Fallout Equestria

Chapter 40.

Loss.

The war had come with thunder and death. And all of the Equestrian Wasteland seemed in mourning. We were deep in our darkest hour, just praying for a ray of light.

We had all suffered loss.

My friends and I had lost one of our own, SteelHooves. He had finally found rest, finally been reunited with his beloved Applejack and their child in whatever life lies beyond this. But all I felt was the gaping wound of his absence. An abscess in the core of our party, aching and hollow, where SteelHooves should have been. The spectre of his death hung over everything, casting all our individual losses into even deeper shadow. Making us all seem more vulnerable and fragile.

I was struggling with a loss of my very self. I was not who I was anymore. Not Littlepip. I was an alien in my own body, a body warped into something entirely non-pony by taint. And I was a stranger in my own mind, not knowing the truth of the things I had done. Velvet's words had cut cruelly, not because she was cruel but because she was right. The balefire bomb had been an atrocity. And yet, as Velvet Remedy had assured me, it had been the necessary thing to do. Without my memories, I didn't know if I had simply never thought of the consequences... or if I had and went ahead anyway.

SteelHooves had paid the price. He had lost his life because of what I had done.

I knew I would never watch those memories. Well, maybe the eighth memory orb - my soul needed Homage's every healing touch - but not the others. I didn't want to know how much I had realized. If I had committed a holocaust, I couldn't bear it. It would be the final, fatal separation from self.

Velvet Remedy was suffering a loss of faith. Velvet was hurting more deeply than the rest of us. The foundation of all that she was had been shattered. The wasteland was more cold and cruel and brutal than any pony should have to bear -- too much for a pony whose soul was one filled with kindness and caring for others, whose core desire was to help, to heal and to make things better. To her, it didn't matter if the hurting creature was a pony, a zebra or a monster. Friend, stranger or enemy were all worthy of the same compassion in Velvet Remedy's eyes. I remembered her considering a hellhound a patient and easing the pain of a dying alicorn. Velvet Remedy had weathered all the Equestrian Wasteland had thrown at her, sometimes weakening but never failing in her belief that helping others was the right course of action. And she had done so, fighting both the despair and ugliness of the wasteland and her own inner demons by clinging to her personal religion of Fluttershy. The kindness of the Mare of Peace had been her anchor and her bulwark.

Now, the memories of SteelHooves had revealed the truth to Velvet Remedy, and that bulwark was shattered. And she was drowning.

Calamity was fighting against a loss of all he held dear, and he felt he was losing that battle. Already, one of his friends was dead, and he could see those he held most dear, including the mare he loved, slipping away into their own darkness.

And that horror was playing out against the backdrop of the end of his world. After meeting one of Calamity's brothers (and seeing hints that the rest of his family were as bad or worse), I found Calamity's "policy" and his personal horror over Bucklyn Cross were brought into sharp focus. Calamity was my closest friend, and I was only now beginning to understand and truly know him. And now the Enclave had descended upon us with "Operation Cauterize". It was one thing for Calamity to have rejected and left the Enclave, but it was quite another for him to witness the Enclave rise up as the greatest threat to Equestria.

Like us, Applejack's Rangers had lost SteelHooves. He had been their Elder and their center, the figure around whom they had gathered. Now, the fledgling force for good faced a harrowing fight to survive.