My life fades, the vision dims, and all that remains are the memories. They take me back, back to the place where the silver pumps sucked magic out of the very ground. I remember a time of chaos, of ruined dreams, This wasted land. I remember the terrible battle that we fought, and the day that we left, forever. But most of all, I remember the courage of a stranger, a warrior named Dash.

To understand who she was, you must go back before my time, to the last days of the old world. When civilisation was powered by the opalescent fuel, and the fields sprouted strange towers of pipe and steel. Gone now, swept away.

For reasons long forgotten, two mighty magical nations went to war, and touched off a conflagration that consumed them all. Without magic, they were nothing. The Pegasi could not fly, and control of the weather was lost. The Unicorns could not cast spells, and the magical defences were lost. The Earth ponies lost their connection to nature, and the plants grew wild or died. They had built their houses of straw.

Intrepid science-ponies discovered that the lost magic had sunk into the ground, and could be retrieved with the right technology. They developed machines that ran on the liquefied essence of the world, restoring for a time a modicum of normality. But the new need for this precious resource only compounded the problem, and the seeds of Discord were sown far and wide.

Their leaders talked, and talked, and talked. But nothing could stem the tide. A new conflict began, only a few short years after the first one had ended, over who should wield the dwindling supplies of magic. In the end, everything collapsed. Ponies stopped in the streets and listened; for the first time they heard the sound of silence.

Their world crumbled; the cities exploded with a whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Ponies began to feed on ponies. In the rapidly wasting land between the cities, it was a high-thauma nightmare, and only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage, could survive. The changelings and umbrum took over the wastes, ready to wage war for a tank of juice.

At last, the vermin had inherited Equestria.

And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary ponies were battered and crushed, ponies like the warrior, Dash, who, in the blink of an eye, lost everything and became a shell of a pony. A burnt out, desolate pony, a dead pony, a pony haunted by the demons of her past. A pony who wandered far out, into the wasteland, and it was here, in this blighted place, that she learned to live again.

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The gaunt, unkempt blue pony cruises over the barren desert road in a black-on-black Interceptor, battered and scarred with the evidence of many past collisions. Her leather-armoured uniform is tattered and missing the right sleeve, the bronze Main Force Patrol badge green with corrosion. Dash hits the brakes as she comes over a hill, skidding around and settling in for a landing. Her turtle companion cautiously lifts his head to peer out at their surroundings, blinking slowly.

“Okay, Tank. What’ve we got?” she says, pulling out a worn set of binoculars.

Below them, on a ridge, she sees a group of changelings cannibalizing a farm vehicle. Siphoning its mag-oline into portable tanks and transferring food and supplies to their own bizarre transports. The turtle, looking to their left, growls. Further down the ridge, Dash sees a small shack, consumed by flames. Nearby, the bodies of three ponies, one a mere foal, are strung up from a dead, gnarled tree.

She looks back to the changelings. Several of them are running to their transports, having noticed her. Their apparent leader is larger than the others, sporting a mane dyed red and gelled into a mohawk, wearing leather armour reinforced by a metal chest plate, shoulder guards, and leggings. He runs to a yellow-haired changeling sitting on the back of an enormous hoverbike. Mounting, he leads the others, two more with mohawks and bikes, three donning racers, and four donning awkward-looking buggies. Their machines roar to life, the mag-oline powered engines pushing them into the air and thundering over the sand.

Dash runs her hoof through her rainbow-coloured mane and sighs, then fires up her own machine, turning back down the hill in the direction she’d arrived from.

“Well, Tank, here we go again.” She guns the engine as she activates the supercharger, surging away as the changelings crest the hill in pursuit. The turtle just nods his head at her as he lowers his head back inside the cabin.

A few of the changelings fall behind immediately, unable to stick with the overpowered Interceptor. Even the swift are too slow, and only the fastest can even keep up with the black-on-black machine. Before long, only three are left in the chase: the leader, a racer, and a buggy. Cresting a rise, Dash lets out a gasp as she bears down on a group of wrecked vehicles scattered on and just off the road. Slaloming through them, she enters the wide curve beyond. The red-maned changeling ramps over the first wreck, then slams into the road on the far side and bounces back into pursuit. The racer follows suit, but its heavier frame tips into the second wreck, ripping a fender off as it spins out to a stop before turning back into the chase. The buggy avoids the wrecks altogether, rolling off the road to cut the curve and catch Dash on the road beyond, but it’s a futile move – she is already leaving them behind.

A red light flares to life on Dash’s instrument panel, flashing in synch with a shrill alarm. Glancing at the fuel gage, she realises it’s almost empty. Damn!, she flicks a switch on her throttle and the supercharger cuts out. As she slows, the turtle whimpers and crawls into a den behind Dash’s seat. The enormous bike pulls up alongside the Interceptor’s passenger side; the red-maned changeling raises a gauntlet mounted crossbow and levels it at Dash’s head.

Dash catches the racer pulling up alongside her pilot side out of the corner of her eye. The pilot aims an enormous bolt-thrower across the racer out the passenger window, six quarrels protruding from the barrel. Shit! Just as the changeling pulls the trigger, Dash stands on her brakes, sliding behind the two craft. Her Interceptor catches two of the arrows in her front quarter-panel, while three go wild. One hits the red-maned changeling in the arm, who drops back with a snarled curse.

Dash immediately guns her engine and throws herself right back in behind the racer. The hoverbike leaves the road as the red-maned changeling struggles to retain control. Dash hits the throttle-mounted switch and her supercharger roars to life, the Interceptor leaping forward and ramming into the back of the racer. The shriek of metal rubbing on metal pierces their ears as they crest a low rise, only to find the wreck of a trailer mixed with scattered furniture and other debris blocking their path, and an abandoned lorry off to one side.

Dash eases back for a moment before slamming her throttle to the stops, crashing into the back of the racer and hurling it forwards just as the buggy crosses in front of it. The pilot of the racer screams as he clips the aft end of the buggy, spinning it like a top until it crashes into the lorry. The racer slides out of control, spinning perpendicular to its direction of travel before it starts to roll. It smashes through a sign and a pole and finally comes to rest.

Dash throws her machine into a power slide, skidding to a halt facing the way she’d come as the pole falls to the ground behind her. Tank hops out of the passenger window and makes his way to a patch of dying grass near the racer, where he nibbles absently on the dry stalks while watching for signs of movement. Dash jumps out of the Interceptor carrying a jerry can and a length of tubing. She sees the red-maned changeling stopped on the apex of the rise, looking down at her, the quarrel still protruding from his arm.

Unfazed, she runs to the wreck of the buggy where it leans against the rig. Opalescent, the mag-oline spills from its ruptured tank, looking as much like watered milk as anything else, while its injured pilot moans inside. Dash sets the jerry can under the stream of liquid magic to catch as much as she can, then rips a skull-patterned bandana off her neck and starts to mop up the spilled fluid lying on the ground, squeezing the precious substance into the jerry can as best she can.

The red-maned changeling screams loudly, catching Dash’s attention. He grins at her as he rips the bolt out of his arm without looking away. The changeling points the bolt at Dash and yells “For you!” before tucking it into his own quiver and gunning his engine. He spins the hoverbike around and peels out, roaring back into the wasteland.

Dash shakes her head and goes to examine the rig. Most of the tyres are punctured by arrows, the rear doors torn off. Tapping on the mag-oline tanks produces a hollow ringing sound. She reaches up to the pilot’s door just as an anguished gasp emanates from the wrecked buggy. Dash turns, the changeling’s hoof emerges from the twisted metal, scrabbling at the edge of the hole before going limp and disappearing within.

Dash turns back to the lorry, and as she opens the door, a figure crashes down onto her shoulders. She struggles from its clawing grasp, only to find that it is the lorry’s long-dead pilot. The bloated, putrefied corpse of the stallion falls limply to the ground, two crossbow bolts protruding from his neck.

Dash stoops and picks up a small hurdy-gurdy that had fallen from the dead stallion’s grasp. Collecting her jerry can, she walks back to her Interceptor. After emptying the jerry can into the large fuel tank on the back, she secures the can and walks to the pilot’s door while turning the handle of the hurdy-gurdy, playing the first few notes of The Heart Carol.

A smattering of memories rise unbidden to her mind. A play, the history of Equestria. No blizzard this time, I guess even the windigo can’t do anything without magic. Her old friends from Ponyville. Not much left of it now, I reckon. Still, I was brilliant as Commander Hurricane, wasn’t I? She snorted. She could barely remember it now, Spike’s narration over their rather silly lines. The chill down her spine during the argument over the window. The wrap party afterwards. No, those days are gone. There’s nothing left of them now.

The pony once known as Rainbow Dash wiped a few tears from her face. She turned to look at her rear, the ghostly afterimage of her Cutie Mark lingering thanks to her recent exposure to the mag-oline. She sighed wistfully at it, wondering again just what could have caused the magic to disappear the way it had. The war, the day Cloudsdale crashed to the ground, the almost-but-not-quite-like-flying that the new magitech vehicles offered. Well, we’re all blank-flanks now, aren’t we?

She looked around at the wreckage. Damnable changelings. Even Discord hated you. She tucks the toy into her jacket.

Spying the smashed sign, she picks a piece of it up and flings it into the air. She watches it spin and land, pointing approximately north. Shrugging her shoulders, Dash picks Tank up by his harness and sets him inside her Interceptor, idly twirling the propeller as she releases him.

“Sorry buddy. Not enough here to power that thing for you. Maybe next time.”

She climbs into her pilot’s seat and nudges the throttle, turning in the direction of the sign and driving off into the distance.