Fallout: Equestria - Rising Dawn

Chapter 5 - One With None

Chapter 5

One With None

"Not that many ponies go this way up to Poneva on hoof. In fact, not that many ponies go up this way to Poneva at all, let alone by themselves."

In solemn quietude, I followed a battered wagon, Dew Drops' blood-speckled scarf billowing behind me in the chilling breeze.

Across the broken, half-buried road, the wind blew gusts of swirling snowflakes that clung loosely to the soiled fabrics of my battered barding. Beneath my vest's kevlar plates, my bruised, livid flesh ached, sending sharp stabs of pain through my chest with every trembling breath I took.

I was exhausted. There wasn't a single muscle in my body that wasn't sore. Every step was a step made with aching exertion.

I glanced over my shoulder, and saw far-flung groups of ponies trotting distantly behind me, having merged back into the Crystal Highway from another road that bypassed the canyon I nearly died in several hours ago.

That other road must've been the one Night Sky and the others would've taken. The route I would've taken with them.

I sighed. It didn't matter anymore.

Several miles away in the distance, Poneva's tattered skyscrapers, towers that may have been taller once, loomed over the fallen city like tombstones, somber reminders of a better age. An age thrown away by the same ponies that preached their damned friendship across Equestria.

I looked around at the cold indifferent faces that passed by as wagons and ponies trotted past me. Where was that friendship now?

I certainly had none of it left. Nobody left.

I exhaled a trembling breath, and willed my legs to keep moving. I was almost there. I could already see the city walls and make out the pony-shaped silhouettes standing upon its ramparts.

Well, 'walls' was the closest word I could think of to describe what encircled the city. Erected between the city's roads were immense, patchwork, junk-made obstructions that blocked off open roads between Poneva's high rises, and barricaded intact buildings. Silhouettes hobbled across ramparts of junk and ladders that hung over the streets between the boarded up derelicts.

What with the terrors that lurked outside in the wilderness, it wasn't too surprising that they decided to just build a huge wall to keep the monsters out.

Somehow, I was convinced that behind those walls, life was somewhat safer than life out there, despite what Duster told me. Hooligans and gangsters or not, I preferred to be shot at by other people, not eaten alive by some mutant abomination from hell.

My heart fluttered with distant hope. 'Maybe,' I thought, 'Just maybe, I'll survive this.'

All around me, the ruins became denser as I approached the city walls.

The blackened rubble and dilapidated metal skeletons that lined the streets were all that remained of the city's surrounding suburbs and countryside. Off in the great distance beyond Poneva's walls stretched only ruin.

As remote as Spring Song's woodland cottage was, even it was not far enough to escape the infernal hellfire that scoured the earth. I wasn't sure if it was possible for balefire to reach as far as it did. Poneva city rose up around me for hundreds of miles. It sent shivers down my spine thinking that one single bomb... one bomb could've destroyed so much. There had to be more than one ...