Fallout: Equestria - Rising Dawn

Chapter 15 - The Death of a Dream - Pt I

Chapter 15

The Death of a Dream

"Good ponies don't win, Summer Smiles ... they die..."

Dead.

Wiped out. Almost two dozen ponies killed behind the safety of their own walls.

I tried not to look at the mare whose brutalized corpse hung crucified above me.

It was hard not to when the same brutality painted every inch of that frozen hole in the earth.

That hideout was supposed to be secure ... that hideout was supposed to be hard to find ...

It was supposed to be safe.

The ponies who had died in their beds, their throats slashed open ... they thought the place was safe too. Surrounded by that horrific carnage, I began to question if anywhere was safe.

A string of bile and saliva dribbled down my lip, the puddle of vomit at my hooves cooling rapidly, exposed to the cold, dead air. My eyelids fluttered, trying to blink away the horror. The blood. The entrails. The patches of flayed coat. The skinless musculature, now black and blue. The exposed, ruined haunches of dead mares.

The hollow eye sockets.

I had seen that before. Their eyes were gouged out ... everyone's eyes were gouged out ... so were Silver Dove's, Beryl's, Peach Petals' ... Mom's ...

Before my eyes a nightmare repeated itself.

My horrified stare gravitated to the sign above the crucified mare's head.

"Goddesses ..." I whispered with a tremble that shook me to the bone.

'Goddesses ... what happened to them?'

But as I stared at the carnage, it was not them I thought of. It was the Goddesses.

The Goddesses couldn't help those people. The Goddesses didn't help those people.

Tears welled up in my eyes. Where were they when that ... thing attacked us? Where were they when Dew Drops attacked me? Where the fuck were they when those people were slaughtered like fucking animals!?

No. No ... this wasn't a slaughter. They weren't butchered, either.

They had been desecrated. Profaned. Reduced to bloody morsels. Cut apart and savored like finely-prepared cuisine.

I wondered if they put out their eyes before or after they tortured them. I wondered if they begged – if they begged the Goddesses to help them.

I wondered if it even mattered.

It didn't take eyes to feel the excruciating agony they must have felt. You could see it on their faces. Their skinless, contorted faces, rent black and blue from the icy talons of the wasteland air.

What kind of monster could have done that? What kind of disgusting creature could have taken the time to butcher those people so meticulously, so methodically, so ... so thoroughly?

Not even furies ... not even furies could've ... I gulped. Just like Candy Cane had said: furies killed because they could. Furies killed. Furies raped. Furies tortured. That was what made them different from whoever – whatever defiled those poor souls.