Arkon shivered, his fur and feathers not enough to fight the bitter cold of the endless winter. He pulled another rock aside, digging a slightly deeper crevice to squeeze into for the night. The work was hard, and frustratingly difficult in the dark of night. But even the most meager shelter was better than none out here in the badlands between the old Empire and the remains of Equestria.

The war, while nominally still on, had really been fought and lost before he was even born. He'd been told the stories though. It'd started with a red star, a small sun that grew brighter every day, until finally its avatar, Nemesis, had appeared in alicorn form in Equestria. He'd fought the ponies there, defeating even their mighty Queen Celestia, but not before she could hurl the sun into his own source of power. The resulting stellar conflagration had consumed all life on half the planet, scorching it beyond recognition, while leaving the other half in bitter cold. For almost ten years, no creature did anything more than scrape the dirt for food.

Then the wars began. Arkon's own people, the griffons, relatively unscathed in their aeries to the north, saw a weakened Equestria as an opportunity, and attacked. Bereft of their kind and friendly leaders, ponykind itself had become vicious as well however, and hoof, claw, wing, and talon met time and again in bloodied battle. Eventually, the ponies won, laying waste to huge swaths of border territory between the kingdoms, their newly developed weapons mimicking the god-like battle of stars a decade prior.

But that'd been his grand-dam's era. Arkon himself grew up in an impoverished griffon "Empire" that could barely feed its own people, much less wage a proper war. Their leaders said the empire would rebuild, grow strong again and flourish, but Arkon knew in his heart those were lies. He could see the signs all around. And it wasn't just the Empire, but the world itself that was dying. The leaders refuted all such claims, of course, but... he'd seen seventy-one seasons in his life, yet the mythical "blue" of the sky was something he'd glimpsed only once. So he went west.

West, toward the border with Equestria. The wastelands between the old powers were vast, and inhabited only by the most vile and monstrous of creatures to be sure. Yet Arkon knew that was the only hope he had to survive. He knew the world was dying, and the ponies knew it too. He knew they knew because he could see their rocket launches every few nights, flying off to better worlds in the great sky beyond the sky.

So he'd journeyed into the wastes, fighting his way through heat and dirt, starvation and sand. He often felt like he might lose hope, when the only water smelled of rotten flesh, or the only food literally was rotten flesh. Then there were the freezing cold nights, where no amount of fluffed feathers and coat would keep a griffon warm. But then he'd see that glow on the horizon, just beyond his ability to judge the distance. The massive pillar of flame, of fire, and of power that showed ponies leaving this broken world and heading for something better.

The griffon leaders said the ponies were simply moving more weapons to orbit, to ensure territory for themselves. Yet rumors among the younger griffons told of escape, of mercy, of how a poor and starving griffon could, were he bold enough, cross into the great land of Equestria, beg for help, and find a chance at survival.

So Arkon moved on, slinking through a world even his noble ancestors from a thousand years prior would have called primitive, yet beckoned onward by semi-nightly pillars of fusion-powered hope they could never have imagined. There, just over that next ridge, just beyond that one last salt flat, just over this hill, or maybe just over the next—was the greatest thing a griffon could pray for in this ruined world: an escape plan.