Chapter 30: Reverence of brutality

On the arid margins of the redoubtable Everfree Forest, ambling nettled and balked through an unbounded matrix of peril and unbridled menace, a drudging covered wagon groaned ceaselessly. With every revolution of its titanic birchen wheels, its venerable hinges whinnied like spoiled children. Bucking against the rigid ordinance of the two spearheads of this, at least up to that dearthful point, utterly fruitless operation. Undertook, some may say foolishly, by the threadbare, woebegone gang of miscreants and hayseed reprobates. Or the layman’s epithet they preferred over all the other titles and helms they accrued over their years of unprincipled toils. The Surly Gang. The twain of figureheads marched in rhythmic synced-up strides, one vexed and the other poles apart from his comrade. 

The gang were fettered into a rangy path of narrow undiluted soil that overstayed its noisome welcome. The only filament of salvation shielding the path from being labeled brutishly monotonous being the small, piteous patches of grass tattooing the earth. Some were tiny blotches of brisk green while the bulk that conquered the lion’s share of the dirt trail was arrant stygian. Darker than any blank thoughtless crepuscule or cavernous throat of a ghastful cavern could ever fathom possibly mirroring. And even then, it would be not a sliver more than a gimcrack attempt at recreation. On either side, the walls of their redundant kafkaesque dungeon, were scores of arid sable trees. Some thick and gibbous like Greek coliseum pillars, others wasp-waisted and resembling more a ravel of malnourished branches than a tree. Leaves were most certainly a hot commodity in the Everfree. And it didn’t take a Harvard-educated polymath to intuit that this endless scape was a poverty-stricken vacuum. Far bigger monoliths of hazard on their vista that demanded more attention than the embellishment of leaves. 

Mortimer Surly’s unkempt talons stamped their acuate arrowhead-like points into the desiccated wasteland. Sullying the trail left in their wagon’s wake with a gratuitous nuance. Clusters of marble-sized holes in the dirt. Their provenance being the begrimed claws of the eldest Griffon, stifling a roiled grunt with every ache-littered stride. Irises ignited in a flaming maelstrom of wrath that threatened to outmatch the paragon of opaque heat in the clear cyan ether above. The brim of his pale white pork pie an awning braving the sun’s intrusive shafts and draping shade over the elder’s visage. His heart harboring a singular similarity to the desolate expanse corralling them. Both were snared in the throes of a craving for a coveted amenity that was doubtlessly unwarranted to them. The trees choked on a full-throated hankering for vibrance and serenity, Mortimer’s soul pined for felicity. One singular shred being more than enough to slake his heart’s mountainous desire. 

Yet, there was a disconsolate reality that protruded from the branch of every tree and written on the unaltering walls of inky wood. That singular truth being that in this abject stagnant slurry of execrable spirits and wretched hearts, any yearning being benignantly satiated was an atypical will-o’-the-wisp. An unachievable oddity with the only juxtaposition where its roots can be planted being the wooly-minded demarcations of a fictitious vivarium. Operating within the borders of a mind engineered in an infantile understating of the grim world and its cruel, dour calculations, where their longed-for outcome wasn’t the byproduct. 

Dread Shot, however, as he often was in the aggregate of affairs the gang found themselves in, was an austere contrast to his leader. Staring stoic and unfazed by their loathsome tribulations. Choosing not to fester in an acidic lake of unimpeachable impediments and grievances. Refusing for every chair in the just council of his mind to be callously usurped by unapologetic contrarians. Undertaking a road where the path the Griffon he walked abreast with was circumvented. In the stead of wallowing in their tangled bed of unfavorable, inconvenient circumstances, Dread embarked on a far afield excursion. One where the sole direction was marked by a road paved with indifference. A path he could only pray Mortimer decided to browse at one point in this life or another.

Although, to say laborious spine-splitting days of unflagging searching unteeming lands and emerging mastless consistently was merely “inconvenient” would be the mother of all understatements. Their hooves quaked with scalding tremors of agony. Unwearying bones glazed with choleric slag. Scanning the barren trite terrain time and time again, exercising the definition of insanity. Sweeping his strained Argus-eyed optics across that murky featureless terrain like a fissured wall of black stone. Hoping that one of those instances, the stars would align. And he’d discern a form or a minute clue of any variety and be granted the ability to forsake these woods and leave the Everfree back into its own devices. Come back to the Princess with a bounty, and receive that assured superabundance that would secure them a care-free existence they all lusted for. Yet, even that seemed like a distant ember now. A spark with a dying glow that fell fainter with each wasted day. 

Even the most hopeful equine out of the ireful posse was beginning to succumb to the disease plaguing the hearts of his family. Doubt and hopelessness. Now, his aspirations for a new life far beyond the coarse reaches of Appaloosa’s golden oceans of sand were as dark and cadaverous as the nature around them. Their doubts beginning to coalesce into a ravenous dubious body, where mitigation ceased to exist in its vocabulary.

Dread cleared his stale throat into his hoof before he spoke. His horseshoe caked in a tan loaf of packed dirt and pebbles. 

“You think he’s still here?”

Mortimer snapped his wiry neck to the pestilent voice. His burly yoke nearly seceding from the timeworn wagon in a flurry of splinters. “What makes you ask?” He snapped in a baritone grumble like the bubbling of a volcano. 

Dread furrowed his brows at the shameless sarcasm. “I was just wanting to check on you, Mort.”

“I don’t f****n’ know, Dread, does it look like he’s here?”

“Forget I asked,” The opal steed mumbled. “How’re things looking back there, Sky?”

The equine aimed his chin a few inches into the air and beckoned for the seafoam-green pony scouting their rear with the eyes of a hunting maestro. She sat at the wagon’s posterior with two forelegs dangling over the chipped flaxen rim and swinging mindlessly inches above the banal swath of dirt. Dog-tired back like a scorching chain lazing against the sprawling pantheon of towers of replete boxes. With every strident lap of the whining wheels came a soft disorderly sympathy from the penned innards of the coffers, rolling and bouncing in their age-old confines. The feeble thumping of lavish vibrant apples rocking and pinballing against their brethren. The soft jingling of loose rounds rolling across the cage’s flaxen floor, tinkling like a trove of shimmering crystal. Bullets of all varieties and blood-hungry calibers bowling from one end of the crate to the other and barreling into its fellow masses of contained destruction. .45 specials, .55 cartridges, slugs raring to fire, and even a sparse sprinkling of spare spick-and-span revolvers and pistols for the most direful of perilous emergencies. Resting atop the teeming nodes of boxes sat the vast brunt of Dread’s puissant loadout clad with a wide ironwood stock and butt plated with fleckless steel. An unflawed stygian barrel darker than the serrated bark jacketing the militia of lifeless trees, long like the nose of a deceptive Pinnochio. Miraculously staying seated in its given position for the dominant bulk of the inefficient excursion. 

Resting in her lap was her trademark hallowed Old Derby Repeater. A standard run-of-the-mine lever-action rifle, austere and unabashedly plain in brazen contrast to the flamboyant firearms of her familiars. Her focus sternly knotted around her prized possession with a small latte-colored rag dampened with rank wood polish. Meticulously scrubbing the stock and jabbing the rag between the nigh-imperceptible nooks between the fine-grained wood. Sat beside her, his back glorying in the respite of the pillars of boxes, was Mortimer Junior. Twiddling with the brim of his bowler hat idling in his lap and staring thousands of miles into the rearmost distance. Not a word or utterance muttered for miles.

“Not a breathing thing back here,” She called over the rhythmic wail of the wheels. “I saw a crow a mile back. Maybe that means something.”

“What about you, Taci?”

Dread’s cranium gyrated and beseeching irises fell upon the graceful titan. Walking a foot or so away from the wagon’s left side. Abstracted from the repulsive asterism blighting the stark-white cover, a loathsome ravel of bodily fluids and gaping holes forsaken in the wake of wrathful bullets. His sawed-off shotgun slipped in his auburn holster belted around his brawny barrel undulating. Swaying in the rhythm of his ponderous strides. 

Tacitus shook his head and oriented his musing sight back to the spartan, somber horizon, ensnared in the throes of a ghastly drought of ostensible ambitions. Colorful antic pipe dreams that only served to inundate the desolate quagmire of despond the gang trudged through. 

“Ain’t this grand?”

The indomitable amorphous body of silence wreathed its viscous tentacles of never-say-die quietude around every being dwelling within that vacant expanse. Their mouths lashed by its robust tendrils and lips welded air-tight. Sauntering as tacit and soundless as a funeral procession marching through a titanic anacoustic sarcophagus. Lost souls defecting from the thrumming pepful heart of modern civilization and foraging the blackened scourge for…anything. A bootprint. A hair follicle. A paltry filament of dead skin. Hell, even a corpse or stripe of blood across the soil would suffice. Anything that would cleanse their journey of even the most minute sliver of empty space where refutation can hew it into an intractable breeding ground. Clear Sky beavered away at the solitary token of her merry cherishment. Abstracting every slight angstrom of dust or grime blighting its exquisite frame of radiant bronze. The nettled Griffon’s protegee aimed his brainless stare towards the most distant of horizons far more blissful than his impossibly bleak existence. Scrounging for vistas so euphoric and paradiscal they could be effortlessly confused for a figment of a child’s rampant daydreams. Tacitus walked alongside his kin with elephantine steps nigh-mute against the unyielding frigid soil. Oak eyes saturated in an indecipherable tangle of emotions and sentiments, questions with privative answers, habited in a cloak of shade beneath the wide brim of his hat. 

Roughly twenty lifeless minutes stemmed off the most benign morsels of sound and its retinue of familiars and partners moved like rusted machinery. The fatigued cogs of their extremities lubricated by rivulets of ignited gasoline. The hinges of their joints packed to the gills by ruthless age and corrosion. A sentiment reverberating across the span of the lethargic, crestfallen gang, yet mercilessly exasperated by the eldest of the dastardly crew of desperados. Mortimer Surly Senior with the knees of a willowy infirm scarecrow. The innumerable years of clashing with lawless bastardized equines bucking against the unbendable regulations of Appalossa screaming with every step. Memories of sanguinary fighting with a conclusion only found in an ashen mist of gunsmoke. Recollections of battles both inexpensively staunched with the ease of picking a flower, or lost in a puddle of sparkling ichor. Chromos and sanguinary snapshots of his self-christened “glory days” flickered before his washed-out icy irises. Each retention pulled from the locuplete cluster of vaults tucked into the beavering projector. The eternal slideshow unending, pictures and emotions stopping and starting at speeds unbeknownst to man. 

All the pulls of his trigger.

The thunderous cracks of gunshots.

The pleas…

The plights…

Many begged for the gilded cage of heroical, empyrean salvation to burst open its door for them, others were the opposite. Dredging a morose inexplicated solace in the grim darkness within the revolver’s barrel. Picking apart every nuanced facet and organ of the bounty hunter’s hallmark instrument of boundless anguish, embellished by a penchant for raw, unsympathetic mayhem. The spiral of the rifling that melted into the black within. The diminutive notch at the barrel's end, the crosshairs his forehead was the prime center of. 

The gleeful cry of the void he was moments from entering. The dreadful enigma of an afterlife that had been consistently tangled in impregnable mystery for all his life. A torturous puzzle with the final piece excavated only from the pond of scarlet his corpse would be found in.

Dread Shot flicked his orbs, filling the entirety of his peripheral with the sore sight of Mortimer. Hackneyed limbs working on unadulterated memory. Undriven by a mind miles away in the uncharted reaches of his pale sapphire globes. Ravaged beak murmuring silent words and phrases, the scythe-like ends parting and united tens of times in a manner of seconds. The onyx stallion cocked a brow at his leader, bemusement lacerating through the wooly cloth of shadow unfurled over his eyes. 

“What’re ya thinking about, Mort?” 

The Griffon blinked mightily and extracted a needle-sharp arrow of wind from the stale colorless pond of moribund ambience. He darted a duo of ice-blue optics to both dictatorial paries of vapid trees, the inky oblivion behind his eyelids graven with the images of his sins. 

“I…I just…” He blinked endlessly. His wrinkled forehead undulating like a beating heart. “What’d you say? I was far away.”

“You alright?”

“Sure. Just thinkin’.” He waved a vexed hand towards the undeviating congregation of trees, the incharitable foliage like the bristles of a mammoth comb. “Ain’t nothin’ else to do here ‘cept think.”

“Talk about what you’ve been thinking about. That’s an option, ain’t it?”

Mortimer scoffed. “You been thinkin’?”

Dread nodded. “More than anything, I have.”

“Share first.”

The mustang rolled his eyes with the gesture rendered nigh-invisible beneath the velarium of his hat’s brim. “I was just thinking about…what our next move is after this?”

“What? You don’t trust me no more?”

“I didn’t say that. I just mean you never said what the plan is after Demonio. Nothing about where we’re going or what we’re doing. Not a thing..”

“I’ve been thinkin’ that myself. Thinkin’ to death about it. I ain’t exactly sure but I got a pretty damn good idea.”

“Being?”

“We turn in s**t-for-brains. Get our money. Pack up the cabin and hop on a train. I’m thinkin’ Manehattan.”

Dread’s eyebrows rocketed and nearly entered his forehead. He chortled. “Manehattan? The city? You’ve finally gone mad.”

“Shut the f**k up.” Mortimer sneered. “The city’s full of chances for a bunch of low-lifes like ourselves. Ponyfolk up there are decent, I’ve heard. A lot better than the cocksuckers back in the country.”

“Mortimer Surly, the best bounty hunter Appaloosa’s ever seen, wants to move into the city?”

“Absolutely. Is there a f****n’ problem? You seem to have more than enough objections.”

Dread paused, steering his gaze of illegible cerebration to the drilling sterile path to aridity. Ceaseless brooding failing to adhere to a rigid set of bounds or capabilities. “How’re we gonna make money? The city don’t got bounty hunters, hardly even got law. The Royal Guard does everything, don’t they?”

“Easy. You can go be a jeweler somewhere…”

“And what’s the rest of us gonna do?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we f****n’ come to it.”

“The bridge is pretty close, Morty. It’s not too far off.”

“Once we blow that m**********r’s brains out of his head and bring him to the Princess, we’ll get into semantics. Right now we gotta worry about making good use of our time.”

“We could start by getting off this path!” Clear Sky bellowed from the rear. “There’s been nothing for miles. Only that crow.”

“Would you shut it about this damn crow!” The Griffon snapped. “We’ll get off this path when it spits us out somewhere, okay? Is that good enough!”

“Sure, boss.”

“Now let’s keep movin’ with no more f****n’ complainin’. Next person to b***h gets-”

BLAM!

The gang froze in unison. The wagon lurched in a discordant cacophony of thumping and jangles. Every member, every breath, every heartbeat. It all hitched in the matter of a hair of a nanosecond. Eyes of all different colors and degrees of worry and apprehension were magnetized to the polarizing tree line. Staring deep between its crannies and spaces, limitlessly scrutinizing the titanic shards of grass and luster beaming between the malnourished bodies of stark wood. Sky’s wiping halted. Mortimer Junior’s blank canvas, somehow known as eyes, were inundated in a fresh scintillating coat of a novel color, unseen by the leader’s son…he couldn’t even recall how long it’s been. A crisp splash of a fresh batch of paint. Dread. 

“You all ready to see some real fun!” A sublime, triumphant voice amped by a booming timbre soared over the trees. Permeating the forest’s icy ground and ravenous populace with its incensed arrogance. “I’m here to show you!”

BLAM!

Tacitus sauntered with a noble purpose and dovetailed into the trifecta guiding the wagon. All glowering with knitted brows and dampened foreheads at the moment they’ve all been waiting with bated breath for its arrival. 

“It’s that f*****g easy? Is it really that easy to kill you worthless cocksuckers? Do you think a bounty is gonna stop me!?”

“I’ll be damned.” Dread spoke. “Is that who I-”

“Yes, it is!” Mortimer interjected. 

BLAM!

“You think a few dollars is gonna stop me? I’ll shove it down your throat, you annoying sons of b*****s! Send your worst!”

“Holy s**t! Mortimer, what’re we waiting for? We gotta move now!”

“We can’t just leave the wagon, we gotta take the path and hope it sends us to him.”

“Have you lost your mind!?”

“We’re gonna lose a lot more than our minds if we just leave it! Our whole armory is in there!”

“We got our guns! We can just go!”

“You wanna leave all our s**t to the wolves and whatever else lives in here?”

The wagon’s sole operators bickered. Yoke-bound throats, charted by veins zagging every which way like the lines on a stock market graph, roaring their shameless vehement disdain for the other’s suggestions. Catapulting scalding mounds of conjectures and fervent odium. Words like volleys of sweltering brimstone. Sentences like heat-seeking meteors. Their inadequate sum of time to act and fight for the glittering prospect of a newfangled life in a Lucullan city bleeding from its wounds by the second. Every word a new puncture, each exclamation a scathing laceration. Seconds disgorging from its gaping, yawning wounds. Sanctified moments sanctioned to the unflappable hounding of the reprobate mongrel who, bereft of an atom of doubt, left a sanguinary pond of corpses in his wake. Wherever the provenance of the loathsome parade of gunshots and booming ridicules towards the dead occurred. 

Mortimer Junior sat far afield from his father’s signature interminable bout of immolating quarrels. His daily petty wars of words barbarously fighting and shedding blood and sweat to march towards a goal nobody could seem to pinpoint or identify. Mortimer was a lionhearted, unfagged centurion in those superfluous battles and pressure-cooker skirmishes. Guiding his army incorporating his ruthless unfettered tongue, flapping beak, and a throat outwardly immune to his mind’s endeavors to cloak it in blissful quietus. Press the broad red button on every operation in every category of the wrinkled pulp liable for postponement of Gary Demonio’s magnificent execution. Hell, if he carved a circle out of the top of his skull, he was almost positive with no doubt in the equation his brain would be crying for a swift demise. Begging with folded hands and knees pressed to the ground for a terminus to be imposed. As much as he loved the habitually odious Griffon who raised him, his father who accrued fervent hatred with the unrivaled ease of blowing out a dandelion, he would find himself satiating his brain’s desires. 

A ritual for him in times like these was to simply, with no additives or obnoxious strings attached, to pretend its existence was the machinations of his imagination. Falsifying its actuality. Nullifying the loathsome influence it had the fragile yet somehow tight-knit structure of the formidable, shuddersome Surly Gang. Exclusively led by the peerless maestro of all things quarrelsome. An eternally unmatched virtuoso of the craft of emulating blistering never-say-die contention from nothing but his psyche and his raring war-ravaged beak. Although, the bewildered teen’s mind and irises were not laser-focused on feigning indifference to his father’s shenanigans. Far from it. In the stead of Mortimer and Dread Shot’s day-in and day-out screaming contest with one another, his attention was swarmed solitarily by a tree. 

It wasn’t just a regular tree. Not one of the tens of thousands of mirror-images erecting from the glum icy dirt, polka-dotted by the frangible carcasses of leaves and ruptured branches. Without a grain of dubiety, it was one of the illimitable stygian figures like wax statues fabricated from unfiltered pen ink. Peeling cragged bark? Check. Willowy maze of branches and budding saplings jutting from its frame? Check. The ability to be swiftly confused for a wooden corpse? Check. No blatant deviations could lead any soul with utilitarian sight and a sound mind to tack any epithet onto it that bore any semblances to an unwelcomed oddity. No secreted hints or minute fragments of a clue pointing towards a reality of even the slightest difference. Even with the ostensible rigid solidity of its identity, its features shrieked an antithetical story. Recited to the young Griffon in an inscrutable cadence. 

His talons fell static and the brim of his bowler hat lazed in his waning grasp. His visage following a starkly contrasting path, every surface and sect of his countenance activating to blare his piqued, waxing trepidation. Eyebrows furrowing. Forehead wrinkling. Cyanic globes surveying the height and breadth of the rai-thin, slimlined tree. Wrapping his sight around its dismal breadth time and time again. Spewing gallons of effort into his shot-in-the-dark undertaking to discover the seed this bemusing curio budded from. Something vehemently bizarre jacketed the flinty foliage blacker than the besmirched face of a drudging coal miner. A filament of peculiarity sleeving the tree that enkindled an esurient befuddlement. One that effortlessly trumped the reining of regulated standards. 

A spark flickered from somewhere in the disheveled tattered shell of bark. Was it something in the way branches twitched as though dancing to the tune of a false breeze? Did a rogue ember of life torch a token into the wood? Or was it all a fictitious pretense by a mind wired to madness by the monotony of the prison of the Everfree Forest? 

Mortimer slipped his hat back onto his scalp of steel-grey feathers and, mere milliseconds before beseeching the opinion of the mint-green unicorn at his side, his confusion turned to ash. Finally reaping a bounty from his hard-and-fast investigation. 

Two slits spawned on the upper half of the trunk and parted. A lambent twain of brazen, spangling ovals of pure radiant vermillion like jars of melted ruby. Beneath it, inches above the base of the tree, a vast toothless grin of the most infernal variety materialized. Thin lips gaping to an ample maw of hollow darkness. Two branches fashioned into the arms of a human exploded from its sides donning a fistful of thorns upon each fingertip. 

Mortimer Junior gasped, repelled by the ghastly spectacle and leaping backwards in a blind non-negotiable fright. Spine crashing into a spire of boxes. The rounds within jingling like a bouncing sack of coins. 

Clear Sky ravished her attention from her gun and bore witness to the monster. Cloth dropped. Eyes awash with an unholy perpetual terror. She begriped the repeater and slammed the lever forward and back. “What in Tartarus is that!?”

“The f**k is goin’ on back there?”

A viral autonomy drifted through the harried Everfree air, infecting and hijacking the exanimate fence-esque palisades ruthlessly trammeling the prospects of a four-squared evasion. On either side, hundreds of scarlet ovoids dawned. Crimson eyes freed from the noisome mask of their eyelids and granted free reign to bear holes into wherever their radiant irises crashed down upon. The solitary indiscriminate landing pad for their meteoric glunch stood dumbfounded and perplexed at the sundry of scorching optics. Their elated yet flaming stare akin to the blood-colored bulb of Hell’s lighthouse, plethoric with an unparalleled glee like Jesse James gazing at a lonesome train with an exultant heart. 

Countless eyes were reeled into existence. Hundreds of mammoth Glasgow smiles stretching until their limits impeded them. Barbed fists like an arrowhead formed from shattered glass, pointed like the head of a zestful Roman warrior’s spear. Sprouting from the peak’s of their heads in the fraction of a blink was a sinuate labyrinthine maze of diminutive supple branches. Windy and chock-full of zags and curves like a map to a cumbersome knotty river, cheek-to-jowl with rounded turns and sinuous trails.

Sky jabbed the repeater’s stock into her shoulder and mashed her cheek into the sheeny wood. Pencil-thin shafts of gilded splendor danced their nimble glittering feet across the stygian metal of her barrel. Gibbous crosshairs, fit with a sinewy notch like a shark’s fin at the end of the barrel, trained on the miscreant. Hoof ogling at the trigger as a sonorous, brain-rattling boom exploded from its darkened maw. 

“Eram sselinnep!” The tree roared. “Gnihton naem stellub rouy.”  

BLAM! 

A round sought the forehead, at least what the fluttered unicorn assumed was the forehead, and it received exactly what it implored for. Soaring into the three inches of decrepit, despoiled bark splitting the two incandescent eyes. A benign Lilliputian crater no bigger than an infant’s thumb dawned on the rind. 

The tree’s smirk waxed. 

“Ylap s’dlihc.” Exclaimed the tree. 

Fright’s mighteous insurmountable fist pounded her into the steeples of boxes and its monolithic digits breached her quivering frame, coiling ironclad digits around her lungs. Every fractional, miserly modicum of oxygen wrung from her taut chest, bedeviled by an unyielding knot of ungodly horror. Dread striking her bones like a colliding moon. 

“RUN, MORTIMER!”

“Son of a f****n’ b***h!” The geriatric pirouetted his head in every direction. Aiming his cracked beak at the resurrected marauding battalions. Electrocuted with a newfound infernal verve, incapable of being emulated even to the most minute degree. 

Barbed limbs swung at the solemn leviathanic pony scrambling conjoined to the wagon’s side, melding into the sprinting yoke-choked duo spearheading the charge to greener pastures. 

“As fast as you can! Let’s move!”

“F**k you think I’m doin’!”

An eastward tree cocked its rangy limb, a conduit to the swirling maelstrom of barbarity engulfing its blazing globes, and honed its barbated digits into a rapier-sharp point. More than enough to make an inimical Swordfish cower in monolithic planet-struck terror. Its barbed fingers dove into the soil like a stray comet and puked a dust-choked volley of lumps of soil and rock towards the wagon’s rump. Junior’s heaving chest was pelted. Clear Sky’s repeater sullied. Dainty, atavistic braid seen only in lionized warriors of Norse mythos studded with marbles of the uprooted earth. Her iron visage taut and unyielding to the mortifying terrors corralling her. She slammed the lever and locked another round in the chamber with a spent casing leaping from the frame. 

Dashing. 

Sprinting. 

Fear.

The hellish trifecta. 

An unhallowed trio. 

The only three words branded onto the foreground of the gang’s psyches. And that was all they did.

They dashed.

They sprinted and pushed the erected bounds of their limbs, some more long-in-the-tooth than others. 

And most predominantly, they feared. 

The regimes of trees rocketed their gore-starved hands at the wagon. Time and time again, their target was long gone from the trajectory of their piteous endeavors at assailing. They’d prime their arms for bloodshed, prowl with scarlet eyes for the pluperfect opportunity, and lambast. Missing either by the slimmest of hairs or the largest margin, no benignant median extant. The trees opted for a hearty herculean swing in the stead of the fruitless divebomb. Slashing gaping slits in the foul begrimed cloth and lacerating the ravels of boxes within. Blighting the pale blonde wood with a myriad of hideous graven grooves. 

All the while, a cacophony strangled them. Taunts lobbed from all sides. Searing ridicules scorching the pride of the wrathful Mortimer Surly. Burning its humiliating patterns into his mind. The Griffon shoved his hand into his jacket and wrenched his golden Schofield from a holster secreted from the restless probes of the world. The barrel pointed to the sky and a besmirched talon drew the hammer back, its hushed click stamped into obscurity by the ineffable din.

BLAM! 

Clear Sky became wedded to the only medium of defense she knew better than any abstract concept of any variety. Gunsmoke. After all, penned in the voracious eye of this hurricane of discord, what other pragmatic options were seated in actuality’s unsympathetic realms? 

She fired. Bullet after bullet. Thunderous cracks in brutish ruthless succession. Every searing round impossibly fruitless akin to a hailstorm of sample spoons against a mountain of iron. 

“Who in Tartarus are all these m***********s?“

“Don’t matter, just run! We need to get out of here before we’re all killed!”

“Trees ain’t got nothin’ to a little big of smoke!” 

Mortimer engaged in the same bootless ritual his comrade huddled panicked at the rear was engrossed in. Cowering against the city of boxes and clutching her lever-action security blanket. He ensnared the ravenous beings of wood in his sights and smashed his tarnished talon against the trigger. Each round digging a tiny bowl in the wood no bigger than a housefly, even punier than the otiose cavities left in the wake of Sky’s unavailing weaponry. 

“Syot era snug! Gnihton snaem gnihtgif rouy!”

“Star, gniyaled rehtob t’nod.”

“Sdrawoc, sgub ekil yrrucs!”

Dread’s flattened ears winced at the tempestuos booms. When a tree spat a smoldering gob of mockery on one side, the stallion’s head pinballed to the right where a full-throated rampart of impregnable sound awaited him. With every movement from the evocators of this onslaught came a crepitant crescendo of moans bubbling from its bark. 

Dread whipped his slathered visage to his partner-in-crime. frenetic irises caged in a vicious dither, snapping to the sable feather tucked in the ribbon of the Griffon’s hat waggling endlessly in the freight trains of wind. Countenance chiseled. As unfathomably indifferent to the perilous menagerie of monolithic odds dwarfing him. Monolithic prospects of unnavigable doom frowning down upon him with a titillation of satisfaction in its eyes. Staring down the barrel of a battery of failures chambered in a caliber unseen by the Griffon in all of its decades of life. 

“What’re we doing?!” Dread bellowed. “Where’s this path gonna take us?”

“How am I supposed to know! We’re all neck-deep in the same s**t!”

A couple feet ahead, their benevolent salvation clad in a guise of a crossroads stood before them. The road severed. Chopped in two by God’s mighty unfeeling cleaver. On the left was a trail bemired by a matted, jungly wig of pine needles and crumpled leaves. A path that curved and melted into the unbounded colonies of trees hosteling that terror-laden neck of the woods. Northward sat the selfsame straight, solemn road paved by a gritty belt of the discordant, maddening machinations of the Everfree’s contrivances. 

“F****n’ finally!” The Griffon muttered. “LEFT!” 

His subordinates adhered to the beseeching raspy shout, swinging their robust frames in the commanded direction. Painfully and obscenely ambivalent to the vitality of the hapless souls fettered in the back of the wagon. The bodies callously swung into the birchen wall, meager centimeters from being haphazardly dumped into the salivating domain of the wolfish trees. The boxes, in arrant contrast, stood unbothered. Stifling a shiok chuckle at the crumpled mass of braided blonde locks and talons crumpled in a unput pulp of limbs and hair like a monstrous colossal tumor. 

“Are we-” Dread spluttered. Breath zipping from his lungs and back down his wind-burned throat at breakneck speed. His truncated, pitiful exclamation a pale travesty to the steely command that outflanked the hell-roaring broadside.“Are we done with that?”

“I think so!” 

Talons stabbed the earth in opaque degrees of brutedom. 

Hooves clobbered the stone-freckled swath of soil. 

The trees rocketed to the crescendo of their skull-punching shrieks. 

Mortimer lobbed a scalding sneer and jagged beak at the cacophony, the distance waxing by the second. Quietude barbarously wrangling with their strident peerless exclamations. A concise winner of that roughshod skirmish, one that negated the augean brawn of any debate or conjecture, was nebulous. As mysterious and incomputable as the precise provenance of the shrieking hordes of wood, both encroaching beyond the bounds of sane intuition.

“What in Tartarus was that!?”

“How am I supposed to know!” 

“Sky, Morty, you all set back there?”

A raft of addlepated battered groans distilled from the thicket of hooves and limbs. A forlorn deserted purple-ribboned hat sat forsaken on the tranquil flanges of the discord. The unicorn’s orphaned tried-and-true repeater lie tossed to the opposing side of the wagon. Hurled callously by the lavish glut of disconcerting anarchy with no evident rhyme or reason.

Clear Sky whinnied and clasped a fistful of the teenager’s stygian button-down. Wrenching the pneumatic vise of terror-fueled aghast extremities from her screaming frame. Maltreated ribs and buffeted bones stridently howling in agony, every movement, in spite of how slight or elephantine, invited a congeries of pangs. As though each ivory prism was sleeved in a tight-knit bracer of thorns. The mare jimmied the boy from her chassis with a swift yet tender toss, casting the soughing Griffon against the rattling obelisk of boxes. 

“We’re fine, I think.” She shifted and sat up against the screaky wagon wall, her frame bawled in fervid protest. The muscles of her smarting core bound to a spit and spun above an unfeeling pit of rabid flame. She gnashed her teeth, her glossy bronze canine glinting in the trickling sunshine, a harrowed hiss bursting from her lungs. 

“Sorry, buddy. You hurt?”

Junior shook the gurgling, fizzing crucible of discordance and blizzarding questions known only as his head. 

The path undertaken by the rattled planet-struck posse was a stark contrast to the bustling trail of doom, forever trounced by the colonies of wolfish timber. Poles apart from the frenetic pod of peerless madness. The arboreal redundant palisades fettering the perturbed junto wanned. Thickness dwindling, trees growing ever-so-malnourished with every cycle of the stridulent wheels. Each pound of sore hooves and begrimed talons pruned the tenuous bodies. Bases and naked limbs impossibly lank and desiccated like the extremities of starved men. An unabridged broadside of resplendent, elysian sunlight poured forth from the formless cyanic firmament. 

“Where in Tartarus are we now?” Mortimer sneered. 

Dread torqued his head towards ever side and direction that penned in the only family he’s ever known to any degree. 

The morose godforsaken battlefield of exanimate trees and branches on his left? Nothing. 

It’s copybook twin on his right? Nothing.

The sinuous bleak path as tan as sun-grilled leather coiling around an unseen corner? 

Perhaps even the most benign, scant grains of hope possessed a one-way ticket out of the realms of Dread’s unending fantasies and into the graspable reality before him. A less-than-auspicious state of affairs that was mere minutes from being irreparably blighted by a fresh, antiquated jacket of scintillating ruby-red. 

Affluence was alive in that direful wasteland, and the only way for it to be pilfered by others was ravishing it from its stony hooves. Struck ineffably icy by the insatiate avid fingers of Death’s permafrost clutches. 

“I don’t got a clue, Mort, but I think we’re almost out.” Replied the stallion. Every few proclaimed words separated by a monolithic fissure of heaving breaths. Gusts of oxygen stampeding down an arid throat, lethargy spurred and unmendably aggravated by the chugging of his forelimbs. Unceasing. Unabated. A terminus to its arduous repetitions far from discernible by the naked eye. 

“You sure?”

Dread Shot gritted his chompers. A glove of scorching indignance smothering his mandible. “Not exactly. Just trust me, d****t, it’s our only way out of here!”

Mortimer yielded, bowing his head ever-so-slightly against the hotfoot onslaught of rapierlike Autumn gales. The crown of his lily-white pork pie braving the frigid brash. Raven-black feather jittering in his hat’s ribbon like a debauched, penurious junkie deprived of his fix. The wagon’s mighty wheels rotated against the satiny soil of the Elysian path. Its clamant irremovable whine marring the pacified air, bereft of the badgersome, plaguy shouts and ridicules of the rampageous trees. Sky brushed a perturbed hoof over her gilded locks and the downy ridges of her Nordic braid like a knot of downy, feathery knuckles. Behind the discomposed unicorn sat a measly node of lorn, forsaken boxes. The furthest possible cry from its mountainous peers and brothers dwarfing it from every conceivable side and angle. Within resided a fist-sized oak-brown leather coin pouch, a sinister jingling emanating from its bulbous craw. A shallow yet soft rattle of metal far from the otiose silver and copper it was manufactured to hostel. The clinking wormed through the tightened spout, strangled air-tight by two soil-colored strings. She yanked two hooves at the maw’s waved crinkled flanges and clutched a hearty raceme of chromatic rounds. The gaggle bouncing and clanging like a bank robber’s rotund sack of pilfered wares and metals. Her body turned an unabridged one-eighty and faced the unbounded scores of eminent crates. Miraculously, by some ineffable boon crafted by mind-twisting luck, no spire of boxes were slung to the wagon bed by the indiscriminate discord. 

“Are you sure everything’s okay?”

Sky nodded. Besotted globes not straying far from her repeater’s gluttonous chamber. Rounds slid into its steel cavity by the diligent hoof of a firearm maven. Gold cylinders adorned with stygian caps entering the frame. The only soul sanctioned a sight of the ammunition being the next hapless being doomed to die between its crosshairs. 

“What gave you the idea trees would ever scare me?”

“I’m serious.”

“And I’m not?” She ceased her repetitions and lifted her visage with a toothy beam. The mighty wheels trudged over a minute roadblock. The wagon bounced, her braid springing from her back for a fleeting instant. “Don’t worry about me one single bit, sport. It’ll all work out.”

Junior paused, training two blank, vacuous globes into the exuberant unbounded morgue of leafless cadavers. 

“But-”

“Watch that word. You’ll lose yourself in it.” Sky rejoindered, prepping her heedful hoof for another ceaseless placid rhythm of sedulous wiping. Cleansing the repeater’s unsullied frame of every fractional modicum of grime. Each paltry vestige of the blight that once was filth or residue from a grisly skirmish omitted from the face of the consummate gleaming metal. Its swift and unfeeling demise becoming the subject of constant repetition, time and time again. Mortimer Junior watched for a scant few seconds. Something flickered in the hollow, disquieted cue balls hosteled in his cavernous sockets. Confusion. A pristine, unadulterated creek of discordant disarray, frothing from the angry perplexed mouth of confounded heart. Struck perpetually agog by the unwavering abysmal happenings puncturing every facet of the posse’s houndish trek. 

The wagon bounced once more. Wheels grizzling like spoiled children. Talons thoughtlessly toying with the brim of his weather-worn hat. Its bold, staring purple ribbon a brazen unconcealed deviation to the Everfree’s ineffably banal color palette. Without question one of the dullest arrays of shades and hues ever conceived by the dexterous hands of the demiurge who fabricated it. 

“We’ve all tried our luck too many times. We can’t seem to stop pushing the line between dangerous and flat-out stupid.“

“Who gets to decide the difference? Dangerous and stupid are one of the same.”

“The one who cares about the lives of my family, that’s who.” Junior retorted. “If it ain’t colored in gold or has a dollar sign on it, my dad could care less. It…It seems like everytime we do this, we all get more and more tunnel-visioned.”

Sky paused for a brief second. “You’re looking too deep.”

“I-”

“It’d be better if you back off this trail you’re taking now before it blows up in your face.” Sky rejoindered, sharper than any blacksmith’s opus could ever dream of becoming. Hours spent milling ceaselessly at a grinder, tongues of gilded sparks spewing in all directions, and nothing could match the rapierlike edge of her sentence.

 “Quit wasting time and make sure your guns are loaded. Who knows what’s ready for us at the end of this path.”

His brows knitted. “Sure.”

---

He wasn’t keen on the morose kismet of Twilight Sparkle.

He wasn’t sure what had become of his brother.

He didn’t know how barbarically destiny would manhandle the remainder of his hapless blind-sided posse.

But there was a singular unconfutable concept that, bereft of even the most diminutive plaguy stains of doubt, was understood as irrefutable truth by the Man in Blue. An unarguable idea immune to the roughshod, wanton onrushes of dubiety, its callous bewitchment dwarfed in the face of his heart’s insusceptible bulwark. Erected and bolstered with the uttermost diligence, insusceptible to its indiscriminate deception. 

Whichever infernal sod, accoutered with a psyche wrenched from the torrid Hadean vaults of flaming perdition, held the mantle of solitary proprietor of this opaque lunacy was doomed. Condemned to a fate reserved only for the apotheosis of Hell’s flagitious zealots. The hellacious b*****d who gripped the quill who authored this untellable tale. A malign saga awash with mind-rupturing horrors slinking into every enshaded nook and cranny stippling his path. 

The sinister soul lumbered with the culpability of this unwordable calamity was going to perish. And not a singular earthbound hamper, notwithstanding its brawn or magnitude, could ever ponder the prospect of impeding him or occlude his swath of ireful strides. The ill-omened, ignominious bowels of the byzantine Everfree Forest was the furthest thing from an exclusion from this rigid prescript. 

It didn’t take arks of a peerless polymath’s  knowledge to intuit the provenance of the unexampled discord. After all, with the unbounded sprawling throngs of clues and signals, vehemently shrieking to be dissected and followed, remaining clueless was nothing short of a miraculous achievement the Man in Blue could hardly aspire to. With a drought of red-herrings and a brimming bullion of glimmering guides, it didn’t take long for Levi to embark on the sinuous tanned soil path into Everfree’s hazardous nave. The screaming, direful heart of the tormentable timberlands. A perpetually thrumming generator of God’s most vile, damnable creations, its fabrication forsaking the resplendent uniformity of His image. Every Tartarean beast and hell-born jackal forged in its diabolic craw, spat from its horrific maw and sicked upon the hapless mortal world, somehow emulating the last gorgonian design. Trumping its former noisome brethren in every conceivable way and longing to bury its vampiric jaws in Ponyville’s bare throat, heedless to the terror lying in wait just beyond its bounds. Vibrating with malignant jubilation, panging with innate despicable desire. 

Every hint towards the cradle of the chaos spewed its unabashed obviosity into the feverish air, deluged by hysteria and Opehlian panic. The harried shouting from mortified townsfolk he precipantly approached hat in hand. Beseeching and panhandling desperately for any sparse nugget of information, in spite of how otiosely Lilliputian it may appear. That, in coalition with the cavernous gorge the inimical trees left in their wake, accorded Levi a pluperfect trail predisposed to his unrelenting houndish probing. Like a famished wolf on the pathway of a meek unthinking doe, the male pursued unendingly. Darting down the tan soil path into the belly of the dolorific Tartarean beast. Marching headlong into the peril-logged stygian domain of monsters and devils incomprehensible to a foreign alien emphatically assimilating into its sanctified hunting grounds. Heedless to the unseen eyes gazing with roaring stomachs and jaws dampened by raring saliva, lapping at their teeth with elated tongues. Stares imprinted with an innate sinister passion unable to be nullified or snuffed by any entity. Rushing lionhearted to thoughtless to his well-being into the wall of graphite-colored trees. Holographic sword clutched in an ironclad cage of sweat-stained fingers. Knuckles dyed a ghostly white. Wrists gibbose with rushing, jetting veins. 

His maroon boots stomped the arid forest floor generously peppered with colonies of frangible syrup-brown leaves as he marched. Stride by stride, brawny swing after brawny swing. Brutishly swiping the razor-like edge of his prismatic blade tens of hundreds of times over. Laying waste to the stenciled spider-leg-esque branches sprouting from the wraithlike trees like slipshod streaks of sable paint, the trees harboring no better of an appearance. Their onyx bases all fabricated from the likeness two undeviating archetypes. Rangy and rail-thin with equally svelte arms granted with a sleeve of dark sword-tip thorns like obsidian arrowheads. The other rotund with networks of quarter-sized branches. Regardless of size or density, the limbs failed to stand a tenth of a chance against the unrivaled might of that centuries-old sword. Rib cages of branches reached from the ghoulish bodies encompassing him. A bedeviling, badgersome bother, yet far afield from a hindrance that deserved no more than a fleeting glance of concern. Bodies plummeting from the simmering air and gathering upon the trodden ground of the inglorious timberlands, condemned to one of two kismets. Left to rot amidst the decaying reaches of dead grass or fragmented by the bald soles of his boots. No in-between, no median to doddle on. Just raw, untamed, savage reality dealt in frothing unpitying rivulets. 

In spite of the holey meshwork of scraggy limbs burgeoning high above his aching skull, the unfettered ravishing sunlight of a flawless day, ravaged by the machinations of his adversaries, spilled through the bulwark above. Raining down upon the stampeding box of frayed nerves in gilded spyglass-shaped tubes like the pinpoint reflection of a titanic magnifying glass. Countless golden pipes of luster nailed the ground as far as the eye could see and, amidst the hideous state of affairs he had only himself to blame for, this unsoundable beauty claimed sovereignty. Whether it was successful in its efforts to surmount that ill-omened forest’s malignance was an entirely separate conversation. But if it accomplished anything that Babelic day, it accorded pined-for respite to the burdened champion of Equestria. 

‘Keep running.’ His mind hammered. ‘Run. Don’t stop. Never stop. Once you stop, they all die.’ 

His psyche’s filter being panicked chatter and unfiltered truth was clogged.

‘Keep. Running. Once you stop, your friends are dead. Run.’

His arm shrieked in horror. 

Knees bawling in agony. 

Gnashed teeth grinding like the milling of wheat, threatening to pestle his molars into a silky ivory dust. 

Yet he ran. 

And ran.

Contrary to the assumptions of his overwrought psyche, the Everfree’s array of cadaverous inmates possessed a necessitated terminus. With three final clouts of his blade and a cascade of the frigid Autumn breeze, the Man in Blue welcomed his pillaged world once more. Shooting a sweltering scowl at the tooth-shaped clouds drifting mindlessly in the azure ether before lasering his glunch at the token of this unutterable mayhem. 

There it stood. In all of its alleged quaint glory positioned in the center of a vast leviathanic field burgeoning in each direction opposing the Everfree’s lead-black border. 

The Ponyville Museum.

 A rife, bounteous aggregation of archaic and antediluvian mementos. The endearing town’s exclusively chartered site for a sundry of antiquated vestiges of times long lost. Times that, for the vast majority of the ancient trinkets and novelties that call it home, are better forgotten in every conceivable capacity. Even the untoward present was miles away from deserving an exception from this custom.

A location whose existence was disclosed in one of the uncountable moonlit conversations with his incisive roommate abiding deep into the twilight hour. Their perpetual colloquy knowing few comrades in that epoch of the moon’s unchallenged regnant. Its solitary companions being the modal invariant symphonies of the night. The harmonic minuet of the mirthful crickets and the sonorous ballad of the gallant owls. An awe-drawing, arresting spot that deemed every narrow description of it in the wee hours of the night appropriate and destitute of a drought of necessary detail. 

When the Forest loogied him from its foreboding bowels, Levi gazed through a misty visionless haze of loathsome perspiration and heart-perforating dread. Staring with widened eyes and quivering lids at the seed of the bedlam older than his existence. Harried irises snapping to each titillating facet of every featuresome conspicuous object like a flying hummingbird. The Man in Blue cropped up east to the Museum atop a small gibbose hill of quarter-inch tall beryl-green grass. Accorded a full unbitted panoptic view of the entirety of the tight-knit bundle of architectural portents and marvels. 

On the far right of the estate stood the byzantine, inchoate labyrinth of soigné deft-handedly groomed hedge walls, standing nearly six-feet from the kempt sod it towered over. A bird’s-eye-view at every nefarious twist and turn, the taunts of the vexatious walls that marked gallign dead-ends, the all-father of all mocks and ridicules that spelled a complete redesign of their path. An stymie of vivid foliation that brought in tow an abasing walk of shame back to the last nettlesome dogleg marring their recreation. The far left was occupied solely by a gimcrack courthouse-esque edifice paler than raw drywall, equipped with every polarizing, attention-reeling decoration one could possibly imagine. Tall varicolored stained-glass windows illustrating the incandescent skirmishes between valiant heroes and despicable foes. Greek-style pillars chiseled with peerless proficiency, the vociferous passion stamped with every clout of its creator’s mallet. A profound clamorous guffaw erupted from the stomach of the building. Its granitic walls shoving the boisterous noise placid surface of silence’s unforgiving sea, yet the clamor parried its efforts, the guffaw booming like the thunderous rumble of an ireful volcano.

“S-s-s**t…” Levi spluttered through a trembling lip. His inundated hand of stabbing, agonized fingers liberating his sword’s hilt from a barbarous querk. Palms soldered to his scalp. Knees struck weaker than twigs swathed in aluminum foil. “Oh f**k, oh f**k!”

The broad belt of pepful grass, the clean-cut sod pulsant with unequaled vibrance and animation, placidly waltzing in the ginger croon of Autumn’s emollient sighs, was all but deserted. Two rows of equally spaced unflawed squares of sickly wheat-like deceased grass were all that remained of the feted, extolled luminaries and redoubtable warriors that stood before. To be virtuously accepted and inducted into the gleaming roster of opuses, handicapped by the mien of a gimcrack, pale recreation of an antiquated display, their resplendent handiwork had to be untrumpable. Required to spike the bullseye on the vast elephantine target of its begetter’s most opaque insurmountable balk they’ve ever happened upon. The unending and arguably bootless war between martial samelike pundits and sculptors, all wallowing in the same bullering pond of a regent passion’s voracious flame. A palmy field where boundless serendipity and an imperishable concord was the invariable mores of the fervent craft. 

Whether the warriors in those otiose, uber-frivolous skirmishes and battles, the championed paladins in the cutthroat coliseum of the artform, lived to see their unflagging travails be dashed across the wind was anybody’s guess. But the undebatable bottom line of the situation was their unwearying efforts were all doubtlessly in vain. Nothing remaining of the arduous toils of the smiths who breathed life into its coarse flesh sans the faultless squared outlines of its base. Patches of pale dead turf as a half-hearted memorial. 

In the end, it wouldn’t matter how vehemently they gainsay the machinations of the primordial preternatural forces that breached the margins of meager human description. Their full-throated, flaming objections. Demonstrably banzai remonstrances and animose dissent. It was all for nought, completely and utterly ineffectual. In the center of the sickly cubic pathwork stood the forlorn lonesome victor of those senseless battles. An aberrant mangled totem made from pale stone whiter than the sun-grilled skinless carcass of an emaciated desert indweller, its flesh marauded and scoured by the grim panoply of esurient skyborne scavengers. 

The lurid, appalling effigy of a belly-laughing Dracoonoquus eternally caged within the grainy impenetrable margins of his kafkaesque sarcophagus, forever shackled in a sculpted stasis amidst an eruption of frozen efflorescent mirth. A discordant unforeseeable concoction of appendages and features from a versatile roster of unguessable fauna. Not one aspect of his inharmonic being was his own, uniquity being a foreign concept across the breadth of his factious frame. 

Levi’s quaking emerald irises scanned slender uncouth figure and scrutinized every centimeter of the chalky statue from his yawning gleeful maw, the spear-tip tooth jutting from his mandible, eagle-like arm stretched high above his head. The final morose detail perceived and intuited by the mortified Man in Blue were a paltry pinch of direful components that, if he said he didn’t expect or steel himself for, nothing but falsity would froth from his lips. 

On his left leg sat a dried greaver of pure unalloyed ichor. Minute toothpick-thin rills of scarlet snaked down his carnaged dragon’s ankle and slinked between his triad of whetted scythe talons and pooling at his base. Beneath the risible gaze of Discord’s jovial countenance, sprawled rakishly across the vivacious plane, were the final lovelorn resting places of two lackless, godforsaken souls. A duo of cadavers. Dour, saturnine votives fanatically dedicated to an ineffably dismal oath sworn by an unequivocally infernal mongrel. Dwelling on a disconsolate echelon of incontestable evil that hardly any being, neither present or in the years of yore, could attest to bearing witness to. Hell, even merely claiming the ability to gainly fathom the caliber of malignance was a behemoth triumph on its own. One that was, bereft of a morsel of doubt bearing the slimmest breadth, a task belonging to the lithe category of unrealizable labors. 

Directly behind the baroque statue was a stone-cold geriatric scattily strewn onto the abashed earth, not the slightest modicum of heedful regard towards the prospect of institutional respect for the deceased. The elder rested upon the padded bed of trodden downy grass. Orbs like marbles of molten glass with the curtains half-drawn. Willowy frame anchored to the turf and trussed by Death’s ironclad clutches. His silky gilded mop peppered with runnels of aged iron sprawled slovenly over his scalp. Flossy bangs dangling over the scarlet tunnel chewed out of his broad wrinkled forehead like rank vines crawling across the entrance to a long-forgotten cave. One curious silver-and-gold strang curled into the dime-sized visceral tunnel seeking to cleanse itself from the unmitigated flourishing thirst for adventure. Slender lines of crimson meandered down his parted muzzle half-sank in the soil. Far behind him was the other half of the recumbent twain. The burrowed tunnel of a merciless round obscured by a reddened disheveled mantle of dirt-clogged aquamarine locks and her chiseled jaw troweling the soil. 

And there it was again. That sonorous roisterous horselaugh exhaling from the oracular organs of the tessellated structure. Faintly, as anacoustic as a dying whisper, the male discerned a dim whine from the tumultuous core. 

Levi combed his inundated scalp once more. A hopeless repetition to attain the slightest modicum of shallow fleeting comfort. He coiled his digits around the gold-lined hilt of his sword and slid it from its eroded scabbard. The full piercing length of the crystalline blade jittering ever-so-slightly in the disconcerted tremors of its wielder.

Far behind him, countless feet into the lifeless jet-black chainlinks of trees, a tonitruous, bemusing shout rocketed deep from its abstruse nonplusing penetralia. An astonished bellow coated in an unmistakable varnish of familiarity. 

“Levi! There he is!”

“Where?!”

“There! Through the trees!”

Two cream-colored wheels the size of archaic Viking shields barreled down a golden-tan anfractuous trail. Meteorically discharged from their abominable tenure in a strident, ear-stabbing fulmination of dissonance and frenetic shouts of glee. Saddling the robust axle of the monolithic wheels sat the onerous bed of the wagon. The clamorous, nettlesome jingling of innumerable coffers of ammunition spanning every conceptible variety, leaving little to no facet untouched, was the Surly Gang’s emulation of an Aztec death whistle. Beneath the incessantly flapping piebald covering rested two battle-worn souls. The firstborn of the gung-ho leader and his honorary aunt, the unmistakable Clear Sky. 

The gang eased the throttle on their unflagging sprint. Slowing to a modest yet far from nonchalant trot up to the dithering brunete, standing stock-still like a rangy spruce. His boots entrenched steadfast and obstinate to change or deviation. Sword squarely clenched in the pneumatic claw of his fingers. Quivering orbs wrenched from the direful Gorgon caricature of mayhem. The monstrous unabashed avatar of a primordial, hellacious force of evil with Olympian power far exceeding the comprehension of man and ponykind alike. Even with a skimpy glance that transcended no longer than a few seconds, he could sense the chilling buzzing of the enslaved air. Its freedom pilfered and pulverized and its existence mutated into nothing more than a drudging, moiling conduit for the rife bounties of long-unexpended chaos. Enjoining it with fierce icy command to bow to the countless whims of the thrumming unseen reactor in the beast’s coarse sternum. Radiating from the unfree tempestuous heart caged within an unsympathetic coop of stone. The air vibrated around him with that unholy dissonant tune, exhaling from the furthest blackest reaches of the underworld. 

The irreformably jarred Levi, eyes agog with indefinable shock and fright scrabbling towards an almighty crescendo, swiveled from his post to face the harbingers of his empyrean salvation. The fretful, ill-humored elder with a visage of raw chafed vexation staring from beneath the canopy of his pork pie. 

Mortimer chuckled with a tenuous smirk.“I didn’t think I’d see your mug again, Mister Cronell.”

Dread Shot shucked the yoke from his hard-wearing agonied neck and dropped the ponderous wood onto the grass, the thump like the deafened clap of firecrackers. Mortimer followed suit and forsook the glorified noose as Tacitus strolled to their side. The figureheads and powerhouses of the gutshot gang stood abreast before the teeming feculent wagon.

“I c-can say the same.” Replied the Man in Blue. “Are you all okay? Got your wits about you?”

“I’d say so,” Dread replied. “It was a collective pain in the a*s getting all of us outta dodge. These trees were-“

“What’s it matter now? We’re here, ain’t we?” Mortimer sneered like the corrosive growl of a miffed lion. 

His lily-white comrade rolled his eyes. “If that’s the way you wanna see it.”

Deep in his irises, clawing feverish and brutishly at his corneas, bedevilled by quiver he jailed in a coffin of imperceptibility, Levi stared deep. Those globes of disconcerted turbulent gold swimming in utter unbendable fright, the prospect of his capabilities smothered in brazen abasement. The eyes of Dread Shot enforced the selfsame bedrock function as any other. Following an undeviating ubiquitous blueprint that ne’er dared to stray even a diminutive angstrom away from the pervasive uniformity. They were unmistakable yawning channels to the doubtless lucidity of the heart’s veracious, unabridged mentations and perceptions. A virgin spirited sea of pristine thoughts in their utmost immaculate form, untouched by the begrimed blight of dubiety choking his mind’s ineffectual filters. Briskly darting down the winding bypasses around his brain’s otiose, unavailing screening. 

And pouring forth from those gushing golden irises, his poorly veiled angry ducts spewing endless truthful libation, was frontless veracity. Ripe for the ceaseless scrounging perpetrated by Levi Cronell.

“I can’t find no other ways. Can you?”

Dread scoffed in unmitigated, arrant botheration. “We’re wasting time, everypony!”

Snaking through the loops of his mussed blue jeans and winding around the breadth of his heaving barrel was his tatterdemalion holster, fashioned from the bona fide leather of a coyote felled by his hooves in the years of yore. Dangling from that bedraggled belt was his unflawed midnight-black Mauser pistol ornamented with a sable wooden grip he hastily tugged into the limelight in a brisk grapple. Just barely, for the slimmest fraction of a second, Levi was accorded the slightest hint at the grip’s discreet engraving. A Jolly Roger graven into the stygian wood with veritable scintillating silver. 

The remainder of the gang intuited the conspicuous memo. A blatant vehement call-to-arms that lawless rabble of outwardly avaricious hunters and thieves, b******s and ardent killers, all drew their signature treasured firearms. The bold exclusive cynosure of their convergent predilection. 

Mortimer drew the smooth hammer of his lavish, ostentatious Schofield. 

His son cocked his Peacemaker with an anxious talon.

Clear Sky giddily slammed the lever of her Old Derby.

Tacitus, the mighteous and placid titan, wielded his sawed-off shotgun with a single primed hoof. Whether his visage of thoroughgoing, unbridled tranquility and watertight resolve was a pluperfect masquerade or the double-dyed truth was dubitable. The stage was set for a duel of sultry discourse and contention, yet the appropriate time for such affairs was far from arrived.

“Where the f**k’s he at? The day ain’t gettin’ any younger!” Mortimer quipped.

Levi jabbed his index finger down at the opulent building amidst the champaign where his pointing beckoned another booming flurry of crashing glass and obnoxious laughter with the faintest modicum of a panicked whine.

“I think he’s in-”

“Who’s that out there?” The imperious voice thundered from within, a loathsome vast beam discernible across the waves of sound. “New visitors? I sure as hell hope so!”

Levi clutched his sword. The embattled concourse sidewinded in unison and scuttled to the left-hand side of the hill like a scrupulous procession of disposed crabs. Treading in long, greedy strides, strainlessly pilfering generous wealths of feet across the suave crown of the round knuckle-like hill. The twitchety Man in Blue tried and failed, beavered away with every minute tittle of vestigial vigor within, to purge the mastodonic heft from his encumbered psyche. Swipe his almighty scythe across the pinnacles of his mind’s profuse unbounded field. Ousting the agonized detritus blighting the gorgeous unfathomable reaches of its beauty, its euphoric placidity. A mere wisp of its delectable essence slithering past his nostrils, a glance at the perfectly uneventful horizon. The lands characterized by an unending vapid vista, wholly lifeless in every estimable way. How miserably and unremittingly he pined for those days. Just for one tiny grain of that blissful serenity and repose to grace his hellacious, incendiary warpath. An unutterably abominable creation that was never a creation devised from his own poised hands and clenched wrists. The bulging powerlines of his veins roaring through his jacketed skin screaming for that same sophomoric familiarity. A time where responsibilities were few and far between and, even if they did bear a position in the laundry list of Levi’s present obligations, they were as sparse and trivial as humanly possible. 

Similar to the blazing trail of incomprehensible horrors and blood-chilling strife, both present and a faint protuberance upon the horizon, those times were not of his own fabrication. And most importantly, they were a relic-like oddment of the past rendered unrecoverable regardless of the efforts or means put forth to mend it. It was all over now. His life of unceasing battle and dredging through soupy lakes of the inky crimson like unfettered disastrous oil spills was only dawning. Freshly born and callously rocketed from his earthbound womb and smack-dab in the center of this prophesied existence he feared since the fleeting moment his eyes parted to the light of Tuscaloosa. No battery of strident whining would remedy these circumstances. No one was coming to save him now. It was only him, the sword gripped in his digits, and the laser-sighted irises sitting before a bustling, feverous brain that could permit any salvation. 

“You wanna come out and see who's here for you, buddy?” The voice chirped from within. That familiar gut-kicking whine exhaled from its fanciful archaic innards. Levi could hardly discern a whisper of a tawdry grunt from the perpetrator's mouth and another series of whines and silenced cries like a gagged wounded pig. “Of course you do! Let’s go.”

The gang moved left until the space of the hill ran dry and they were forced down the vibrant gradient, all in pluperfect synchronization. Same motives. Same goal. Same off-the-charts ardor and ravelled nerves. Unblemished mirroring. Levi and his hearty crew stood in front of the building roughly two or so feet away from the gaping entrance. A yawning pair of opened double doors from which the noisome, unwordably inclement maestro of this sickening tapestry, embroidered with the septic orbs of pestilent malignant yarn. The parted double doors shuddered in a formless, torrid frisson of blinding fright. A jabbing red-glowing sabre of blinding terror galloping mindless and headlong to a fulgent, effervescent crescendo. His heart relegated to nothing even diminutively more important to a perfervid formenter. Plunging his frame in a smoking cauldron of sweltering, brain-sparking alarm. 

A mirthful Gary Demonio emerged, chesty and vain, sauntered forth from the sumptuous stone cube. Behind him and deep into the reaches of the building was a razed fractal of incurably demolished artifacts and relics from antediluvian yesteryear. Haphazard heaps of cocoa-colored shards and spalls of clay painted pots and vases. Glistening spills of grain-sized shards and chunks of razed glass, the final remnants of the cages containing the priceless antiquities from the untameable ruination of the outside world. Their otiose defenses were struck fruitless and ineffectual and the contents of those glass boxes were faced with a kahuna of indiscriminate wrath, far from present in the epoch of their inception. Old rusted helmets of war-torn knights and warriors, dented chest plates, blunted longswords and battle axes, charred cannonballs from maritimes skirmishes. All in a shambolic unfathomable mound. Gary stood on the topmost stair with his sodden brawny back faced towards the ineffable bout of carnage left in his thoughtless wake, wrought by calloused hands riven by neede-like stounds. 

A mortified navy blue pegasus was manacled in an ironclad infrangible chokehold by the b*****d clad in begrimed, crimsoned turquoise. Dampened jungly forearm welded to his heaving throat exploding and deflating with harried soul-shaken breaths. Inhaling a quivering sea of oxygen and upchucking a tremoring exhale. His ears were flattened and steamrolled against the temples beneath his barren scalp and an umber apron-style beard, its wiry ends tickling his captor’s appendage. Gary’s forearm was burrowed into the buttons of the ruffled, ravished collar of his azure button-down punctuated by an arresting cobalt sports coat. Its bottom flaps open and spread like the extended wings of a Thunderbird. The piteous soul was gagged by a vermillion upholstery-patterned necktie bound stoutly around his parted maw finished in a taut sailor’s knot behind his head. Glazing his timorous visage wracked with an impious fear that seemed not to belong to that merry world was a wicked coalition of sweat and terror. Pebble-like amber eyes screaming to a discordant tune in an untrounced amplification.

“I was wondering when the hell you sorry f***s would show up. Took your sweet a*s time to save this poor b*****d.” Gary exclaimed through the pearly teeth of his pernicious jubilant Cheshire grin. 

The entirety of the nocuous gang zeroed their crosshairs on the b*****d quicker than a hasty whip crack. All manners and variations of firearms and reticles fixated upon his stubbled beaming countenance. Levi readied his blade for an up-and-coming savage frenzy. Every conceivable morose path all fed to the same putrefied bustling hub of direful lark. 

“W-What do you think you’re doing here, Gary?! Let the pony go, he’s got nothing to do with us.” Levi bellowed, somehow managing to bolster the pneumatic vice grip on his hilt. 

“This isn’t about us. You’ve always been a f*****g moron. Never seeing the full picture.” Gary tautened the flesh-and-bone clinch around the impeccant civilian’s throat. His flaunting protuberant python pressing deep into the side of his roaring head. He jabbed the frigid muzzle of his gunmetal-blue Schofield into the pegasus’ throbbing temple. 

From afar, as Levi Cronell keenly purveyed the grim exhibit, he wasn’t entirely certain of the unambiguous identity of the fervid maelstrom of emotion lambasting his features. Whether it was pure, unadulterated shock or a subliminal surrender to the insurmountable might of his state of affairs was nebulous to the male. 

With a free hand, Mortimer Surly foraged through the velvet lining of his jacket and emerged with that infamous damning page scrimped in his talons. The Griffon relinquished that paper, the simplex justification for their gun-toted arrival, to his partner on his right. Dread Shot unfolded the paper in his hoof and relayed its contents, no acerb eyes sans his strayed not an angstrom away from the fiend. 

His irises scooted across the poster. 

“Gary Demonio,” The stallion announced, arrantly deadpan. “We’re here on behalf of the Royal Guard and the Princesses of Equestria for your life or freedom for the murder of Flash Sentry. Now, we’re all just and honest ponies and when I say you get a choice of your fate, you do.” 

Gary chuckled and stiffened the brassbound collar against the hapless equine’s Adam’s apple. “You don’t get to give me choices, hillbilly. Is this something you wanna butt your nose in?”

“I think it is.” Dread thrusted a torrid envenomed enfilade from the mantle of shadow beneath his midnight-blue brim. His adust glower like a twin pair of dying stars bursting in a curtain-drawing extravagant fulmination. “We got every right to do what we gotta do, Demonio. You can step forward or-”

BLAM!

Gary snapped the barrel to the perplexing, zany jungle of tooth-shaped clouds above and tugged on the battle-worn navy trigger. A .45 caliber round envigored with a hellacious lust for swaths of carnage boomed from its glossy frame and rocketed into the cyanic ether with a tonitruous squall. Electrifying the hearts of his vividly scorned adversaries. The Man in Blue jolted, the pegasus erupted, yet the Surly Gang stood stock-still. A rangy vine of stone-grey cordite lazily floated from the smoking muzzle like a hookah tube. 

“Or what?” Grey clicked back the hammer and planted the muzzle onto the pegasus’ temple. A trifling millisecond failed to best the inexorable grizzling and moans slinking from his victim’s mouth. A Tartaren blistering gobbet of fear boiling the contents of his crudening stomach.

A bony snap plunged itself into the frenetic ambience and a fresh craggy chain of fissures dawned on Discord’s esoteric effigy. 

Gary haughtily strode down a singular step. The gang advanced one stride further, sights incapable of any undertaking bearing semblance to bewitching divagation. “I don’t think you know what you’re getting into. Has my friend Levi told you any stories? This goes way deeper than some f*****g bounty, cowboy.”

“Who the f**k do you think you are!? You ain’t nothin’ more than a two-bit thug and I’ve met plenty of those. You ain’t different!”

“It’s over, Gary.” Levi quipped.

The noirette locked his manic Hadean smirk onto the chin-wagging paladin, the feral, unfettered flames of his flagitious psyche plastered unabridged and shameless across his visage. Levi, notwithstanding his ostensible puissant fortitude and heart of bona fide gold, couldn’t convene the temerity to dredge through the nether regions of his nemesis’ mind. 

“You don’t get s**t, do you? You ever realized you’re gonna get all these fuckers killed? These ‘decent’ people.” Gary took another step down, the ireful gang subsequently aped. 

“Give. Up.” Dread snarled. 

“You’re not all that better than me right about now, Levi. Sentencing these people to death like this,” The male chortled and his captive writhed against his adamantine bounds. “And I’m the monster.”

Discord’s statue cracked. 

The air hummed in a strangled incomprehensible tune like the song of an ancient indefinable god. 

“How long are we gonna go on the way we are?” Mortimer hissed. He took a bold two steps closer to Lucifer’s earthbound agent and wagged his Schofield with every embittered word he thundered. “I’m gettin’ too old for this horseshit. If you wanna f****n’ die you can be my guest!”

Gary shifted his arm. He liberated the planet-struck pegasus’ throat from its virile chokehold and snaked his begrimed hand up the hapless soul’s swamped back. Calloused avid digits snaffling a covetous fistful of his satiny jacket and silky shirt’s linen. His smile burgeoned across his jaw. Growing somehow, someway, by some aleatory deluge of fortune spilled over him by a sinister force arrantly untouched by benevolence. Silver tongue threatening to sparkle through pearly bars of his gritted twinkly teeth. Riven rays of cadaverous luster glistened through the plush ivory shapes overhead. The glossy radiance forever sullied by the abominable machinations of a devil-ridden sod with guiltless, unwitting lives juggled blithely in his palms. Pinched between his unheeding fingers with ceaseless, volcanic malice, a meager half-second of his blistering glare enough to scorch an entire continent to vacuitous heaps of ash. 

The two parties stepped closer. Gary stood at the bottom step and he delved the barrel deeper into the pony’s temple. His captive whined and shrieked through his silken gag, the unrelenting gelid gales threatening to freeze the tears spilling from his irises as he whinnied. 

The insuperable, mastodonic heft stamped his neck like a tungsten boot. 

Stomp after stomp, the barbarity burgeoning. 

Second after second, countless breaths of requisite air banished from his heaving terror-crusted lungs. 

Moment after moment, the atmosphere’s insoluble oscillating groveled to novel heaven-grazing heights. 

That statue… Something buzzed from deep within. Levi somehow managed to wrench his globes from the hostage and his captor and gazed deep upon the nightmarish likeness. Scrutinizing its every discordant, inexplicable feature and peculiar design choice selected by its brainsick demiurge. Something pulsed inside. He couldn’t see. Not a mite of a clue was present to shepherd him to a sane conclusion. All he could see was a corpse-riddled field and a soon-to-be cadaver still unrescued by the Man in Blue, the alleged heaven-sent paragon Equestria viewed him as. 

“You really want him?” Gary inquired. “Is this sad sack of s**t really worth dying for? You can always turn around.”

“Let go of the stallion!” Boomed Mortimer with a slight nod of his revolver’s barrel. 

‘F*****g morons. I thought they’d be smarter than you, Levi.’

The raven-haired male shifted his stance, attuned his stalwart stance on his soil-caked boots, and strangled the grip of his Schofield. An elated index fondled the trigger. His nefarious, beyond decadent smile preparing for the onslaught of felicity awaiting him at the simple roar of a revolver. 

One tug.

A simplistic pull of that steel hook resting icy against his begrimed finger and all the limitless tanks of joy he’d derive could satiate his every crave and desire for eons. He could almost salivate at the idea. 

What gains awaited him for waiting?

“You can have him.”

On that maledict day, where every stout sensical construct and prospect was callously riven from their seams, each and every idea was pulverized into an oozing pulp of mind-spinning disarray. All ordinary rudimentary laws of science and rationality were deposed. The modal unappreciated constitution they hitched their saddles to sprinkled into the atmosphere and shattered across lands far and unachievable. Any semblance to the unsung familiarity, criminally unlauded by the terrorized masses, was as elusive as a wispy phantom skulking amongst the stars. 

Levi wasn’t sure whose censurable hands the ramified glut of guilt rested upon. The identity of the lucid inarguable culprit vexingly nebulous and drowned in a wooly smog of vaguity. He was far from keen on whether the epithet of decadent wreaker fell upon Gary Demonio or the insidious vault of primitive roiling energy, corralled into that totem of fissure-riddled stone.

Earth stood in an eternal perturbed stasis. Its rhythmic rotation stunned and halted by a mighty clout of frayed nerves and inenarrable dread.

Raring handguns trained and clenched by untiring hooves. 

Talons amorously petting their triggers. 

Sights zeroed in on the b*****d’s frenzied mantle of liberal undiluted felicity, his crazed countenance adust with an incendiary seal of dissidence. 

The collective body of looming patience unspooled posthaste and its wire whittled rail-thin. Levi’s longanimity which, under the canopy of any quotidian circumstances, pridefully bore the mettle to perdure time’s unrelenting sorties, languished beneath Celestia’s lambent sun. His equanimity eroded and ran slimmer than fishing wire. 

One final crack barked from the canyon-riddled statue and the air’s savage, rampageous undulating rocketed to mind-twisting heights. Soaring to pinnacles never thought possible by the Man in Blue, and most certainly ones he ne’er believed he’d ever intuit or perceive. Yet, here it was. The nauseating oscillation shrieking in his ears. His mind screamed and skull buzzing, tasered by the wallowish vibratility. Brain akin to a boisterous toiling hive of raucous hornets that’ve never been kissed by the serenity of a split-second of silence. 

Levi hardly discerned the rustling of grass behind him before the acme of the Babelic disharmony. The drumroll of frantic hooves and boots. A familiar bellow of his name painted by a southern drawl. Either an emphatic warning he lacked the haste to thoroughly optimize or a trick of his overwrought mind. 

A thunderous boom sounded across every facet of his roster of senses. 

Vision? Painted in unblemished white.

Hearing? Pulverized to a strident eternal drone. 

His war-starved comrades, his sight, the unholy creature with his prisoner across from him, they were all wiped from the Earth in a flashgun of unadulterated white. 

And just like that, Levi Cronell was thrust headlong into a reality he always deemed possible. One awash in soupy dread splayed across his horizon and conquering every aspect of his thoughts and conceptions. Living in obdurate accordance to the rail-thin parameters, ironclad and everburning, equipped with nothing mightier than his novice aptitudes and fierce tenacity. 

The Man in Blue always had to learn the monolithic duties behind his epithet.

One way…or another.