. centuries went by .

. millennia .

. eons .

. i counted them with each boatstroke that i performed .

. one soul after another, i ferried across that dark, dark river .

. i ferried them all .

. the mothers and the murderers .

. the saints and the liars .

. the heroes and the cowards .

. one by one, i carried them to their destination .

. every soul was as pale and colorless as the one before .

. none of them i recognized; very few of them breathed that misty light of tenderness and hope .

. every so often, thousands of souls apart, one might actually have spoken to me .

. it was almost nothing but rambling nonsense and whimpering drivel .

. a few hundred of them actually tried pushing me into the waters .

. only a dozen and a half of them were brave enough to ask if they could take the pole in place of me .

. i refused them; i ferried them all .

. fifty billion souls later, the ponies stopped talking altogether .

. fifty trillion, and the bodies on the shore grew more and more spaced apart .

. a quintillion or more souls into my task, and the riverbank grew desolate .

. i would spend decades and even centuries scouring the pale coast, until finally i found one lone soul or another that had gotten lost, lingering amidst the nothingness, waiting to be dissolved into the breathless void across the waters .

. eon by eon, the search took longer and longer, until i determined that there was nothing left to search for .

. the riverbank grew silent, something quieter than death .

. even the waters grew still, for i had nowhere to row my raft .

. more eons passed, peeling away at the blighted morass .

. the bone shoals grew bitter, breaking way with each passing age, showing nothing but blackness beyond the fissures and cracks .

. the waters evaporated, giving way to a black, smokey mist that drifted past me and my raft .

. and still, i kept my constant vigil, eyes glued upon the shore, even as it grew fainter and fainter with each dwindling epoch .

. and then finally, when so much time had limped by that even the foundations of the afterlife had begun to crumble... .

. i saw her .