There was smoke, and ash.

Embers falling slow like snow, pulsing with orange and heated cores, the charred flakes of detritus layered across the ground that sent up little puffs of carbon-black as somepony galloped across it, or some rubble clattered down from the granite-facade buildings lining the street.

He could taste it, smell it through the filters as it overpowered all else, the heat-wash making sweat pour down the back of his mane, blinding him with stinging salty rivulets as it caught in his eyelashes and pooled into his mouth.

It was like a barbecue, a thought that made his stomach twitch with hunger and his throat gag with disgust.

He almost didn’t see them, the faint pulse of deep-purple off-brand arc-tek encantment. He nearly looked right past it, nearly dashed right over the feathered corpse covered over by so much rubble as it was, so distracted in his mad-cap race to catch up with the retreating raiders.

He almost didn’t see it but it caught his eye and brought him screeching to a halt mid-air, angling down and nearly crashing into a rebar rod jutting up out of a concrete slab torn from some thrice-pummeled high-rise that had once stood there.

He tore through the rubble, scuffing his boots and cutting his forelegs as dirt and flesh and bits of jagged rock went flying out behind him.

It was the glow, that mesmerizing hint of magic, that other-worldly pulse that drew him in and filled him with such horror.

He pried it out, torn from a dead pony’s satchel, a poorly equipped and malnourished looking Shadow Bolt, kicking aside the corpse with a shodded hoof and holding the artifact up to the dim half-light of dawn.

It pulsed, and he saw a half-dozen others out around him, a field of purple haze that made his jaw and foreleg drop, the glowing jewel and metal tri-pod rod dropping to the ground and rolling away.

His throat was scratched and his voice hoarse from the cold, the frigid chill that would bring snow in soon, that had torn so fiercely at him during the fight up above.

His voice was weak but still he tried to shout, alert his fellows who were scrambling around him, some landing and panting hard as they tried to regroup, fifty or maybe a hundred ponies, more out beyond them where the front was or where the headquarters were.

He tried to scream “Beacons! Destroy the beacons!” but only got halfway before it turned into a pathetic, gurgling stream, blood jetting out his throat to coat the corpse and the debris and his forelegs before him.

A flash of pure and blinding light was the only warning, an over-surge of magic that popped with air-displacement and crackled with discharging arcs of pure energy.

Where before there had been a few haggard pegasi and a few dozen corpses there now stood a stood a deep-strike platoon, an evil looking force of unicorns decked out with sleek black armor that fizzled with enchantment, that glowed with barely constrained power.

One had a knife, lodged in Skippy’s throat, the cause for his silence.

The horned equine laughed, a deep and twisted thing, as the pegasi fell to the ground clutching his wound, coughing up a stream of blood as it kicked in desperation, the life fleeing from it’s soon-to-be corpse as his killer trotted past, grunting and pointing his hoof at some young looking and clearly shocked Air Corpspony, obliterating him with a surge of electricity that arced from his horn to the other pony’s muzzle, scorching him and generating the smell of well-done meat that got a few disturbing chuckles and at least one set of smacked lips.

The beacons had been lit, the Wraiths had been deployed, the line had been penetrated and the fall of Bittsburgh almost assured.

The smoke was dense and smelled of petrol and putrification, carrying with it the vaguest hint of something more sinister than mere soot and pulverized debris. Ash fell with it, white and black charred flakes of the skyscrapers and apartment blocks towering through the smog around them, the eerie red glow of the infernos gutting their innards casting strange shades through the swirling clouds.

They trotted warily, steel-shod hooves clopping as the treads of the armor they were spread around clinked and clanked through the center of the street, brushing aside shell-warped carriage husks and crushing flash-carbonized carcasses beneath their advance. Inside their barrels they were safe, secure, peering out through glass-paned vision slits and peeking heads up out of cupolas to eye as warily as possible the surroundings.

The barrel was warm, wafting vapor trails into the air as it over-heated on his side. The flash of the muzzle lit the world up in pulses, reflecting off the tinted plastic of his eye-pieces, the pin-pricks of tracer rounds screeching into the dark as he stood his ground and pulled hard on the bit.

He could smell the cordite, the fumes thick even through the filters of his mask. He could smell something else, the vaguest hint of that sickly-sweet stench he’d come to associate with the ruins. It permeated everything, clinging to the world around him more thoroughly then the smell of gunpowder every could. It pushed him on, kept his mind focused as he put one hoof in front of the other and advanced into the flickering shadows, his saddle opening up a great stream of hell as he fired it to the point of failure.

The shells burst with puffs of smoke and fire, super-heated shards breaking away in a roar of thunder that cut down scores of ponies as they rained down and pulped the line. Sky was curled up hooves to his head and muttering Ave Celestias over and over again as if the words were some ward that would keep him alive. He reckoned it was, in a way, as he counted backwards from five and jumped up out of the crater, scrabbling in the artillery-pounded gravel. He managed to gallop forward five, maybe seven yards before the next round tore into a Battle Wagon next to him, a fragment of the turret and what looked to be the sheared in half iron shoe of the pone that had been inside of it whizzing past and demolishing half a support pillar for a building that had already been gutted by some macro-shell in the weeks before.

I cut left across the open and galloped hard, hurtling a still-smoking crater and what were probably bits of somepony I’d known since induction and indoctrination. I landed badly, my legs buckling out under me while the rounds skimmed past. One of them clocked my helmet with a ping, nearly knocking me out and sending my head snapping to the side, the helmet pinging and ringing loudly, spinning off into a wall I face-planted a half-second after, tumbling against it with the full grace and airs of a sack of potatoes. Grumbling and fumbling, reaching out a shaky hoof for the helmet despite the rounds still ricocheting around and tearing at the corner of the wall next to me and the street behind me I was suddenly pushed up against the wall again, groaning from the new gash torn in my cheek and cursing as I tried to fit the firing bit back into my mouth.

I remember the sky more than anything else, how unnatural it looked. I think back on it sometimes and I could swear I was dreaming it was so surreal. Everything was red, tinted and tainted by the way the clouds were filtering the light down to us. The clouds too didn’t seem quite real enough. They were black and smoky, thundering without rain and noise, coiling out ahead of the WRECS crews like it had a mind of it’s own.

It looked like a scene out of one of those fantasy movies, when the heroes stumble upon the lair of the villian, when the color shifts and it starts to storm so you know who the bad ponies are. When you’re in the moment, adrenaline rushing and ears popping from that altitude, when your heart is racing and your mind is blanking, you don’t think about that sort of thing. Symbolically, we were pretty bucked up but nopony took the time to notice or the strength to care. It was easier to just write it off as psy-ops, and to a lot of us that’s exactly what it was.

The griffons had one down with four to go and however many reinforcements as they could manage to call in before we high-tailed it out of there, added onto however many of the Loonies were still left infesting the camp. Before the bird I’d downed’s friends could take a shot at me I dashed back into the building I’d come from, firing four of the dwindling supply of 20mms at the wall to smash an opening. I leapt through it and flew over the body of a mare that had been taking refuge on the other side, snapping left right up and down to make sure there hadn’t been anypony else with a bit more luck in the room. Finding nothing, I swept the next and mounted the stairs, moving low and trying to stay out of sight of the windows until I could fine a good enough place to set up for my next few shots.

The Griffons burst into what was supposed to be a wide formation, their under-wing cannons blasting fast and their clips cycling out before we even had time to scatter beneath the barrage. Two, maybe three Pegasi and three of the Earth Ponies went down right away, a pair of Unicorns saved amidst their unfortunately tight grouping only by a quick shield spell they’d thrown up on a hoof-jerk reaction. When it fell, one of them just stood their and sort of spaced out looking at the bodies around it while the other mare got the buck out of there and fast.

We dropped down out of the cloud cover and into the darkness below, diving towards the specks of light that illuminated the Loonie camp like… Well, like Griffons. With our black on black fatigues, feathers and coats soot-smeared, all our battle-rattle tucked in and held tight, metal edges and surfaces blackened with shoe polish we were invisible against the night sky, the irony of the situation lost upon nopony.

I remember my first time going into Griffon territory. More than anything else it was cold. You could feel it in your wings, in your bones, chattering through your teeth and making it difficult to fly. Add all the cold-weather gear and heavy CT989 Feather Dusters we were lugging up there and it was a miracle we could even achieve lift, let alone get to the heights we needed just to cruise above the mountain faces.

Lt. Glider glided in on Celestia’s rays, but everypony knows what they say about stars burning twice as bright. He and his squad smashed straight through the ring of resistance, all muzzle flash and rapid dash, unloading auto-feeder hoppers into the momentarily swelled Loonie ranks. They must have killed three, maybe four dozen ponies during their pass and during their double back, and the regular troops must have been pulling the same kill counts when we all surged up into the breach.

Calling it a breach though doesn’t really do it justice. It wasn’t a break in the line, it was an obliteration of the line. The walls were still standing but there were only corpses along them, smashed and bloodied and torn to little itty bits of Pony and Griffon and probably a few Zebras. It was beautiful and terrifying and it put the fear of Celestia’s wrath into my heart surer than anything else I’d seen up to that point. If it had been under any other circumstances, if I hadn’t just watched Privy go like that, if we hadn’t just been getting hit like we were, if I hadn’t been fighting so hard that day just to survive I probably would have called it monstrous.

We knew that as soon as we breached the perimeter and jumped the walls that Little Horn was going to be hell, but we didn’t expect the sort of ferocity we met even before we’d cleared the siege lines we’d drawn around the settlement. It was getting dark, only an hour or two left before the damned orb would be up and the Loonies would be in their twisted element, but even then the light burnt fierce, thrown up from the sheer volume of shells and muzzle blast and mortar rounds exploding across the sky and tearing into the ground. It seemed like all eyes and every gun was trained on us as soon as we kicked up from the temporary resupply and reinforcement camp, shots whistling past and some tearing into ponies in the center of the formation even before we’d gone out of sight of the Guardsponies’ armored columns.

We managed to clear through the rest of the wheat without much incident, though Specialist Trundle in one of the support squads from Canter Company that had flown down to reinforce our push managed to trip into a spider hole and smash his radio to pieces. Nearly snapped a hoof while she was at it, but she managed to limp away with a sprain and a scowl but thankfully not much worse. Somepony called up a medic, but he just laughed at her and trotted back to Corporal Punishment’s squad behind Bucking’s pointponies. For the first time since we’d landed the platoon was deployed in numerical formation, first squad at the head and the tatters of fourth in the rear, bought up by the Canter Company fourth and fifth. 

To our east, Fourth Platoon’s third squad was moving up, and First Platoon’s fifth squad brought up our western flank, the lines extending all the way to Second Platoon tossed over to the eastern fringes, and Fifth Platoon stalking on the fringe of the anti-air battery fields to the west, everypony pushing forward in a massive sweep to crush anything stupid enough to still be skunking around in the brush.