My stomach grumbled.

I eyed longingly at a flickering neon sign that said ‘diner’, before flames crept up the wall beneath it. Blinking for the last time, the sign popped and exploded in a dull flash. My eyes fluttered closed as the acrid stench of smoke filled my nostrils. I cupped a hoof over my mouth as I relived a memory that had been branded into my conscience not too long ago.

Zebras or not, it was all the same. I could still hear them screaming.

The diner’s walls crackled and moaned, fires raging within. Wooden beams snapped and collapsed, feeding the flames as the fire slowly consumed every inch of the restaurant. Outside, ponies dragged out charred crates of miscellanea, aluminum cans tumbling about. One pony just stood among the throng, staring quietly as the building burned. She must’ve owned the place. Or, used to.

She watched as those ponies fought among each other for the canned food that spilled onto the snow.

The frenzied ponies, clad in grimy, tattered barding, fell upon an opened crate of foodstuffs, tearing into it like wild animals and spilling its canned innards into the snow. Even if they were hers, there wasn’t much she could do to stop them. Nobody else bothered to stop them anyways, as they broke into the crates and scurried off with whatever hadn’t already been burned to ash.

I kept telling myself that Poneva was probably one of the last bastions of civilization in the Northern Wasteland.

But the looters just kept looting. That was what was left of civilization – and that shithole of a city was the biggest concentration of it.

Not far from the burning building, ponies in collared, jet black businesswear watched the shop burn as they clanked glass bottles and took long drinks.

One of them took a rag, stuffed it in one of the bottles, and lobbed it through one of the shop’s broken windows. The splash fed the fires within, and the inferno exploded outward, spilling out of the windows like a cup running over. The looters yelped like frightened little dogs, scurrying away. One of them rolled around in the snow, his clothes trailing smoke.

The black-clad ponies trotted over to the quiet mare. One of them bucked her in the chest, and she collapsed face down into the drifts. The pony donned her wide-brimmed fedora and spat into the snow; the others did the same, and left her there without another word.

They heaved a soot-covered safe into the back of a wagon before the ponies departed, their job done and their treasures stowed away. The mare didn’t turn to see them leave. She just buried her face in the snow, her shoulders rocking with muffled sobs.

The fire’s cruel glow made my mind numb. My hooves were even number as they plodded through the fetlock-deep powder. The looters had left with their treasures by then, leaving the mare to lay there alone and abandoned with nothing left. I glanced at her, and saw that she hadn’t moved an inch.

Sighing softly, I stopped at one of the near-empty crates, staring at its spilled innards. Aluminum cans were scattered across the snow, leaking a brownish, half-solid slurry. I dipped a hoof into a puddle of pasty brown sludge, brought it to my nose, and hesitated.

It looked like poop water to me.

I clenched my jaw, and took a whiff. Nope. Beans. Old, ancient, botulism-riddled pre-war beans.

I shook my head as my stomach groaned achingly for food … for something … something that wasn’t just snow. I was getting desperate. I’d nearly passed out earlier, and a steady, pulsating headache impaled my brain with rail spikes every time a hoof made contact with the ground beneath me. But as Night Sky said, there could be no rest – not even for the weary.

To keep going would kill me. But to sit there and wait for my horn to flicker back or wait for my insides to stop churning meant another day crossed off of 91’s life span.

I opened my saddlebags and dumped inside the few cans that hadn’t been trampled over. For a moment, I hesitated as my languid gaze crawled down my vest.

My barding was still covered in blood.

With a heavy heart, I clamped my teeth around the brim of a squashed can, shaking out as much of its contents as I could, and stumbled towards the flame.

Skirting the fire’s edge made my skin prickle. Sweat began to trickle down my face as I approached a wooden beam that fell into the snow outside, its surface blackened and smoldering with hungry flames.

I sat beside it, scooping up some snow with my can, before nudging it in the fire. I watched the snow melt with a disturbing calmness in my eyes.

I kept telling myself that I wasn’t a murderer, but the gory shell that covered my shivering flesh said otherwise. I needed to wash it off. I wanted to wash it off before the blood settled and stained even deeper than the clothes on my back.

I killed that blood brother. Gored him with my horn and choked him to death with my bare hooves.

If that was what Night Sky meant by doing whatever it took to save the folks back home, then my life wasn’t the only thing I feared to lose. I remembered it in shattered shards of icy memories: his face as I blundered into him, the pain I felt when he bucked me in the chest … my horn dripping with his blood … my hooves tightening around his throat …

The rest was lost to blackness and hysteria.

‘Out here,’ Night Sky’s voice whispered inside my thoughts, ‘Killing is just another part of living …’

My heart shuddered with disgust. I gulped down the lump in my throat, shoved it away into the furthest corners of my mind, slammed the door shut, and locked it behind me.

I rubbed at my temples with my hooves, letting out a long, drawn out sigh. I fished the can out of the flames with a long piece of cardboard. It spilled across the snow. I nudged the can with the tip of my hoof until it stood upright, too hot to hold in my hooves. I waited for it to cool.

I stood to my hooves and hesitated. I could feel eyes on the back of my head. I glanced over my shoulder.

The mare was sitting there on her haunches, staring right at me. She might have been watching me that entire time as I picked through what few there was left of her store. Her livelihood. The job that put food on her table.

I just stared back. For a while, neither of us said anything. I didn’t have much left to say. And she didn’t have much left.

I shook my head and retreated back into the darkness with my can of half-melted slurry. Climbing atop cold shanties, mounds of frozen detritus, and discarded scraps, I found a place where I could be alone. Away from the burning shop, away from that mare, there was a shed that sat atop an abandoned building overlooking the shanty town below. I inched my rump onto the cold sheet metal beneath me in an attempt to ease the strain on my sore muscles. Trembling jets of wispy mist hissed through my lips as I finally lowered myself to the floor. With a long, drawn out sigh, I shrugged off my saddlebags.

I placed the can of slush between my forelegs and narrowed my eyes at it with all the focus I could muster. Nothing – except for the riveting flash of agony that speared through my skull. I fell forward onto my forehooves, dry-heaving into the metal. When the pain subsided, I winced as warm tears welled out of my eyes.

A foreleg came to my muzzle to wipe away them away, but instead, they came away red with blood.

I grumbled quietly and fetched the can with a hoof, pouring its contents down my vest. The slurry ran lazily down my body. With my other hoof, I scrubbed away as much of my bloody shell as I could. The breeze raked against my wet barding, and my body convulsed with violent shivers. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to see any of it. All that blood.

When I finished, my clothes were lacerated with darker shades of blue where the blood settled in. I at least managed to clean most of it off my kevlar plates.

It’d have to do.

I huddled in the back of the shed, wet and shivering, and gazed out into the ashen snowfall. From up there I could see a bright light glowing distantly through Poneva’s crumbling skyline.

Actually, it didn’t really seem so far. I could see its amber glow poking through the skeletal skyscrapers and around their rough, weather-beaten corners. Sitting in filth and darkness, I realized that the light was just over horizon. Light meant life. Light meant machines. Light meant technology – maybe even a water talisman … maybe even a warm place to spend the night.

I needed to get there.

Not all of Poneva was razed to the ground when the bombs fell. The light told me so. Some survived. Stable-Tec had to be one of them.

I needed to find out what that light was. I needed to find Stable-Tec. But first … I needed to eat.

Reaching into my bags, I pulled out a bruised can of beans. I brought it to my lips and clamped my teeth down on the lid’s tab, and pulled. With a dull plop, the lid tore off and the smell of old beans wafted into my nostrils. I tipped the can into my mouth and the frigid, chunky sludge dribbled onto my tongue.

I chewed and swallowed, too tired to worry about the unwholesome taste of expired slime slithering down my throat. Within minutes, I downed its entire contents, my stomach’s whining abated … for the time being. Exhausted, and with my belly finally full, I laid down, yawning as I rested my chin upon my hooves.

I thought that maybe I’d rest for a bit … just a few minutes with my eyes closed …

‘No!’ I couldn’t rest. I couldn’t waste anymore fucking time!

But … I was just so tired. My aching body begged me to sit down and rest, pleading with me to take a break.

‘Just a few minutes,’ I told myself.

I yawned once more. ‘Just a few …’

My eyes fluttered closed. I lay there, my exhaustion slowly reclining into a livid slumber. Lying there beneath the waning light of consciousness, I tried to imagine a place that wasn’t … there. Anywhere but there. The wintry wasteland slowly faded away … it faded away as I remade Spring Song’s world in my vision, letting my weary mind escape into a place far … far … far away.

Fields of verdant, green grass rippling in a gentle breeze. The protective gaze of an amber sun. The endless expanse of a blue, cloudless sky.

I felt considerably warmer, even as the cold breeze whispered down my neck. It whispered … it faded …

The murals … I remembered murals painted across B-Block’s walls, the awe-inspiring landscapes of a world that once was beautiful. Beautiful. It was just beautiful.

Lost … I found myself lost in an undulating sea of grass. I gazed out into the distance, following the gentle curves of the rolling green hills that swept across the earth as far as I could see.

I raised my head to the bottomless blue sky and sighed softly. There, I bathed in the warmth of a guardian sun that caressed my cheeks with its golden sunshine.

I could see the sky – and not a single dark cloud hung over the earth to ruin that perfect day.

Perfect. There was not a single thing in sight that could ruin the perfect world around me.

Not a single thing.

Hooves plodded behind me. My bright eyes gravitated to the mare I loved.

Dew Drops ran into me at a full gallop, and I took her into my forelegs, spinning through the grass as she buried her muzzle in my chest. We fell on our hooves and I was taken aback by the beauty of the mare that stood before me. The sun illuminated her gentle face and her eyes reflected brilliantly like diamond jewels, encapsulating me in their tender gaze.

Dew Drops giggled once, brushed her teal mane out of her eyes, and gave me a long kiss, wrapping her forelegs around me and hugging me tight as if she hadn’t seen me in ages. It might as well have been, because I returned the favor tenfold, pausing only for a moment to take a shallow breath of air, before parting her lips with my tongue once more.

I took Dew Drops’ hoof as we trotted through the grass, the tall stalks of grass parting before us as we giggled, loving each other … and loving the world around us.

We entered a clearing. There, a picnic basket on a red-checkered blanket was waiting for us. We enjoyed our lunch of hay sandwiches and carrot juice and laid down on the soft, cool grass, watching fluffy white clouds float by.

I rolled over beside her, and our lips met as the sun began to set, a line of magnificent, amber light parting down our muzzles as the moon took to the skies and bathed us in its pale moonlight. Crickets chirped, and buzzing yellow fireflies zipped over the grass.

She rolled me over onto my back, whispering that she loved me as she nibbled playfully on my ear and I planted kisses upon her neck.

“… hahahaha …”

My ears perked. The midnight blue skies shuddered as if a hoof clopped against the glass behind it. Dew Drops’ expression flickered as I reached her jawline. With her panting breaths hot against my muzzle, I silenced her euphoric gasps with a kiss, caressing her tongue with mine.

In the distance, barely audible beneath the crickets’ chirping, a faint voice whispered …

“Hahahahahaha …”

The world shimmered around me.

I sighed, closing my eyes as I waited for the crickets to resume their chirping. I didn’t care. I let the distant laughter pass unheard through my ears as she lied down on her back. I lowered myself over her, touching her scarlet cheek with a trembling forehoof. I gazed dreamily into her tender gray eyes … her voice whispering to me softly … inviting me onward.

“DD … I –”

A sharp twinge shot through my skull.

“Hahahahaha …” Closer. Hooves plodded through the grass. Cold sweat trickled down my face.

I shook my head vigorously, telling myself that I couldn’t let anything get through … ‘I couldn’t let anything ruin this …

‘Not a single thing … not a single thing … could ruin … this …’

“Hahahahaha … hahahahaha …”

Nearer. Hooves crunched through the brush in the closing distance.

I took a deep breath and tried to focus. My eyes fell upon Dew Drops’ face, her expression unchanged as she waited for me to say the words I needed to say.

I didn’t want that night to end. I loved her so much. There were only three words … three words that I needed to say … but they continued to escape me as the hoofsteps crunched ever closer.

Her lips moved … asking me something. What was wrong … the voices. The crickets stopped chirping. The wind stopped blowing.

What was wrong … her lips moved, but all I could hear was the laughter in the distance … their psychotic … mindless laughter.

“DD … I-I …” My vision unfocused – blurring. I whimpered, blinking furiously as my vision flashed with splashes of red.

A voice whispered from the brush …

“We’ll cut you up good …”

“No …” I whispered as my shoulders rocked with sobs. Dew Drops was still beneath my heaving chest, her startled eyes staring through me, her jaw dropped as she saw something behind me that I couldn’t. Something that I didn’t want to see.

All around me the grass withered and died. Black clouds drowned out the moon. Icy veins broke apart the earth.

A thousand pounding hooves trampled through the snow. Closer.

“I’ll fucking skin you alive …”

Closer. Their laughter quaked the earth beneath me like voices screaming behind a window.

“Hahahahaha – HAHAHAHAHA!

“NO! DD, I –“

“I’LL FUCKING SKIN YOU ALIVE!”

I blinked.

My heart skipped a beat. A ragged gasp tore out of my lips.

Dew Drops was lying beneath me, her head tipped slightly to the side.

Blood was pooling out of her shredded throat. I cradled her head as I peered into her glassy eyes. They stared back. Staring into nothingness. Wide, inert, lifeless dead eyes, the light within them gone … gone, gone, GONE –

… gone.

“DD? … DD! DD!” I shook her frantically with my blood-caked hooves. “N-no NO!” I screamed as the frozen earth quaked beneath us and insane laughter filled the air.

“DEW DROPS, PLEASE! GODDESES, NO – SAY SOMETHING!”

“HAHAHAHAHA – HAHAHAHAHA!”

My bloodshot eyes shot open – and my paradise shattered like glass. My hooves fell away from under me, into the darkness – into the wasteland.

Hoofsteps thundered behind me, and I swung my head over my shoulder.

My saddlebags were gone. An equine shadow bounded away from me across the rooftops as I swept my foreleg over the floor where they used to be.

My eyes darted over my shoulders frantically, batting at my neck –

‘Her scarf – Dew Drops’ scarf!’

Gone.

“STOP!” I screamed with burning, teary eyes as I galloped after him. We raced across the shanty town’s rickety, scrap-metal rooftops, forty feet of frozen air between us and the slums below.

All it took was one wrong step. I swore that it wasn’t going to be me.

He scrambled to a stop, several feet before a ledge.

“You’ll pay for this …” I growled.

The pony looked over his shoulder and I met his eyes with a look that promised murder. He inched back. Forward. And took a giant, running leap.

My jaw dropped. ‘Son of a bitch!’

I skidded to a stop inches from the ledge, and saw him roll across a rickety canopy that cratered beneath him. He stumbled to his hooves, shooting me a desperate glance as I took a hoofstep back and hurled myself over the edge.

“GIVE THEM BACK!”

My fall crushed the sheet metal beneath me.

Three words. Three words were all I needed to say.

“G-give them back …” I whimpered as I heaved myself back to my hooves.

But they weren’t enough. That pony just kept running.

I hounded after him into a third-story alleyway, the skyscrapers’ orange lights flashing across my eyes between the shanties. Ponies dove out of the way, spilling over carts full of scavenged materials and refuse that clattered behind us in our wake.

He jumped over a cart sitting in the middle of the alley, and I plowed through it. He ran around a herd of loiterers, and I blundered through them.

Nothing could stop me. Nothing could take her away from me … again.

A mare sifting through a cart of bent cans screamed as the pony narrowly sidestepped past her. I shoved her aside, spilling her tin treasures across the snowy, weather-beaten deck. It didn’t matter. All I cared to see was that stallion galloping away from me.

I blinked. Snow furies dragged Dew Drops into the darkness. I winced as their laughter echoed inside my thoughts.

It only made my legs pump faster.

We reached the end of the narrow alleyway, my hindlegs kicking up showers of dirty snow. The pony ducked through a shanty’s door and kicked it shut behind him. I flung it open and charged through the doorway, a family of huddled ponies screaming past me as the pony hurled himself out the back door and I barreled through it.

“STOP! NOW!”

“No!” I was close enough to see his tattered barding and his scratchy, brown mane. “I need this!”

Another ledge blurred closer. That pony knew Poneva better than I did. He vaulted across a gap between two rooftops, landing on the other side with a slight stumble before recovering fast enough to take another leap. He was getting away.

I leaped, bounded, and flailed, swearing under my rasping breaths as chunks of dirty snow and black ice plummeted away from my hooves – four stories to the bottom. Sheet metal pounded rapidly beneath my hooves – until my eyes widened at what I saw in the closing distance. I slowed as we approached a dead end. A dead end for the both of us.

All that was left was another rooftop – twenty feet away, across a ravine that fell into the darkness below. But he didn’t stop.

The pony screamed his voice hoarse.

And he took the leap.

‘Dear Celestia,’ I mouthed as he throttled across the gap, forelegs outstretched, hindlegs kicking through the air with my saddlebags trailing behind him. He was going to fall. He was going to splatter across the streets below … and take Dew Drops ... my friends ... Mom and Dad ... everyone I loved away from me.

The sheet metal cut his screams short. He slammed into the rooftop, skidding violently across the frozen metal before landing in a heap.

There was a pause in my madness.

During the time that passed as I approached the precipice, I saw myself splatter across the pavement in twelve different ways. I saw the world spinning end over end as I tumbled to my gruesome death – pancaked across the asphalt like a squashed radroach.

‘I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die. Goddesses – I’M GONNA DIE –‘

My hooves left the sheet metal beneath me.

Flying.

I was flying – soaring through the air like a pegasus pony. The weathered metal rooftop at the other end of the gap seemed close enough to touch as time slowed and my entire existence became devoted to reaching it.

Snow furies cackled their maniacal cries, their snarling, psychotic cacophony echoing distantly in my ears …

“Hahahahaha … hahahahaha …”

‘Not again,’ I thought, ‘You can’t take them away from me.

‘I’ll save them. I’ll save them all.’

I held out my forelegs, letting the chilling breeze carry me upon my flapping wings. I caught the frozen winds beneath my feathers and sailed across the gap. Nothing could stop me –

Except gravity.

My imagination swam – reality violating my senses as I looked down, and the world below me stretched on into infinity. A maw of frozen metal parted beneath my thrashing hooves, threatening to swallow me whole.

Falling.

I was falling – careening over the edge, flailing my legs, and screaming at the top of my lungs. The world raced by me like a fleeting memory – the ledge at the other end of the gap far beyond my reach.

I wasn’t going to make it.

I threw out my forelegs, stretching them out as far as I could, my joints screaming frantically at me that that was as far as my forelegs could go. But it wasn’t far enough.

The weather beaten ledge was less than half a hoof’s length away.

And I missed.

A mortal, ear splitting shriek erupted from my lips.

“FFFFFUUUUU –"

My face careened into the sheet metal wall.

Stars exploded in my eyes and my vision swam away from the light of clarity, my ears ringing like a tolling bell. My hooves scrambled blindly for purchase, but I skidded down the wall, plummeting back to the earth.

CRACK!

I felt the ligaments in my right fetlock shred like paper. My hoof caught itself between two rimy layers of twisted rebar and I broke my own fall with a violent snap.

“CELESTIA!” I hissed.

White hot agony shot through my veins – my fetlock shrieked in torment.

With an anguished grunt, I forced - I willed my left foreleg to reach higher. Higher. I found a ledge, and I clung to the deformed rebar for my life.

The rooftop, past a series of twisted metal beams and sheared steel, was nearly a foreleg’s length above me. Its ledge reflected dully in my teary eyes as I reached out with my swelling right hoof. My nerves cried out in pain as I jammed my throbbing hoof into a gap within the twisted, steel face. I kicked, and kicked – I kicked my hindlegs inward – trying to get a grip. My legs flailed and pawed at the frozen metal, my hooves scraping away layers of frost as my left forehoof came to meet my right.

I reached out with my left once more and faltered. The muscles in my right leg screamed, locking up - wavering through the storm of agony that throbbed through my veins.

But then I heard her. Dew Drops’ screams echoed distantly in my ears.

“NOOO!”

I threw my right hoof over the rooftop’s edge, then my left – my right – my left – and, with a kick and an anguished howl, I heaved myself onto the weather beaten deck.

I stood to my hooves. My pupils contracted. An immense skyscraper loomed over us, lighting me ablaze with amber light. I wheezed and took a step forward. There he was: at the other end of the rooftop, the stallion’s form was silhouetted against the skyscraper's fiery glow.

He wasn’t getting away.

The skyscraper gave light to the hatred that burned in my eyes as I locked gazes with the pony who took everything away from me. Once more, I found myself staring into the eyes of a pony who knew he was going to die.

He backed away, his jaw dropped as he stammered in horror and disbelief. He took one step back, and I took another forward. A rivulet of blood trickled down my forehead as I shambled after him, my horn bowed forward.

“Holy shit …” the pony murmured.

I growled, craned my neck and yanked my pistol from its holster.

“You’ll … pay for this …” I growled, limping towards him. “No … more … running ...”

Behind him was a seven story drop into the frozen depths of Poneva’s underworld.

But he didn’t seem to understand that I was right.

The pony shrugged off my saddlebags, my belongings clanking dully against the shanty’s roof.

“A-alright! Alright! Th-there, j-just ...”

He took another terrified step back.

One step too far.

“… just leave me alone – AH!”

My eyes widened. The stallion slipped.

He fell over the edge, screaming as gravity dragged him to his gruesome end. I raced after him, my fetlock aching as I reached the ledge and peered downward.

And there he was: hanging from a single hoof, his tattered barding billowing in the wind.

I gazed down at him ... and my heartbeat slowed. I felt it again. The calm. The quietude. The silence before the headsmare’s axe.

The pony stared back up at me in desperation. I felt my mouthbit loosen between my teeth. I watched his eyes, as tears welled up from inside of them. I watched. And I listened. His bloodshot eyes told me a tale of a poor pony scraping through the filth, day by day, taking whatever food he could scavenge or steal.

The pony’s weak, trembling limbs told me that chase burned what little energy he had left. The bones that poked out of his emaciated body spoke of days gone by on an empty stomach.

His hoof looked like it would give out any second.

But I just stared ... a chilling calmness in my eyes. His mouth moved soundlessly, but all I could hear was the sound of his head exploding like a melon as he splattered against the pavement. I came to realize that his life hung not at the edge of that steel rooftop, but from my own hoof.

I blinked once, and a snow fury stared back at me. The black veins in his demented eyes bulged as he screamed in utter silence.

His laughter echoed through my ears. His psychotic, mindless laughter.

The blood of my friends stained his coat and the ragged fabrics that were wrapped around his trembling flesh. He took them from me. And he would never ever take them away from me again.

I watched in slow motion as his hoof slipped, his frantic eyes widening for the last time. Madness and death ran their chilling hooves down my spine and I shivered beneath my coat.

'No,' I thought.

No one else needs to die.'

I leaped forward and caught his outstretched foreleg between my hooves, crying out weakly as my sprained fetlock jolted my nerves. He weighed less than I thought he did. With an agonized moan, I pulled him up and yanked the pony back over, heaving him onto the roof at my hooves. The stallion fell to his gasping chest, his limbs splayed out at his sides as he wheezed for air.

Tucking my pistol into its holster, I watched in silence as he stood upon his rickety legs.

“Gods … y-you saved my life …” he murmured weakly, meeting my glassy stare. “You saved me …” he repeated, looking down at his hooves as tears streamed down his grimy cheeks. “Why?”

It was a question I didn’t answer.

“I’m … I’m sorry …” he began, “I-I saw you walk from that place with those cans … I needed them so bad. I needed them ..."

I stared at the poor pony for what seemed like an eternity.

Then I limped to my bags, wrenched them open – and rolled out three cans of pre-war beans, the only food I had left. They tapped against his hooves as he wiped his eyes. He nearly collapsed to his haunches. His eyes darted to mine, his mouth moving, but not a single word escaping his quivering lips.

“Take them,” I exhaled simply, my voice hoarse.

He gawked at the cans at his hooves once more in disbelief.

A painful smile barely grazed my lips. “Go ahead. You need them more than I do.”

The pony’s head bobbed up and down, repeating my words in his head. Until it registered that I wasn’t going to shoot him, he nodded once more, fetched the cans in his hooves, and tucked them into his clothes.

“Thank you,” he whispered softly, his eyes not leaving mine once as he bowed his head and slunk away.

But my eyes didn’t follow. His hoofsteps dissipated into the wind, and I was alone on those windswept rooftops once more. I limped to my bags and fell to my haunches, exhaling laboriously as my sprained fetlock sent a torrent of burning agony through my leg.

I parted my saddlebag’s flaps and fetched a health potion. It was the last one I had. I popped its cap and gulped it down, sighing softly. I could feel my torn ligaments stitching back together with every beat of my heart. I dipped a hoof into my bags and pulled out Dew Drops’ scarf, hanging it from my neck as I pulled out the two frayed photographs within.

I stared at them for what seemed like an eternity, my mind numb and my expression blank. I stared in chilling silence as the wind moaned a somber tune, my friends' cheerful laughter echoing distantly beneath its lonely breeze.

I could discern each and every single one of their voices in the wind before their laughter melted away, drowning into the howling darkness.

My hooves began to shake. I clenched my jaw and pursed my lips. A tear trickled down my cheek as I tried to keep a straight face, tried to suck them back in. But my shoulders rocked with sobs I couldn’t contain any longer.

I hung my head quietly, my face darkening and my tears glistening in the orange light.

It was just in my head. All of it was.

As I stared down at my friends, their faces frozen in time, I relished in the life I lived with those ponies, cherishing their memories, the sweet and the bitter, the hilarious and the disappointing, the successes and the failures.

I had their photographs, I had her scarf … and yet I didn’t feel any different. I couldn’t save them. I couldn’t save her. I failed them all.

But a voice in the back of my head told that I had failed them from the very start.

Ever since I got my cutie mark, I neglected my friends to develop my skills, putting off the hours we could have spent together to tinker, to fix, to learn ... to be alone – and now I had what I fucking wanted.

I took them for granted – most of all, I took her for granted. And I wasted everything. They died without knowing how much I appreciated their friendship. Dew Drops died with so much love to give. And I didn’t deserve a single second of it.

I didn’t even get to tell Dew Drops that I loved her … one last time.

Three simple words that I could’ve … should’ve told her a long time ago. But that time was long gone.

They were torn away from me – out of me, leaving wounds that I tried so hard to wrench shut. The simple thought of them made my heart bleed. Again, my wounds were open, and I was bleeding out once more as my tears poured down my face.

I shook my head in denial, shaking away the tears that welled out of my bloodshot eyes. I gazed glassy-eyed at my family picture, saw my mother’s face and thought, ‘Would she be proud of me if she saw me now?’

Would she be proud to know of the things I did to reach Poneva? The ponies I killed? All those snow furies I cut down without giving a single shit? What about all the friends I lost … what if she knew that I wasn’t strong enough to save them? That I wasn’t strong enough to save the mare that I loved?

I dropped their pictures into my bags and curled up into a ball, burying my muzzle in Dew Drops’ scarf.

That dream I had of her … it felt so real. Her coat, her flesh, the taste of her tongue – it felt. So. Real. That awakening, that rude perversion of reality into my weary imagination was a violent one. It stole her away from me, and I chased after her.

I almost ended up killing someone. Again.

And still, the mare of my life was dead. I watched them tear her apart, just like I watched those zebras, and those slaves and did nothing.

I was fucking useless.

Dew Drops told me that with my friends, we could accomplish anything. But they were gone.

Gone.

Without them, without her, I was nothing. I was only one. And I had none. All of it was too much. I wasn’t strong. I was a fucking weakling who’d only survived that long by luck alone – lucky that other, stronger people had killed and died to get me that far.

I hated it – hated myself for being so pathetic, for being such a little bitch.

I hated everything around me. The wasteland, the snow, the city, the snow, the people that lived in it, and oh – the fucking GODDESSES-DAMNED SNOW!

I sobbed, my eyes heavy and swollen.

There comes a point when you run out of tears to shed. I reached that point.

I just lay there in somber quietude.

I rolled onto my back and stared up into the dark skies, too tired to weep. In silence, with only the wind and the distant Ponevan ambience whispering in my ears, I peered up into the black clouds that hung above the frozen earth, and for a brief moment, I thought I saw a light.

A small dot, a hole, opened up in the sky, and out poured a weak beam of yellow light that encapsulated me in its radiance. Even though I had never seen it before in person until then, I knew exactly what it was. It was unlike the orange artificial glow that washed over me ...

It was pure. Unadulterated. Sunlight.

And just like that, it was gone, as fast as it came. If I was right, the sun was still there – just beyond the cloud layer. Just beyond the darkness.

I saw it … and I knew. It was still there.

Celestia and Luna had raised and lowered the sun and the moon for thousands of years. I wanted to believe that they too were still there. But after what I had seen so far, it hurt to think that maybe Bone Charm was right. That they were dead – and so was all the good and all the hope in the world.

But I wanted to believe … in something. I wanted to believe that there was still hope.

I remembered the look on that stallion’s face when I pulled him back up. I saved his life, in more ways than one. I made the wasteland a slightly better place when I gave him those cans.

Maybe … maybe that was why the sky opened up.

Maybe that was why the sun was still there. Because there was still hope. Still goodness in the world. Somewhere. Somewhere … in … me.

Somewhere in the wasteland, there was hope.

Just like the sun, it might've be hard to see, but it was there, hidden behind all that darkness. And for the most miniscule of moments, I saw it through the clouds, and the darkness, and the madness.

It was still there.

I read once in a silly foal’s book, that the night was always darkest before dawn. It was clichéd, I know, but the darkness around me had to mean something, it just had to – because it was pretty fucking dark.

My head rolled across my shoulder and onto the chilling sheet metal, my darkened face turning to the light. I forced myself to my haunches and gazed up at the Ponevan skyline, and at what few skyscrapers there were that still glowed with light.

Ever since I had climbed up there, I had never even taken the time to simply pause and look around me. I was so focused on getting my bags back, that I never noticed what was staring at me in front of my face the entire time.

The closest skyscraper, towering over me with its amber radiance, caught my eye. And so did the immense neon letters that hung from its titanic, concrete edifice:

World Tree.

But beneath the refurbished neon lights, I saw something else. Something that I had seen stenciled onto almost everything I had, growing up. It was written in raised concrete, just barely visible beneath the World Tree tower's glow:

Stable-Tec.

I stood to my four hooves, the skyscraper’s lights painting my shadow across the rooftops, and my mane, my tail, and Dew Drops’ scarf billowing in the wind. I wiped a hoof across my face, and sniffled, the tower’s radiance burning like firelight in my widening, teary eyes.

I remembered what I had asked Dew Drops, the night before she died.

‘Are we going to find a Water Talisman?’

The answer to that question was less than a mile away.

I reached out with a hoof.

It hung before me, empty. But perhaps not for long.

Hope. It was so far. It was so far … far beyond my reach. But in that moment, as I gazed onward into the light, I felt it. For the briefest of moments, I thought that maybe … just maybe …

… I might just be able to go home.

My eyes fluttered closed as hung my head.

I never really believed in hope. That might’ve been why I couldn’t see it.

All my life I simply did things and waited for the consequences or the results. Then, I knew, that all the hope my friends had … the hope that Dew Drops held in her heart culminated to this.

She was always right. She was smarter than I was, and even in death …

Dew Drops was still right.

We would find a way …

And I found it.

Footnote: Level 4
XP: 1050/1700