After reality breaks, today’s story picks up the pieces.

Broken Roads
[Adventure] • 9,853 words

Dinky Doo and Silver Spoon travel through a shattered world. When all the world is ash around you, can you stand to build again?

FROM THE CURATORS: “Oh, my.  That’s how you open a story,” Horizon said of Broken Roads’ eye-catchingly apocalyptic opening, and from that punchy first line to the story’s final word we found plenty to appreciate.  “It’s a wildly creative apocalypse described in painstaking chaotic detail,” Present Perfect said. “It’s a story about friendship and adventure. It has a really great conflict and some very shocking surprises in store. It’s definitely not the story you’ll think it is at first.”

While this was another entry in Equestria Daily’s recent The More Most Dangerous Game contest — which challenged authors to reinterpret fandom classics — one of the things that made this stand out to us was the sheer amount of originality that it brought to the Fallout: Equestria postapocalyptic theme.  “I was disappointed that that didn’t make the top ten, ’cause I love the worldbuilding here,” JohnPerry said.  All of us agreed that — in Chris’ words — “the worldbuilding on this story is exquisite,” and Horizon went further: “This is an apocalypse where the setting is every bit as much a character as its inhabitants.”

In the end, what made the story exemplary was not only the skill of that construction but in telling a solid story within its vivid setting.  “This is high-octane adventure, with menace lurking around every turn, and novel and coherent thought from both the author and the characters about what’s required for survival,” Horizon said.  JohnPerry summed it up: “There’s something really compelling about this one, and it ends on a fantastic note.”

Read on for our author interview, in which Not_A_Hat discusses little princes, observant carpenters, and bright apocalypses in night lands.

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