heat On The Wind passed by our home.”

The podium turned, and Sunglow pointed at the wall.  I could make out some colors, and shapes, but nothing of significance.  One of my escorts realized my inability, and grew exasperated.  He drew a flower from the rubble, and nipped it's edge.  Several fireflies collected around it after a quick wave, and he took the natural torch to, what I discovered, was a picture.

It was a painting, much like the rest I'd seen on the billboards, but with simple shapes that were easy to discern.  Dark blotches with legs were the shape of deer, near square dots on what looked to be tables.  Rounded rectangles with small patterns, what I recognized as one of the diner's vending machines, were drawn with cracks.

“When the world shrugged, many of the machines that we had started to depend on died.  We could not fix the most important- the machines that could help others.   Even as we grew more confused, that's when the dark days came.”

I was ushered (shoved) over to the next wall, past a doorway.  Inside there was a paint-covered little buck, having stopped in broad swings of his brush on the walls. The entire inside had been colored in swirls and dots, within the center of which there had been place more dirt-filled vials.  Things had not yet started to grow, and he had been finishing the paintings on the walls with dye-covered hooves.

“The night persisted for many days when the earth shuddered.  It came with a hot wind that brushed the clouds aside.  Then, all was still, and the cloth of many colors in the sky all turned an ill green.  The clouds closed, the sky was lost to us, and the black snow began to fall in the dark...” The entire wall was black.  The deer were painted in tan, beneath green sways of paint.  Several were laying on their sides, peppered with green dots.  “The black snow came with many sicknesses we could not stop.  Many things died, including many of us.  While the snow was falling, and we were cowering in our old place of healing, some of us took to the first long sleep.  Those that did, started to go mad.”

I was turned to the opposing wall.  Some deer, silhouetted by guns and by spears, surrounded other similar figures in crimson circles.  “They woke up screaming of terrible things.  That something in their dreams showed them cities on fire.  They said they saw ponies turning to black air, becoming shadows on walls, and that they watched flesh melt on terrified faces.  Some said they saw only darkness, stretching forever, and heard nothing but weeping from all around.  They said that when the world had shrugged, it had ended, and we were supposed to end with it.  The ones that went mad refused to see anything but the dreams when they awoke, and we had to kill them to bring them peace.”

“We had to burn the dead.  Few volunteered to go outside and face the sickness in the air to do it, but it was done.  While the stench of their corpses filled the rooms of our largest home, this place we are in now, three ponies came.”  The next wall showed a box, in which many of the white forms were standing.  Some had the silhouette of guns, while others had spears.  They were surrounding three very odd forms- thick, mostly gray, and with colors that I recognized. Blue, magenta... The color of the old crystals in the magazines and pictures.  “They had skins of metal and crystal.  When they moved, their bodies hissed.  When they spoke, their voices boomed.  He said he was Father of the Crystal Ponies, and that he had come on their behalf to help us.”

My mind reeled.  I knew a few tales of what I was thinking, but they did not compare to this old legend.  Sureshot wasn't one to keep secrets in story time, though then, I had wondered if I had simply never believed he had.  The old king?  Shining Armor?  He survived?  I shook it off.  It had to be somepony only claiming it.  Why would he have survived?

“The Crystal Father was not afraid of the snow.  He was not afraid of the Dark Days.  He was not afraid of us.  He said that Princess Luna, queen of the night and of all things that would drive us to where we are, had taken perfect control of the crystal city.  As your world ended, she brought to the northern land a darkness that would last several days.  The Crystal Father said she did so to keep the Crystal Utopia alive, that the dark would hide it from a catastrophe.  But the city was too bright.  Like a jewel shining in the sun, it drew to it the mistakes that Luna had made, and that is what caused the world to shudder and the black snow to fall.”

“He said he knew of our plight that Luna had birthed, and taught us many things to ask for forgiveness.  He taught us how to make these-” Sunglow tapped the disc on her podium's head.  “He called it a dreamcatcher.  He said it would protect us from the things that came in our sleep to drive us wild.  He taught us how to make warmth from gold, the chips of greed from the old ponies.  He told us the darkness would wane, and so would the illness.  We would only need to persist for a short time longer.  Then he left, and said he would be back with more ways to survive what would come when the cloak of night lifted.”

“So we did what he said.  We waited.  Many days passed, and very little happened.  It was silent, but we feared the dangers outside.  It was then that a great monster came, something we only called The Hunger.”

I walked to the next wall of my own accord.  The image upon it, to my surprise, was familiar.

Fanged teeth.  Eyes.  They were placed in random places withing a large, black cloud, bearing down upon the deer in ebony thorns.  I listened, then, and very, very carefully.

“It took from us many old things with it's mouths.  Dangerous machines, black crystals, old world food and some of the ones starting to rot.  All of it was food to The Hunger.  It ate and ate and ate, and it did not stop.  Within days, what we had that could feed it was gone.  So, it started to eat us.  It came for the ones that tried to fight it, tearing them apart with teeth and swallowing each piece without tasting it.  We hid from The Hunger, praying it would not find us beyond the doors we had sealed, and starved in it's wake.  We listened without sleep for a great while, hoping to somehow hear The Hunger and be able to run from it.  Unable to stop it, we could only drink painful water from our hiding places.  We pricked ourselves with Radawee, the old world slime that made our heads hurt but took the pain from the water away.  When the hurt in the water was gone, we found our eyes had turned red and our coats white.  Our ears began to ache against the sound of our guns and our voices, so we grew as silent as the world outside had become, to listen, and to prepare.  Finally, the snow turned white again, the sky grew bright enough to see, and we could venture outside, beyond the reach of The Hunger.”

Was it still there?  Was that fucking thing still near them somewhere?  I started to breath harder, my eyes barely blinking.  I calmed myself with some level of logic.  If it was, it would have already said hello.  Though the thought did let me relax, to some degree, it did not give me peace.  I focused on the tale, instead.

“We found nothing.  As far as our eyes could see and our ears could hear, there was nothing.  It scared us to stay in the middle of the nothing, but the only thing that had ever tried to help us, the Crystal Father, had told us to wait.  So we continued to wait.  We started to grow thin once the food vanished, and the radawee was saved for children with the omens of the old sickness.  Then the Horses in White came, and we were forced to fight with our stomachs empty and our souls sour.”

“They came in small numbers at first.  Few of us understood how they talked- much like you.  When our talker-machines failed, we fought them and killed them, and took from them their loud weapons and their belongings.  Then more came, and we were forced to do the same again.  And again.  And again.  More and more came every time, and many of us were burned in the name of violence, of the Polesee that once roamed the old streets.”

“Then an army of the Horses In White came.  They stomped their hooves and yelled things.  They started to fire, and wounded us. They did not kill us.  They made us watch as they turned the old homes to rubble, dragged us through the streets, and picked the things that had only just started to grow around the great heart of the tree.  As they started to enter the biggest of our homes,” Sunglow gestured all around herself, and to the walls. “The Crystal Father, true to his word, returned.”

“He and his brothers shot the horses in white with light.  The horses in white fluttered away on the wind as ashes.  He slung glowing orbs at them, and they gurgled as their flesh and organs turned to muddy water and splattered from their bones.  The horses in white tried to strike back, but no harm came to the Crystal Father; light surrounded him, and everything that meant to harm him never pierced the shell.”

“The Crystal Father took up the untouched belongings of the horses in white, of which there were few.  All that was left of many of them were their guns, and bones, and many metal things like buckles and tins.  He and his brothers stayed to help heal what was left of us.  When that was done, and only when he was certain it was, the Crystal Father gave us what he had first left to find.  They were all sorts of things, which he said we were to keep safe.  They were seeds, and he told us they were of many plants that had died in the black snow when the world shuddered.”

“He had parchments with him that our old speakers turned to our voice.  We could read them then, and with them, knew how to best care for the new seeds in our own home.  We could grow these things with the warmth he taught us, using the minds and bodies he saved for us, and then keep both sustained with what we grew.  We were complete, and only if we failed in our charge would we be broken.”

By Celestia.  The things these deer had done to survive.  Even in doing what little I had, I wanted to apologize.  I wished I had only passed that place by.

“When he said he had to leave, we were mournful.  He said he was going to go south.  He promised that the Horses in White would not come back to us for some time, if ever again.  When we asked why the Crystal Father had done what he had, he told us that it was the will of the Tartarus, and that we would not understand.”

The will of Tartarus...

Even back then, the word carried weight to me.  Spoken through legends of those long dead, even then I knew.

“Though we wanted to express our gratitude, the crystal father was gone before we could thank him.  We have not seen him since, but we know he did go south.”

“How?  Does he contact you?”

“No.” Sunglow shook her head. “But the horses in white only ever came from the south, and ever since the Crystal Father departed, they have rarely returned.  When they do, they usually only talk. Usually.  That is how we know the Crystal Father made them stop attacking us- he must have spoken with them, or at least killed enough of them that they cannot come back to us, even now.”

Then why was Resilience seeing so many of them?  Especially in recent days?  I snorted.

I had so many more questions.  All it ever took to damn me in the Quiet Ones eyes, was to ask them.

[***]