Tonight was shaping up to be another one of those nights. The kind of night where sleep was a fleeting and ironic dream, chased away by memories of a life stained by terrible choices and equally terrible mistakes.

At least it didn't have to be a total waste.

Like he had so many times over the past year, Kasimir found himself leaning against his desk and tapping a pen against a blank sheet of paper, wondering what part of his life he should start recording next. More from the crater? It was the logical step to take, but it was equally hard to think about at times. Aside from the tiny moment of kindness that he received from mustard mare, whose name he either never learned or forgot, there were no happy memories to record. Even if recording the bad memories was the entire point of this journal, it was very, very hard to force himself to put much more of it to paper.

He laid the pen down and blew out a breath. Maybe he could find inspiration from elsewhere?

To his right sat a small lock box, missing the lock ever since he lost the key and had to force it open. The contents were far too precious to leave sealed away forever, and now was one of those moments where he needed them. He reached in and withdrew a clawful of its contents to lay out on the desk: a crusty and hard mustard packet, an empty bullet casing the size of his thumb, a pair of armor buckles...

With a talon he arranged the buckles closer to the paper and stared long and hard. They came from Ida's breastplate. He never saw her armor again after her body had been recovered, but that's what they were from. They had to be. The pony guards didn't use buckles like that in their armor, and he found them in the dumpster right where it happened. They had to be hers. He didn't care what anybody else thought.

He scooped them up and held them in his palm. Was that where he'd pick up next? Maybe. It seemed that no matter how much he wrote or thought about her, it was never enough. You couldn't apologize enough for something like that. If he wrote about how he went looking for something to remember her by maybe then it would finally feel like enough.

His eyes flicked back to the mustard two hundred years past its sell-by date. It didn't seem right to just up and move on, leaving the fates of the ponies from the crater unspoken, but it was hard not to. Not many survived. It was expected. He tried to harden himself for it, but it didn't matter in the end. He couldn't even remember for sure who lived and didn't anymore. You could only take so much before your mind shut it out and refused to accept more pain.

A low moan sounded. “N... no... ooo...”

It didn't surprise him anymore. This happened some nights. Many nights even, so it didn't surprise him anymore. All the same, he clenched his claw to hold the fragments tight as he looked up to the black hallway through the door ahead. Would it be an easy night or a hard one this time?

“...no... no... do something!”

A hard night. “...I can't...”

One-by-one he placed the artifacts from Fillydelphia back in the box and sealed them away for another spell. Maybe it would be a week before he wrote next, or maybe a month.

But in any case, he now knew where to pick up his writing. He hadn't forgotten Ida or any of the ponies from the crater, but he had to focus on something else now.