Words?
I was never good with words. Did not have the talent for it, could never say what was really on my mind properly. Yet here I am, writing down my thoughts as they come to me, the ideas I’ve had and places I’ve been.
Might as well start from the beginning, just like any other tale.
I was born long before the war; long before we even started bringing major industry into daily Equestrian lives. It feels like I’ve been alive forever. I don’t know how or why, I’m not sure what makes me…endure…like I have.
I’ve survived destructive megaspell detonations, I survived a direct Balefire explosion. It wiped Cloudsdale from the face of Equestria. I had screamed for days as my skin regrew, even after my voice had given out.
I have tasted death, seen it, embraced it, walked with it, yet it never claims me.
“Not your time,” it had whispered to me. “You’ve got a long road ahead of you, but we’ll probably meet again along the way. Maybe one of those meetings, I’ll be able to claim you.”
I was looking forward to that day. The day I could finally leave this world.
What used to be bright, vibrant, alive…was now dull and dead. Everypony blamed the zebras for the ruin of the land, yet I knew ponies were just as much at fault for destroying this bright country and turning it into a living hell where everyone, pony, zebra, griffon, ghoul and whatever else roamed the land had to fight to survive another day.
I wasn’t spared that struggle either. I wandered the Wasteland, helping wherever I could. I knew I wasn’t the only one. There were others out there, each facing their own trials and hardships, yet overcoming them regardless.
Maybe it was by themselves, maybe it was with the help of their friends.
Friends…
What a strange thing to have.
I’ve had others follow me, yet they’ve always succumbed to the Wasteland, taken by radiation, Taint, and violence.
Yet all those leave me alone.
Well…mostly.
Violence still managed to find me with appalling regularity.
There were ponies out there who had heard of the seemingly immortal pegasus and they were determined to get their hooves on me and find a way to benefit from it.
Pretty sure I’ve left plenty of my blood lying around for them to suck up and analyze by now.
Unless of course they wanted to see how durable I really was.
I was sorely tempted to give in, hand myself over and let them do who-knows-what to me.
Maybe they’d finally allow me to rest.
Yet there was still a part of me that rebelled against the idea. Pegasi were notorious for their stubborn streaks, miles wide and long and I still had a ways to go before it ran out, apparently.
-
I could not express how much I hated unicorns. Trotting around with their magic, acting as if they owned the Wasteland. They lorded it up, demanding and taking whatever they damn well pleased, subjugating or eliminating everyone else around them.
They enslaved the earth ponies, putting them to work rebuilding the ruined cities, making a comfortable place for their masters to live while the workers died by the hundreds.
Many of the pegasi had abandoned the Wasteland, closing the sky behind them when they fled. Any pegasi that spoke about helping the land below the clouds were sent down to experience it themselves. They all shared one thing in common: they had their cutie marks branded off, replaced with the symbol of the pegasus who had been considered the ultimate traitor when she turned her back on her own kind and went down to the Wasteland.
When the call went out to every pegasus to go above the clouds, I ignored the call. I didn’t care what they called me, all I could think about was finding the ponies that meant everything to me.
I was searching for the princesses.
Everyone said they had died in Canterlot, holding the shield that kept the deadly radiation and pink cloud from spreading all over middle Equestria. Yet even the shield had failed and everyone assumed the royal sisters were dead.
But I held hope. If I, an ordinary pegasus, was immune to radiation, surely the princesses could withstand it as well? Reports about the pink cloud were scattered at best; nopony ever went to the Canterlot ruins, which still held lethal concentrations of the deadly zebra weapon.
Canterlot was my goal, yet these idiotic slavers, or raiders, or whatever the heck they were, stood in my way.
I ducked down as shots pinged off the window I was hiding under. I could hear their mocking cries echoing among the empty buildings.
“Come out, little chicken! There’s a healthy sized bounty on pegasi, and yours in particular is very interesting!”
I tuned them out and let my eyes sweep around the area. Several red bars dotted my vision, marking hostiles.
My vision would seem rather odd if ponies ever saw my memories.
It was hard to describe, it was basically a heads-up-display that allowed me quick info about my immediate area.
I flicked my wings nervously. I wasn’t afraid for my life, but getting shot still hurt. Took me months to recover from a nasty headshot that I received after wandering too close to a unicorn walled city.
When I finally awoke, I had been stripped of everything except the PipBuck on my left foreleg. I counted myself lucky someone hadn’t sawn or ripped it off. The morbid part of my mind wondered if I could regrow a lost limb…probably, since apparently I could grow a new brain with no problem.
Shaking my head, I focused on the here and now. I pricked my ears as I heard a sound right outside my window, then bit back a curse as an apple-shaped object was tossed in. A grenade, joy. I flapped my wings hard, sending it flying further away from me, but it was enveloped in a magic field and tossed back towards me.
Oh…they had a unicorn with them.
Buck me.
The explosion demolished what remained of the structure I had been taking shelter in, leaving me battered and exposed. I looked around, seeing what I could only describe as a Raider army surrounding me. Everywhere I looked, there were red bars. Out of options, I took the only course left to me.
I raised my hooves above my head…
And slammed them down onto the ground, launching me skywards much faster than a normal take-off would have. I spread my wings and arched away from the center of the Raiders that had surrounded me. It took them a second to realize I was no longer there and soon enough shots were being fired skywards at me. Luckily, I was high enough that most went wild, yet it appeared a few had some long-range weapons with them because some shots were a lot more accurate than others.
I swerved in an erratic pattern, my eyes scanning the ground below for any options. My eyes highlighted two of their ponies and I focused in on them. One was a mint-colored unicorn who was sniping at me with what appeared to be a heavily modified sniper rifle with all sorts of bells and whistles. The other was…
Buck me again sideways.
Covered from head to hoof and muzzle to tail in armor, the Steel Ranger was tracking me through the sky with its own weapons.
I bit back a curse and folded my wings just as the twin muzzles of the weapons mounted on the Ranger’s armor flashed and twin beams of something shot past me, leaving a burning smell in the air itself.
I rocketed toward the ground, well aware I was taking a risk. A skilled sniper could lead their target and here I was, going in a straight line downwards. All I could do was hope something obscured their line of sight-
A shot hammered into my side, sending me into a spin.
-Never mind, they could see me easily enough. I watched the ground rush and I closed my eyes, bracing myself.
This was gonna hurt…
I was rather proud of the crater I made with my impact. It was a good three feet deep and roughly three times my size, radiating away from me.
I carefully flexed my hooves and limbs, checking for any injuries. Everything moved the way it was supposed to, which I guess was a good sign.
The sound of guns being primed and aimed at me caused me to look up at the Raiders surrounding the crater.
I waved cheerfully to them.
-
Alright, maybe that could have gone better.
Maybe instead of flying down, I should have flown away from the ponies that seemed all too eager to get their hooves on me.
Of course, what’s done is done and I can cheerfully admit I’m more than a few apples short of a bushel, or whatever analogy ponies nowadays were using to identify idiots.
The rusty collar chafed against the skin of my neck (I swear to the Goddesses, if it stained my coat, I was going to start screaming) as I craned my head, looking towards the horizon. It glowed an interesting shade of pink, whereas the rest of the sky was getting on towards a dark blue.
Oh, right, forgot to mention that, didn’t I?
Somepony had opened the sky a few months ago.
When that happened, I could almost feel the Wasteland pause as every single living thing stopped and looked upwards as the clouds dispersed.
It was nice to see her moon again, as well as her sun. I could feel them clearly now. My Goddesses were alive.
But…
Something was off.
They weren’t together.
Celestia’s presence was…flying, or somewhere in the sky, whereas Luna’s was even more vague.
Yet I couldn’t really focus on that as something stung against my flank. I twitched, jumping away from the direction the blow had come from and snapped a glare at the unicorn who was holding the willow switch he had struck me with.
“Well, not so tough now are you-eeaaargh!” His voice turned into a squeal as I tackled him and started biting and thrashing him with my hooves. I felt a hoof connect with his groin and his voice went through a spectacular pitch switch.
It took three other unicorn slavers to pull me off my victim and force me back into line.
I trotted onwards with my head held high. One way or another I would get away from this and get back to finding my princesses.
“So…where’re we headed?” I asked the pony ahead of me, a completely average young buck, dark green coat with a red and yellow mane. He looked back at me in surprise.
“You…you’ve never heard of Rose Eye?” He asked incredulously. I tilted my head. “Nope, I’ve had other ponies on my mind.” The buck shook his head and turned forward, but I still heard him talking. “She’s the pony who took over Red Eye’s operations in Fillydelphia.”
Ah, that explained a few things. I’d been starting to wonder why I hadn’t seen any of Red Eye’s banners flying in the midst of some slave gangs I’d seen wandering the Wastes. Instead, now it was a faded rose…eye…
Well, that made sense, I guess. Either way, it looked like I was headed towards Fillydelphia.
-
Some things never change.
I was small for my age. A lot of ponies seemed to be runts nowadays. Not all of them, but a significant portion of the slaves who worked around me were my size, some larger, some smaller. Most of them would never get a chance to get any larger, killed by sickness, slavers or an accident while working one of the deadly machines that helped keep this place going.
I have seen ponies ripped apart, cut to pieces, beaten to a pulp and vaporized. I have seen ponies raped by their masters for no other reason than to hear them scream. Slavers would beat a slave if they so much as dipped their head too low, or looked away from their work.
We were nothing to them. Property, cattle, beasts of burden. A lot of us were uneducated, illiterate. All we knew was the back-breaking grind of everyday labor. And we were expected to repeat the process day after day, month after month, year after year, until we either keeled over from exhaustion or gave our masters a reason to give us to another master.
Some of us prayed for death, others prayed for salvation.
I didn’t pray. I knew I was going to be free. One day. I had seen it. I know the future isn’t set in stone; that it is constantly in motion, always changing, shadows of alternate futures clouding our view.
Yet every time I had looked into my own future, I had seen myself free, flying across a green Equestria, cleansed of evil, radiation and every other foul thing the war had brought into this land.
Maybe I was merely seeing my death. Either way, I knew that what I saw was better than anything I had now.
So I waited.
I served my masters quietly and diligently; rising up in the slave ranks until I had reached the unlikely position of what every other slave called the ‘master slave.’
I had power. I could order slaves around, make them do my bidding. Yet any slaves that offered their services to me and the area of the city I was given control of, I treated them as if they were ponies.
I worked right alongside them; I helped them when they injured themselves. Soon I had reached my maximum amount of slaves that any slaver could own.
I could sense the other slavers’ jealousy; their envious glances cast my way. My section of the city was almost fully repaired, through the efforts of a mere 25 slaves and one slaver.
Then I was called into a meeting with the pony who ran the entire city.
She called herself Rose Eye.
She was the only pony I ever called “Master” with respect. She had power. She had Alicorns. She seemed surprised at my work methods, at the way I treated my slaves.
“You work with them, even though you have no reason to?” she asked me, as I was working on removing a pile of rubble from a doorway. She seemed reluctant to be here, down where I worked. I could tell she was deluding herself into thinking she was doing a good thing, that the deaths of thousands of slaves would eventually allow her to create a peaceful Equestria
I didn’t know how to answer her in words she would understand. I had a feeling that Rose Eye herself had been a lot like me, fighting her way into power, into a position where she could control those who had used to control her.
She offered me a position under her, as one of her advisors. I asked her if I would be able to work at improving the way slaves were treated.
“After all,” I had pointed out, “healthy slaves work faster, harder and with more enthusiasm than starving abused ones.”
Rose Eye had replied, with no small amount of regret, that, while I would be able to put forth the ideas, they would likely never be implemented, since the other slavers who ran their own sections of the city would never dirty themselves with helping their slaves.
As I cleared the last of the rubble and swept the doorway clean, I had asked Rose Eye if I would be able to order around the slavers.
“Why do you want to know that?” she had replied, his tone curious, but wary.
“Could I make them my slaves?”
That had surprised her. “They would revolt against you; you wouldn’t be safe anywhere you went in the city.”
“I would be if I had the same kind of protection you do.”
That had confused her and I had merely pointed at her silent Alicorn shadows.
She hesitated. “Most of my Alicorns only listen to me because I took up Red Eye’s position after his death…” she shook her head. “There’s not many of them left, most joined with the Followers of the Apocalypse or took off to restart their own lives.”
“You could at least ask,” I replied calmly as I trotted towards the next pile of rubble. A few of my slaves (I didn’t like calling them that, but that was what they were) called out cautious greetings that I returned. I helped a trio clear away a broken wall while Rose Eye watched us for a bit before she turned and spoke quietly to one of the Alicorns with her.
Three days later, I had a purple Alicorn with a blue mane and green eyes simply appear in my quarters and offered her services to me as a guardian.
She was a curious creature, a lot more prone to making conversation than I would have thought. She had introduced herself as Eclipse and when I asked what her powers were, she had simply stated “Whatever the situation calls for.”
I knew a little about Alicorns. All of them had very powerful telekinesis and seemed to favor using heavy weapons like chain guns and rocket launchers. The purple Alicorns were able to teleport long distances and bring ponies with them, as well as being able to erect a weak shield for protection. The green Alicorns always seemed to come in pairs and could erect very powerful shields as well as boost the powers of any other Alicorns nearby. Blue ones could turn completely invisible, which made them excellent scouts and snipers.
After the death of the Goddess at the hooves of the Lightbringer, every Alicorn suddenly found itself with free will and they were in a land where they had been one of the most terrifying breed of pony to ever walk the land. Some became mercenaries, some became slavers, others joined up with Velvet Remedy’s Followers of the Apocalypse.
Eclipse seemed to be a mix of all three Alicorn breeds, able to manifest shields that were stronger than the purples, but weaker than the greens, She could turn invisible like the blues, but only herself, meaning any equipment she wore would still be visible. I found the idea of a pair of saddlebags hovering along behind me rather hilarious, but I knew that I would carry all my own supplies.
Alicorn or not, she was still a pony.
Two days later I received a summons from Rose Eye. Eclipse offered to teleport me to her, but I wanted to say goodbye to my slaves. As I made my rounds, I let my mind wander over the implications of what being one of Rose Eye’s Advisers meant. She seemed rather independent, so I assumed that any advisers were simply there to run Fillydelphia in her absence.
Rather than walk or teleport to her base of operations, I opted to fly there. As I soared over the ruins of Fillydelphia, I scanned the ground below. I could see where progress had been made in restoring the city and I was rather impressed. Great strides had been made throughout the city and I could see that slavers had already marked their territories. I frowned and shook my head. Slavers were little more than Raiders with authority, which I wasn’t a fan of, and I doubted that Rose Eye would be pleased if I punted them into the radioactive crater that marred the city and bathed the sky in a hellish glow, at odds with the blue sky.
Oh well, I could dream.
