Fallout: Equestria - Rising Dawn

Chapter 13 - Broken

Chapter 13

Broken

"Everyone has nightmares ... but we always wake up from them. Always."

Echoes.

I heard their muffled cries. The distant gunfire. The sounds of buildings crumbling.

Then I began to remember. Stallions. Mares. Foals.

A tail rotor cleaving a pony in half – a filly's screams as her mother's corpse crushed her beneath – Holly wailing her brother's name ...

Then the balefire. The balefire echoed through the caverns of my consciousness – searing into my mind scattered glimpses of blood and death.

I opened my mouth to scream, Holly's voice joining me – before hers fell away from mine ... fading into the furthest corners of my thoughts and I awoke.

But I didn't. I shuddered and convulsed, my eyes closed, unable to open – the feeling of falling, of sinking into eternity dragging me ever closer to madness.

My fall slowed, and I felt my coat brush against the snow. Then nothing.

I opened my eyes and the world around me shimmered with a silvery, rippling luster. In the distance I saw evanescent pony-shaped silhouettes bobbing across the stark landscape. They cantered upon the shimmering, amorphous snow that billowed across their hooves beneath the pale, dead sky ...

I was dead. So were those ponies. Dead in some kind of purgatory waiting for a light to take us through the clouds.

I lay there, waiting.

Waiting for the Everafter to come. The Everafter I was told that awaited everyone when they died – where my dad was, and Dew Drops, and all my friends were.

But it ... it didn't.

My eyes widened. They gazed into the distance and saw the familiar skeletons of burned out buildings rise up around me. Ponies walked among them – trotting up staircases that were no longer there, gazing through shattered, melted windows, and sitting around tables that had been incinerated in the spellfire that annihilated them all.

It ... wasn't the Everafter. That sinking feeling engulfed my heart once more.

'This isn't the Everafter. This isn't the Everafter.'

'Hell – the Underworld – Tartarus – no.'

No ...

Worse.

Poneva.

I reclined into a defeated stillness, staring into the shimmering, ashen skies, unable to think, unable to find words to voice the hopelessness and sorrow in my heart. A hollow breeze whispered through my wilted ears, caressing them with its chilling breath.

Carried with it were whispering voices that stumbled – lost and confused through my thoughts. They were the voices of the dead – souls of ponies that I had seen torn away from the world firsthoof.

What sort of terrible fate was it to die and be forgotten, when all who could have remembered had died with you?

Not even bones. No one even knew they were gone.

Maybe not even they knew that they were dead.

They were just numbers. Numbers that General Spitfire couldn't even quantify.