Chapter 1: The flying pegasus.

I walked. This time, I was passing through a small village. The sign on the way in labelled it as ponyville.

I vaguelly remember something important happening here, before Death. It didn't really matter anymore though.

The town looked like it would have had character before. Muted colours of every shade in the spectrum, buildings of every shape and size surrounded me as I stood in the town centre. It would have been beautiful before the decay set in.

I imagined what the town could have been like. Fillies and colts running around, playing games, a market housing vibrant vegetables of every type, a couple guards standing watch over everything.

The longer I stood in the centre, the more I lost myself to imagination, trying to relive a better time. The longer I waited though, the darker things got. Eventually, the number of multicoloured ponies dwindled. The foals disappeared. The guards holding everyone prisoner in their own house.

Sighing, started walking again. I needed supplies for my journey to the next town, and didn't want to be out after dark.

The first house I stopped at was pretty nondescript. An off white picket fence, a mohogany wood cottage, and a little yellow dog house in the back. An idilic little spot for a family of earth ponies.

I imagined the house before. A little colt playing with a puppy while the parents watched. Reality was a cruel mistress though. None of the windows survived, leaving broken edges in the frames. The gate to the fence was off its hinges, lying inwards. What was probably once a window garden sat on its awning, cracked in half and overgrowing with weeds.

I walked to the door, knocking on it slowly. It was rude to just salts in to someone's house without knocking first. When no one answered, I opened the door, bracing myself for what was inside.

The inside of the house fared little better than the outside. Tables and chairs were overturned, carpets were molding, and the smell of rot was heavy everywhere.

The kitchen yielded little for me. Just a few family pictures featuring two earth ponies, and a young pegasus filly. The icebox had a few drawings taped to it, presumably by the filly.

The few drawings that were scattered in the centre of the at featured a crudely drawn orange pegasus on a scooter, a white unicorn filly being pulled on a cart with a yellow earth filly who had a red bow. There was also one in the upper left, right above the handle. Depicted on this was the same orange filly, surrounded on both sides by earth ponies, and a dog sat in front of the trio.

This house was going to be hard. The ones with children always were.

The only consumables I found were of the canned veriety, and the water was a black sludge. I already had enough food to last me a while, so I stacked it in the kitchen with a note, saying who I was, and the road I was taking when I left, just in case somepony else survived, and was following in my hoofsteps.

As I continued my search of the house, I ended up finding the filled room. Half decayed posters of Wonderbolts were attached to the walls, a rusted scooter was hanging from a wall mount, and rotted linens covered the bed.

I imagined the room before, baby blue wallpaper with bright posters glowing in the daylight, and a little orange filly sighting idly at a desk, drawing in a little book labeled diary.

The book was still sitting on the desk when I returned to the real world. The pages were a little worn, and some of them missing, but it was mostly intact.

My curiosity got the better of me as I looked at the open page of the book. The first thing I saw, was little wrinkled spots, where tears had marred the page. The next thing I noticed as a short sentence. "I'm leaving."

This gave me a little hope, that maybe, just maybe the filly had made it out. That she was still alive, and might find me one day.

I flipped to the previous page. The ink was smeared with tears on this one, making it hard to read. What I did read made me sad, but, I still had that silver of hope. "Dad joined mom today. Crawled into bed with her and cut his throat. I can't stay here."

The message on the page before that was different, but made me understand further why she decided to leave. "Applejack took Applebloom to Manehaten with her. After Sweetiebelle

died, that means its just me and my dad. And the guards. They get stricter every day. I haven't been to school in 2 weeks now. I wouldn't have even been able to see my friend with those big meanie headed guards at every door anyway.

I'm scared. I hear noises in the night. Weird moaning noises like somepony is in constant pain. Then the guards start yelling, and I hear them take out their swords... I'm glad the guards are here, even if they keep me from my friends."

One more page, and I would leave. "Mom is dead. Dad says she's just sick in bed, and I'm. It allowed to see her, but all of her pill bottles are gone. She probably took them all at once to get an 'eternal' sleep. She left like the coward I knew she was. I'm not sad for her."

The fillies words were negated by the tear marks on the page. One of them looked rather fresh, and then I realised it was my own. Startled, I left the room, my imagination scarred with a sad and lonely filly, sitting in the dark.

Any hope I had of one day meeting the filly was shattered when I entered the parents room. On the bed were two earth pony skeletons, and on the floor at the foot of the bed, was the tiny skeleton of a filly pegasus next to an overturned chair, scattered as if it hit the ground from a great height. When I looked up, I saw why. A rope was hung over the rafters, a small rotted noose covered in years old blood swaying in a breeze from the broken windows.

I ran.

When I got outside, my tear streaked face looked up to the sky in confusion; why did it always end up like this?