What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.- Blackfoot Proverb.

"Mother?"

"Yes, my dear Joseph?"

"Tell me what it was like. Please?"

"What was like?"

"You know, before the Darkness, when everyone's ghost stayed with them."

The older woman nods, her braided black hair falling down over her shoulder. "Come Joseph, sit upon my lap." The young child called Joseph climbs into his mother's lap, the gentle rock of her chair in the late evening a soothing form of serenity to the young boy.

"Long ago, the Great Spirit formed from the mind of the Earth, and from the spirits of all things. The Great Spirit looked upon the barren land, and used its magic to let it flourish. It created grass and tree to coat the land in green, birds to fill the sky, fish to swim the waters. And the Great Spirit created Man and Beast to walk the land, to roam the hills and valleys in harmony with the world it had created for life."

"Then what happened?" young Joseph asked.

His mother took an inward sigh, gently stroking his long black hair as she told the ancient lore of her people. "Man began to build. He declared himself not to be one of the beasts of the wild, and began to conquer the wild. Our people were not like the others, we were not like the pale ones of old who sought only greed. We held our reverence for the Great Spirit, and chose to know her wilds and treasure her gift of life. And after the white men came to our home and took it away from us, they began to build anew. The world they created was a fantastical realm of metal birds that flew without wings, of steel creatures that reached out to the horizon in their infinite number. Entire mountains were no obstacle to these men of the mind. Man had learned to cloak his world in machinery."

She stops to wipe a tear from her eye, these were the tales her forefathers would tell to their children, so many years ago when the Darkness began. And with Joseph being the only child she knew of within so many hundreds of miles, his may be the last generation to know them. "And the Great Spirit looked down at Man, and she saw his suffering. For though Man built machines to end his need, they always left him in want. Our race should have shared when they hoarded, they hated where they could have understood. Man used his machines against one another, and destroyed much in the name of what he believed to be right. And the Great Spirit frowned on Man, and she rallied his old brethren, the Beasts, to smite Man and teach him humility."

Joseph rested his head on his mother's bosom. "But why would the Great Spirit hurt us? What did we do to deserve punishment?"

"Because, my dear Joseph, in our foolishness, Man forgot what it meant to be human."

For sixty years without fail, Joseph Blackwolf awoke in his bed just as the first lights of dawn touched the world from the eastern sky. Rising slowly from his bed, his weathered and tan body creaked and protested with every step. Walking slowly over to a cracked and tarnished mirror, he looked at his own face with deep reflection. His high cheekbones, those dark brown eyes, and long hair that runs down his leathery back, as white as winter's frost, all a part of a lightly wrinkled face that has seen many moons of life.

And....it is a face that brings him sorrow, for it is one that he has seen slowly decay over his decades of living here in this cabin, the cabin of his mother and her ancestors. His aged and spotted hands clasp a feather from his table, tying it into his silver hair, just as his ancestors had done for so many centuries.

With practiced effort, he slipped on a rough shirt, pulling on a pair of breeches. Finishing his ensemble with a wide brimmed hat, Joseph grabbed a hoe from beside his front door, stepping out onto the porch to begin his day.

Walking stiffly out to his shed, he collected the pittance of eggs that the old hens will begrudgingly give him. They're the only creatures he trusts anymore, especially since they are the only ones that don't talk back. His is a world his ancestors would find shocking and perverse, one where the Beasts have triumphed over their ancient brother, and taken their place as rulers over the world.

Three eggs from ten hens, enough for breakfast, but still a dwindling supply. Walking back to his cabin, he thought about maybe getting a rooster and raising a new batch of chicks, but that would mean interacting with them.

He looked down the winding trail that lead down into the valley below, and down there in the center of that valley lay a bustling village of ponies. Even from this distance, his sharp eyes can see the bright and joyous color that they gaily decorate their homes with. Such weak creatures with few good points, but he still had to get things from them for his own survival.

Setting his eggs on the porch, he turned to his garden, a large swath of green cut from the forestland, with stalks of corn as tall as a man and gourds covered in their knobbly pimples. Rows of beans lay between each row of corn, just as his ancestors had planted their crops.

"Just as my ancestors..." Joseph said in a murmur.

His ancestors called themselves The People, but others knew them as Comanche, a bastard word meaning 'bitter enemy'. His great grandfather had been the patron of the Blackwolf clan of the Comanche Nation. It was said by Joseph's ancestors that it was their history that ultimately spared them from the Darkness that was the Chaos Plague. Hundreds of years ago, the white men had forced them from their lands and onto isolated reservations where no one else would live. And when the Great War, known by the ponies as the War of the Fallen Race, came to usurp the power of Men, the isolation of the Comanche was what saved them from the ravages of the War and the evil of the Chaos Plague.

They stayed hidden, calling on the skills of their forefathers to survive where others would fail. And when the Chaos Plague came to their homes, they showed no mercy to those called the Lost, the psychotic monsters that men had devolved into once touched by the Plague.

Ripping a ripe ear of corn from the stalk, he placed it into his pouch, some of the red and yellow kernels falling to the ground for his hens. The beans would not be ready for another few weeks, but some of the gourds and squashes were ripe enough to pluck and begin curing.

Retrieving a large basket, he plucked only the ripest gourds for harvest and trade. And though he considered the ponies in the valley below to be true comanche to him, he still needed the things they provided. And though they could grow their own rather easily, the ponies in the valley below still traded for his crops.

Walking to his porch and setting his basket of squashes down, he went inside and prepared for his ritual. Frying the eggs and eating them slowly, he brewed two cups of coffee and went to his porch. Taking a seat in the chair his mother had sat in so many years before, he waited.

The steam from his two cups of coffee wafted into the air, the first subtle hints of the cool autumn slowly sapping the heat. And though he loved his morning coffee, he never drank from either cup on the small table on his porch. Staring at the trailhead leading to his cabin, he watched and he waited.

The hours crept by, the sun rising up the horizon and bathing the land in a gentle warmth. Joseph stared with intent at that trail, hoping today would finally be the day after sixty years of solitude.

And when the sunlight grew warm, and the coffee became tepid, he would dump both cups out. Going inside, he would prepare two glasses of whiskey, setting them on the table and placing himself back into his rocking chair, waiting and watching the trailhead. Sometimes he would pass the time by thinking of what he would say, 'Hello! Won't you have a drink?', 'You look weary from your travels, come and rest here, welcome stranger.'

Wishful thinking, to think every day that it might be the day when someone who was not a pony would walk up that trail. Not many would think of Joseph as an optimist, but he stayed true to his beliefs. The ancient books of humanity had said that there were once billions of humans, a number that Joseph couldn't even comprehend in size. And the Darkness had been defeated fifty years ago, the ponies in the town below had even celebrated for a solid week. And it was this logic that he held onto, and if this world was as vast as the old books said it was, then there had to be other people who had survived like him. There had to be, and they had to be searching the world for others like him.

He couldn't be the only one left.