Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria...

…there came an era when the ideals of friendship gave way to greed, selfishness, paranoia and a jealous reaping of dwindling space and natural resources. Lands took up arms against their neighbors. The end of the world occurred much as we had predicted -- the world was plunged into an abyss of balefire and dark magic. The details are trivial and pointless. The reasons, as always, purely our own. The world was nearly wiped clean of life. A great cleansing; a magical spark struck by pony hooves quickly raged out of control. Megaspells rained from the skies. Entire lands were swallowed in flames and fell beneath the boiling oceans. Ponykind was almost extinguished, their spirits becoming part of the ambient radiation that blanketed the lands. A quiet darkness fell across the world...

…But it was not, as some had predicted, the end of the world. Instead, the apocalypse was simply the prologue for another bloody chapter in pony history. In the early days, thousands were spared the horrors of the holocaust by taking refuge in enormous underground shelters known as Stables. But when they emerged, they had only the hell of the wastes to greet them. All except those in Stable Two. For on that fateful day when spellfire rained from the sky, the giant steel door of Stable Two swung closed, and never re-opened.







Sunset poured out its beautiful palette across Equestria, painting the sky in oranges and purples, blues and golds. Sunlight glinted off the broken windows of the dead Manehattan skyscrapers, looking like a scattering of jewels, and shimmered on the river that flowed around Bucklyn Cross.

The butter-yellow pegasus stretched her wings, standing on the edge of the fortress, her eyes looking out over the river, watching the slowly gliding boats, then lifting beyond. She could see Gummy’s home from here. Like Ditzy Doo, another strand of the past that persisted in the present, tugging at her heart. Painful, but still precious. Like anchors that kept her from blowing away in the wind.

She glanced downward, seeing the black scar of the Arbu prison. Calamity was down there somewhere, visiting a pony he had described as “an old friend who looks a lot like me”. It saddened her that there was still a need for such places in Equestria. But not all ponies in the Wasteland were willing embrace their better virtues, to be good ponies.

Every pony, she still believed, had goodness inside them. But she had learned the hardest possible way that you couldn’t assume ponies would do the right thing. Which made those who did all the more wonderful and precious.

She felt the presence of the hellhound as he came up behind her. The old cyberhound crouched down next to her, his cyberleg giving a metallic whine. At last, the aging albino spoke, “You ready fer this?”

Fluttershy nodded.

She would not allow the new age of Equestria to be born out of genocide. The hellhounds were on the precipice of extinction, and it was (largely) the fault of ponies.

Wanted or not, warranted or not, she had been once again put in a position where her words carried weight. And as much as she hated being looked to as a leader, she wasn’t going to shy away. Not after everything. This is something she must do. She must.

She must.

The Applejack’s Rangers weren’t going to be happy about it, but she would convince them. The Hellhound Sanctuary was the right thing to do.

The elderly albino hellhound got back up as she turned around, and followed her as she marched toward the council hall.

A stiff wind cut through her feathers, chilling her. The sun began to sink beneath the waves.

Fluttershy took a deep breath. The day was almost over. And it had been a day without gunshots. A peaceful day. A better day.

“In a world filled with misery and uncertainty, it is a great comfort to know that, in the end, there is a light in darkness.”

Fallout: Equestria