Yet another valuable household item met its untimely death against a wall as Moondancer flung it. How many things she had smashed by now, she had no idea. It was amazing that she still had things to throw.

Her house was a complete wreck. It had never been pretty, but at this point it might as well have been called a bomb-site, a place to be quarantined. All across the floor were various scattered items – torn up books, smashed crockery, smashed up vases, the flowers that used to be in them struggling not to wilt and die in the tiny little pool of water they had left, smashed CDs, even a pushed over couch.

And Moondancer hadn’t stopped. She stood in the middle of the wreck, tossing items with her levitation spell. She didn’t make any sounds, but it was obvious that on the inside she was screaming. The one thing she didn’t want to destroy was the dusty record player in the corner of her room, playing beautiful classical music, with happy and calming lyrics. She had turned it on to try and calm her down, but instead, it had ended up as the ‘background music’ for the tantrum she was throwing. In fact, it was oddly fitting. It was as though Moondancer and all her household items were doing a dance to the music – dancing, of course, before most of the items were completely destroyed. Moondancer heard no sound but the happy music as she destroyed everything she owned. It wasn’t fair – none of it was fair. Everything with Twilight had clearly given her depression, sure. It had made her a social recluse. A recluse in general. It had killed her and the life she used to know. For a long time, she had given up, until she finally realised what she was doing to her friends and herself. She couldn’t live the rest of her life like this. So she had decided to give things a go, to venture outside and try to meet up with her friends. And they had left her, abandoned her, to find Twilight Sparkle. Just as Twilight Sparkle herself had done. She laughed to herself. How contradictory everything was! Twilight Sparkle, who had gone to Ponyville to pursue and learn about friendship, had destroyed any chance of friendship that she had back in Canterlot. She probably didn’t even remember her old friends! Of course, her and all her friends were upset by this – they hated the fact that Twilight had just abandoned them like that. But without even knowing, in their pursuit to find a friend that didn’t even care about them anyway, they abandoned another friend. They did the same thing Twilight did. They did the same thing that they all agreed that they hated. They became the person that Moondancer hated.

And yet, didn’t Moondancer do the same thing? She had shut herself out from her friends, not giving them an inch, leaving them all in the dark. Isn’t that the same as abandoning them? Didn’t she do the same thing that Twilight had done, too? If she never came out of her house, then she might as well have been in Ponyville too, right? She might as well have been dead.

In the end, it all just seemed like a never-ending circle of contradiction and hypocrisy. So now, Moondancer had given up again. There was no point in trying. She was worthless. She hated everything and everything did not exclude herself. She levitated a mug of cider that had somehow survived her tantrum and took a long drink from it. She had more of that. She had much more. Moondancer drank more and more cider, trying to forget everything she was forced to remember, trying to wash away… everything.

She stopped, only for a few seconds, to look at one of her mugs, trying to focus on it. In slurred speech, she said to the mug:

  “Thanks, Sweet Apple Acres… I guess you guys, some random family, are helping me through this more than my own friends are…”

Without even moving it, she shattered the mug into a million pieces, exploding it from the inside out, while activating a barrier around her to stop any shards of glass.

Moondancer grabbed another full mug and kept on drinking.

Next Chapter: 10 - Reflections Estimated time remaining: 24 Minutes