This story was written as a commission for Napalm Goat, based on a character of his from the "Stole My Heart at Cornerstone" FOE Tabletop PnP game (the same one Flintlock and Night Sky from the previous stories were from.)

This one is a little special though. I asked Napalm what he wanted stylistically, expecting him to talk about tone, or natural, or urban, or action heavy.

Instead he asked if I could write in an Impressionist style.

Impressionistic writing is a style that relies on abstract associations, the subjective point of view of the characters, and the rendering of sensory details to relay the “impression” of a person or event. The impressionistic style of writing leaves the reader to determine the author’s ultimate meaning.

Well. Okay then.

So after some time of planning, I learned what I could about Impressionism. And thus I present now the first piece I've ever written that is influenced by that style of literature. It's been a wonderful challenge to put me out of my comfort zone to have to keep learning new things. I hope that people enjoy it, given it's certainly a very different way to construct a story's content!

Please note that I have updated this story to a 'Mature' rating, due to the content within this one. Being FOE, this seemed inevitable eventually, but I wanted to give you all a heads up.

The wriggling, soft bodied radhog snuffled through the freezing snow to find the dull, coarse soils. Amidst the towering, deathly quiet ruins, its nose was sending up cloudy, obscuring little wisps of irritating grey dust in its hasty efforts to rustle up something to eat. It was alone in a cascade of white and grey, half hidden by its own frantic efforts and gentle whirls of snow caressing the fractured city.

Everything about it was gentle and hazy. Almost blurred. But the hard, imposingly straight and clear lines of the gun sights aligned over it were rigid and brimming with purpose to his eye.

At a distance far enough that its irritating squeals were nothing but small ebs in the chilling wind, he impassively waited. Only waited. Still, like a moment caught in time, the snowflakes smearing out of focus across his vision between him and his succulent, warm prey amidst the ice.

And so he waited. Waited for one more moment. The moment when fire would leap into the cold, and light the weathered chill with anger and intent.

And so he waited. Waited, and observed every minute detail in his sights. From prey, to cold, and to what lay beyond: a hopeful new life.

Rainbows and flares of light cast rays from the mists behind the hog. They pierced the frozen wastes like lances thrown by the colossal pony standing atop the island. Heat radiated from its base, and died before it could reach over the dark waters to where he and the hog were. Those at its base were warming their hearths, so he had heard in his broken understanding of their skipping, difficult language; raising trees as coarse and firm as the soil, and hanging shining colours to cast out the winter’s emptiness, both its white chill and black darkness.

He could watch it all at once. One circular vista showing the end point of his whole world.

His sights jittered, the rifle’s cold metal shaking in his grasp as the hard floor lurched an inch below his laid down body. He calmly reset it to watch the lonely prey even as he heard the soft tread of a curious companion make her way into the room he had taken for his den.

“Hmf! Your fire’s gone out! I told you to keep it going...urgh…” Her whipping tone struck his nerves like a warm knife, and he heard her thick clothing rustle and crease as she set to relighting it. “I know you’ve never experienced a winter here before, Ahrim. The least you could do is listen to me.”

He waited, sights lined on his prey, and gently ushered his reply, his voice like a rifle jamming, rechambering, and trying again. “You told...me. It scared them to...see rifle.”

The reply arced up to the roof, and he heard her voice accelerate, running wild to the point he had to race to keep up with her meaning. “Because you pointing it toward them every day IS scaring them. They have night-vision, they can see you even without this fire being lit.”

He didn’t understand the term she’d used. “See I?”

“Uh...glasses that see through the dark.”

“Glasi za usiku?”

He felt her stare burrow into his back, and fought off a traitorous grin at putting her in the same position she had put him in. Seconds later, warmth followed, a glow that crept into the lower edges of his sights as the pop of flame made his ear twitch. His shivering hindlegs felt the blood run wild and tingle as feeling returned to him.

“If they are scared. Tell them, Nebula. Not at them. I need to hungry.”

She scoffed at his choice of words. “Eat. You mean you need to eat.”

“Yes.”

Nebula dropped like a sack of rocks beside him, and he felt her itchy scarf rest on his spine as she leaned over to stare at the still landscape he refused to leave.

“Why haven’t you shot it yet? It’s right there.”

“Waiting for the right time.”

She settled back, a curious presence that didn’t exist in the pale world ahead, even if she had been born of the colour at the centre of it all. He knew that. But he didn’t know why she left it, and brought her vibrancy away into the dead part of that same world. But as he waited, he heard her exhale.

“Ahrim...they’re not letting you in. We’ve tried twice already, and you can’t wait out here forever. You’ll be frozen when the storms hit, fire or no fire. Why here?”

“Only place that talks.” He curtly replied, and shifted his body on the uncomfortably rough boards of the room’s floor, following the nervous prey as it circled in place. He heard her frustrating curiosity through the sound of a pout, and sighed, “And...it is warm and safe in there.”

“That isn’t an answer. There’s other places. Other villages to at least get a proper roof. What is it about us that’s got you so determined?”

“Reached the end. End of...life?” He asked, and got only dead silence as reply. “Go no further, or nothing of me left?”

He felt rather than saw her shake her head, her soft mane bouncing around her smooth shoulders. “I don’t get how you think, Ahrim. But I suppose that’s why I come out to your little den. Spend long enough on an island in the river, soon enough you’ve talked about everything to everyone. Least I’ve got you to come ponder over about just what you mean when you talk in weird strokes like that.”

He didn’t shake his head. “You are...strange, Nebula?”

Nebula shrieked in laughter. “Maybe. But by now I think you owe me an explanation. I’ve kept you company out here, and asked my people on your behalf, so why don’t you tell me something to pay it back? Why is this your ‘end’?”

He paused, eyes fixed past the tempting hog, focused on the unreachable kaleidoscope exploding at the centre of his sights. Blurry snow blew away from it, smearing over the glass he stared through, giving every hard edge a soft, dream-like touch.

A searing yellow blaze beat upon the arid lands from an ochre sky, turning it firm and scathing with dryness, and yet sticky and unwelcome with blotchy sweat to all within it. Ghostly, enormous shapes surrounded him; they were hazy in the heat and erupted up from the plains with their looming plateaus and flat peaks. Like sentinels, they stared down at him. Accusing. He knew each of them by name.

They had once been familiar. Homely. Safe. No longer.

His hooves softly split the dark cracks in the fractured patterns of the ground between them, sinking an inch into the burning earth to turn up a black mark. Every step added a new and stark imprint to the endless plains. Every step a new mark on the untouched wild, drawing a reluctant line away from its origin.

He wished it was not the case, but it was, and he felt the shame of having to stain the landscape with his route.

The green of life lay behind, and it still dotted about him, but it was fading. With every hour, the splotchy patches grew more lonely, until he had lost sight of them. At least without turning his head, something he did not dare to do. And so he stared ahead to a still world. His browned clothing sucked on to his body from dire sweat. His mane wilted like a flower. His rifle dragged him to the earth on its sling. Dragged him forward and down. Forward, away from his shame. Down, away from life.

His grandmother, respected by the tribes, had in her foresight seen to him, providing him what comforts he could carry and setting him on his way. The better option to the alternatives, she had said and insisted it upon him, before walking him to the edges of their life to watch him fade into the choking sandstorms. She would guide him, she had said, and told him to head toward the sun’s fire as it set. She would watch him from afar as only she could. Yet the promise felt hollow, and filled with a crushing fragility that it would never be what it once was again. It couldn’t be.

He did not know where this path ended. The valleys had none that he knew for sure. It all rolled from the mud of wavering heat on the horizon, melting together every evening with the dying sun’s haze. Thus, every night, he always turned himself toward the snaking blood in the sand, much as he sought to run from it behind him. The sunsets were a reminder, and somehow he felt like that was his true punishment.

Hoisting his rifle on its strap, holding the splendidly patterned carvings of siblings on its stock close, he trod on toward the end, aware there lay nothing but further descent from the life he’d known.

“What did you even do to be exiled like that anyhow?”

He couldn’t reply. Instead, he let his hoof touch on his rifle’s new trigger, and rested his foreleg over the bland, strong wood that he’d repaired the stock with. The clever prey was behind a pipe jutting out the ground. Left or right? He mused on the answer, which direction might it go?

“Like, seriously. How far away even was that? To make you go this far? Not even to another place you recognised?”

Ahrim did not even move his mouth. He heard her annoyingly tapping the brickwork of the ruined upper floor as she waited.

“Speak to me, c’mon. What’s the point in that nonsense stoicism down here now anyway? Not like anyone here knows you to judge.”

Her last attempt would not succeed. His focus was on the blocking pipe.

Nebula sighed in defeat at the silence, and he heard her get up to pace back around the fire.

“Right then, different question. How did you end up coming here then anyway? You could have picked any direction from the frontier, but you chose this one.”

His sight wavering left to right, Ahrim saw the clouds of the hog’s nuzzling on the ground drifting to one side, and settled on it. “Followed the signs she left me.”

“Signs? You mean there’s a road to follow between your home and here?”

Focusing on one side now, sights ready, he waited for the hog to emerge. Briefly, he allowed himself a teasing smirk as he answered.

“Maybe not for us.”

He heard the confused tilt of her head through the ruffle of her thick clothing. “Excuse me?”

His legs exploded through the wet grass, shattering the milky dew from the stiff blades. Rifle banging its broken bolt painfully against his chest on its sling, he sprinted for his life through the sickly green. Behind him, a flurry of talons and death tore over the rotten, mossy log he’d vaulted. His legs were heavy and soaked, tired and stiff from weeks of wandering, but he forced what was left of his life into them to push on.

Snarling crept up his spine as he heard his prey-turned-predator voice its eagerness to catch him. Ramming through olive grass taller than he was, he didn’t even dare try to weave or lose it. The beast could out-turn him, out-run him, smell him, find him. And so he drove on, the dark foliage splashing his eyes and turning his flight into a blurry mess of motion and line toward what he knew by memory.

And yet his forelegs found nothing on their next gallop but clean air. The ditch came up out of nowhere, closer than he’d thought it might be, and he went down. Head over hooves, he tumbled down the steep and muddy embankment, hitting stones and fallen branches on the way. Swearing aloud, he heard something crack terribly near his body before the shattering impact of the river bed’s rocks came up to meet him. His ribs seared, and his vision whirled in panic and pain as algae coated water stuck to his face and stained hide. Up above, rows of glinting teeth at the centre of a calico head, stained viridian from the mushy vegetation, stared down. It raced to the side, back into the grass to find a way down to him. It was desperate. It had to have been to chase this openly.

He had moments to live.

Hooves splashed as he rounded his mud-splotched body up, feeling the river’s shallow water curling around the cuts on his fetlocks. There was none of the brilliant sapphire, lush emerald outcrops, or lavish ochre he’d known at home here. Only messy, diseased greens in alliance with darkness. A shadow of the world he knew, one that sought to hurt him and make him fight for every day just to avoid horror. Yet every day, win or lose, it took something from him and ate away another sliver of his life. And as he stood, he felt the heartbreaking two halves of his rifle’s stock split from the fall as today’s toll.

Limping, he splashed forward, heading uphill in the opposite direction to where the hunter had gone. Sharp, slippery rocks tripped his hooves, making them twist and skitter as he sought for some way back up to the other side. Behind him came a roar of thrashed water, and he knew he was no longer alone down here.

He ran, pushing his body to keep moving that little while longer. Rounding the corner of the stream, he spotted a fallen tree and leapt onto its unsettlingly sticky sap-coated wood. He heard his pursuer rush up behind him, and leapt just as it rounded the corner, its forelegs slashing into the tree. Mossy wood crumbled like rotten flesh below it, and Ahrim fell against the edge of the stream. Hating how demeaning it must have looked, he frantically kicked his hindlegs to scramble up, feeling a terrifying rush of air below them as the wicked claws swept close. Stumbling, he got his bearings from the markings he’d left on trees to guide him, and raced forward before it could get out of the stream.

On and on, the trees, grass, and slimy vegetation coiled and stroked over his body as he pushed and forced his way through, before he finally leapt again, and collapsed against the bark of a tree before his limbs betrayed him...and died.

He could go no further. Caught in the hazy light, wheezing in the sticky air, he stared at the bushes, watching them shift and move. Stroking sensually back and forth, deceptive in their soft motions, they hid death.

And death came.

Bursting from the trees, it came in a flurry of needle-like teeth, terrifying barb-like claws, and coiled muscles. His heart turned to ice as he locked his gaze with the beast’s emerald eyes. On it came toward its run-down prey, seeing him helpless.

Until suddenly, it fell. The ground collapsed, his last desperate defence around his camp coming through in his time of need. It disappeared, and he regretted to hear the unbecoming whine of the prideful beast as it found the end he had laid down for it. Breathing hard, Ahrim advanced and looked down into the pit.

The beast had sought to slay him, but he didn’t begrudge it. He had, after all, attempted the same. Each wanted to survive out here in this place between life and death. Sliding down, he edged around the stained red points, and quickly knelt beside its front, not lingering.

A respectful hoof on its trapped head, he upturned his knife with an accustomed toss and knew for one more day that he would hold on.

Hours later, the light once again bled away. The cover of the trees above, half dead and half diseased, were like little dots of black-green to deny him the sky and the stars to navigate by. Not that it would have helped, for as he’d travelled, he had witnessed the clouds become unending; they choked the land in dark haze. Sickness was in the air here. He could smell it. Taste it. This was not a bountiful forest of verdant life. This was a broken land on its way to a quiet end.

His fire was dying and, with regretful effort, he stirred it to life once again. The embers were lost in the thick shadow that wafted about him, the jade flames from melting copper dripping through his bullet mould offering little change in the hue about his camp from the surroundings. Even the smell of his prize was foul and empty; nothing like home. He hated these moments. These hazy, monotone hours when he had to sit and bear it. They were the ones that assailed him most.

To fight it, he took on small fights. Ones to stir him as much as the fire. Tonight that was the wearisome carving of a new stock by hoof. Hours would pass; the shadows, clouds, and leaves coiling about his small spark in their sickly virescence. They were fighting with one another. For space. For height. For dominance, like all things trapped in this directionless mire. It held all he needed to remain alive, and yet being here seemed to draw that very life out of him to keep up. The beast had died because he had needed to live, but to live, he should not be here.

That was it, he rationalised. That was what this place was: a void of empty purpose, lush and alive by definition only. What was living if only surviving?

Dropping his half carved stock down, placing the sharpened thigh bone he’d been using to carve it by its side, he stared out across the clammy woodlands. Today, he had gone west, and almost died. Tomorrow, he might go south. The murky river through here was flowing north-east. Downhill. It would be easier on the way back then.

Behind him, his fire flickered dangerously, leaping to one side and then pulling into another, as the winds changed and froze his body. He blinked, confused. Something stood out to him, although he could not garner what. Still as the night, he leaned on the tree and opened his eyes to everything he could witness.

Out there in the dark, he could see trees swaying. Swaying to the north-east.

Shrieking in the air, a swarm of birds suddenly rounded on itself. They flocked toward the north, then east, their cawing ripping the night’s peace apart.

Nothing. It was nothing. But Ahrim knew better that nothing was only a canvas for one moment to take and use. His eyes searched, and something stirring within him until it overflowed with curiosity and he began trotting away from his fire. He took up his rifle’s sights, and stared through them. Across the other side of the sodden undergrowth, he had seen motions. For a moment, he thought it a beast, but the tap of hooves on wood lightly touched his ears. He crouched, and watched as he saw the forms emerge. Hunched, shuffling unsteadily, he recognised the fallen ones immediately. They moved with the wind, four of them winding their rotted bodies through the forest. They were not uncommon, but he traced their path to spy the broken branches and trodden grass. It was ramrod straight in one direction.

Turning to the north-east, focused with only a circle to see through, he could at last see the fine details of the world the way he preferred. Above their heads, from where their presence had driven the birds on their unending march, he perceived something. Nothing solid, but a change.

There were shifts in the hue of this limbo. On the horizon the darkness was lighter. The smallest perception of something polluting the darkness from beyond the ridge of the world, so imperceptible that he would never have seen it had he had not stopped to appreciate.

He snapped the sights down, and quietly returned to his work on the stock. First that, then the bolt. Yet now he stared north-east as he did so. In his mind, his plans had changed. Now he knew this to not be a pit, but perhaps a canyon.

And gently, he spoke to the providence that had sent the dead to find the dying his way.

“Asante, bibi…”

Nebula idly knocked two pieces of firewood together. She was lounged beside him, listening intently.

“Y’know, I’m gonna’ assume you mistranslated that part about why you decided to take that direction. You saw corpses and followed them...sure, makes sense.”

Ahrim’s crosshairs found the hog again, resting to the right of it as the stinging winds ripped the snow to the left. His sights jumped, the laugh in his breast kicking him unexpectedly. “It is as I...say?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Good.”

Nebula pouted, “No, I was being sarc-urgh, do you do that on purpose now? I can see the books back there. I know you’re learning enough to know what I meant.”

His mouth curled upward like a straining bow. “Maybe.”

“Ha. Ha.” She deadpanned, toying with the sling of his rifle. It made his sights waver slightly, and he narrowed his eyes. Shuffling on the stiff boards, he resettled the rifle, the brass bottom he’d replaced on the grip coming down with a dull tap. For a moment he lingered, watching the snow blow around the rainbow of colours in Nebula’s home down there. The lights were flickering now. Some on, some off, like sparkles bringing vibrancy into the night. He saw ponies blissfully exchanging poorly wrapped gifts, and lingered, watching two similarly coloured foals rocketing off their hooves together at the act.

After a moment, he weakened in his resolve to stay silent, and continued.

“We learned to respect the other place. To respect family who...hmm-walk it. Learn to see it.”

Nebula turned over, lying on her belly beside him. He felt her cool wave of a mane warm his shoulder as it snapped over him in the wind. “Ghosts? Next thing you’ll be telling me that you can see a pony’s aura too at this rate.”

“Maybe I can.” He shot back, even as he lined his real shot up.

“Oh, really?” She chuckled.

“Really.”

“So what’s mine show about me then? Let me guess: Cleverness, passion and...confidence, right?”

“Desperation.”

Her hoof punched into the side of his ribs, and he huffed as his crosshairs flew off target. The hog’s image whirled ahead of him, sending his sights upward to focus on the city of light atop the water. He grunted, and felt the numb muscles in his face smirk.

“For what, huh?” She snapped playfully, her words easing over him, as warm as her mane had been. “You saying I’m needy? Or you think that highly of yourself?”

His grin was impossible to control, he couldn’t get rid of it. “Say...ing, you come a long cold way for company.”

“Smartass.” She poked at him. “Give you a few books in pony language and suddenly you wanna’ be mister wisecracking.”

For the first time since she had arrived, Ahrim gingerly took his eyes away from the rifle. The time was not right. He could afford to wait. Sitting up, he left the hunting tool where it was, the duller metal of its new barrel fading into the grey of the world outside the city. Nebula lay beside it on her side, a welcoming grin on her face. Her ocean mane curled about her cool eyes, the eyesore of a winter jacket she wore obscuring her pale coat to make her stand out in the empty world. She came from a world of colour. She didn’t belong out here. He wiped his goggles to see her better, but still the edges of her body were hazy, like a warm and radiant aura.

She leaned her head on a hoof, resting on his frosty blanket. “And here I thought I was just being a good exemplary pony coming to check on you. And all I get for it is sass.”

Ahrim raised an eyebrow behind his blurry, stained goggles. “You are the one with the aura, Nebula. It is not...I to say how it say about you. I do not know words to convey.”

Nebula chuckled, turning away and leaning over the broken wall to look at her vibrant, unreachable home in the distance. “So if you don’t know the pony words to describe me from it, what are they in your language then, huh?”

He paused, and glanced down briefly as she faced away from him. “Nimevutiwa na viuno vyako.”

She glanced over at him, eyes piercing through the snowy veil. There was a reassuring curve on her face. “Sounds lovely.”

“It is an old saying of wisdom.”

She gave him an interrogating look, then shook her head, spraying strands of snow off of her mane. She gently laughed. The sound shattered the numbness of his den, and the snow pulled away, the winds changing as he dropped down by the fire opposite her. Nebula tossed a can of food, and it slammed reassuringly into his chest, dropping into his grateful hooves.

“Quiet, stoic look but with exotic fancy words to tell us mares. You must have had fun so far with that attitude.”

Tossing his knife up, catching it inverted, he pierced the metal to work away at it.

“It was a surprise.”

Azure liquid wastefully sloshed across a slick cerulian top after the impact. The stained shot-glass had endured, but curaçao spilled, and nerve-wrackingly sharp talons released it to punch his shoulder.

“There! Get that blue fire in you! You look like you need it!”

The griffoness spoke painfully, her every word echoing around his skull. Ahrim peered up to her face, his goggles discarded around his neck.

“I do not lack...heat.” He pursed the words out, but they felt like churning waves in his mouth. Clumsy, uncertain, held up only by his eyes staring hard behind them.

Kalda, as he’d overheard her name to be, laughed and punched him again. “Just what every hard-stallion claims about their life by their boats! Just drink it you idiot, you moping into your glass is giving me a migraine half the room away!”

Ahrim had no idea what she had just said. But as her navy feathers rustled impatiently, and she prodded the glass again, he settled on a clear understanding. With a swift motion, he threw back his head, and felt the bitter liquid sear down his throat. Ocean sweetness followed, and he slammed the glass down hard with a gasp. He had tried harder, but the crystal blue had caught him off guard, having been expecting a smoother flow from it.

Seconds later, he was almost thrown forward over the bar by a talon slapping hard into his back. The motion, combined with the sway of the ferry rocking on the river, made him choke and cough hard.

“Too much for you? Maybe we oughta get you one toned down, a cocktail? A Swimming Pool maybe?” She teased, and laughed. Several other patrons joined her, mostly other dangerous sorts who had loudly come in with her. Feeling their judging gaze, seeing some as little more than dark silhouettes in front of the winding indigo neon forming complex runic patterns on every side, he made sure to shake his head and fix her in place with a confident stare.

“Too distract.”

“On what, huh?” She crossed her ‘arms’, sitting back on the stool; wings intimidating, like a swell rearing up, ready to crash.

Ahrim had witnessed the waterways for weeks now, searching for an end to the sloppy midnight haze that coated this new land on his descent. He was already bruised black, purple and blue. His hooves were staggered, and his back weary. He had little reserves of subtle care left.

“On puzzle.”

Her dangerous beak turned upward, leaning her head on a claw and toying with a cobalt medallion about her neck. Every griffon here wore one. “A puzzle huh? Which one?”

He paused. He could feel their stares, and their silence, like the breath between waves on this new world’s shorefront. He let her wait, as he sipped his own drink, the liquid soothing the liquor's burn.

“The one where-” He muddled for the next word. “-I...curious, why griffon with many options want me...drank.”

There was a momentary silence, before the griffons exploded into hysterics at him talking back to their comrade. She raised her eyebrows, and even if he didn’t catch all her words, he heard her talk far more quickly than she intended.

“Cheeky bastard! What are you trying to say?” She glowered, raised up like frothing edge.

He held his ground, and he saw that alone surprised them. His voice rode the threatening swell. “I not know. You are one that...pro...claim drink to me over others. Exotic tastes?”

And then, the final touch, he smirked.

She stared at him, eyes wide as wary mirth bubbled up from the sea of dark shapes around them. Then, in a blurred motion, she surged forward.

And grabbed the bottle.

“I like this one!” She heralded, and the cheers from her squad split through Ahrim’s head worse than ever before, and yet it drew him in. To not care, to not worry. To join this world in its raucous end of life and just indulge in the still moment. He witnessed her pouring another of the sapphire drinks for him, and had it shoved into his hooves. He chuckled, feeling little guilt, and downed it with absolute willing.

Digging in his pack, he drew out a dark navy bottle, weathered and scratched with a milky, frothy substance within that left dots of bubbles staggering its surface. He saw her eyes directed at it, and he knew he had caught her like prey in a trap with the unknown drink.

“If that is what you seek…” He winked, letting his accent crash on the new shore about him, and let the arak fall in a thin streak amidst his cigarette smoke into shot glasses for them both.

She took it up and sniffed it, before scoffing. “I don’t even know if you’re playing it all up for me, you barcode bastard...but I’m into it.” The griffon grabbed the drink and necked it, before her ocean-blue and iron-built body satisfyingly squirmed before him. She coughed violently. “What is this shit?”

Ahrim just sipped his, the hurtful nostalgia mixing with the relief of the familiar, and raised an eyebrow. “A drink to not be taken alone in the evening.”

“It takes like piss.” She snorted, looking eye to eye.

“Another?”

“Hell yes.”

Ahrim crashed onto the bed, the dark tidal wave that was Kalda coming down onto him in the murky midnight blue of the moon’s obscured glow in the porthole. His vision was hazy, both from the scouring drink and the satisfying grip of the powerful creature he had tustled and grappled with through the door.

Bigger than him. Taller. Stronger. Like the beasts he had tracked before. He felt underwater, the world muffled and quiet, feeling more than seeing as her weight landed atop him. Lips and beak clumsily scrounged the moment for total escape. His hooves wandered, discovered, and indulged. For a moment he had no idea, was he predator or prey?

And a moment later, he realised he did not care. Or was it that it no longer mattered?

In passionate wordlessness, he felt the garbs he had worn all this way torn from him, and soon his cunning saw him return the favour with eager, wanting tugs. His world was soft, cramped, warm blue, appealing to so much of him. Twisting, feeling her delightful squirm to resist, he trapped her below him, and heard her too-casual joke about his kind and their tricks. His hunting grin twisted into a strained grimace as the piercings tip of her claws sank in, and somehow the pain only drove him to partake further.

To forget it all and let go off the edge.

Feeling her sweltering, hot breath from within the livid aquamarine tips of feathers about her face, her beak hidden from all but his own feverish mouth, he whispered an uncaring promise of raw sensuality, and heard her interested purr. In a moment, tease turned to need, and need turned to impatience. The escapism of a wanting desire took over. Pointless control was forgotten, and he experienced her aggressive snarls as much as her whimpered gasps. She raked his back in wanton lust, and he fought to stay afloat in the furious sea of passion as they let it all go and partook in one other, alone in their moment. Time forgotten.

Only after all had faded to a soft and frozen relief were things quiet. In the still evening, his chest heavy with effort and the melted, sleeping shape of a griffoness, Ahrim stared upwards. Satisfied, feeling more alive than he had in months, and yet painfully exhausted. Wild. Raw. More than he’d ever allowed himself under the presence of home.

The heady grin on his face had caught him off guard, and left him wondering what had changed. Inhibitions faded, he tried reflecting, but the effort was too much. All it left him wondering was the same as it had always been. Where now?

Out the window, far into the lazy night, he saw shimmering lights in the distance of the river. A monstrous pony rose above it, casting more light into the sky than any he had known, lighting the snowflakes beginning to fall from behind in a silent world.

Hearing the amusing growl of the griffon as he sought to get up and detach from her, he wisely remained still, lest he become prey. Instead, he stared at the lights. Lights had brought him this far to follow.

It was still something. And that was all he needed right now.

Nebula accusingly coughed and held him in place with a pointed hoof, “Hey, you told me those scratches on your back came from a savage beast!”

Ahrim shrugged, the edges of his mouth turning up. “I did not lie.”

The pony before him gave a warm roll of her eyes, and she disturbed his fire with a stick idly. “Something about that confuses me though...sounds like you had fun. Long journey, a warm bed, and an intense night to share with someone. So, where’s the problem?”

He wearily shifted, crawling back to his rifle to reassume his uncomfortable, patient watch. “Problem, Nebula?”

“Yeah. Problem.” She kept her intrigue by the fire, not coming closer to him. “You sounded like something about it threw you off. Wilder than you expected? Not into it?”

He blinked, wiping the front of the sights. The carved glass from a second scope he’d fashioned to replace this one’s broken front smeared. The hog was but a brown dot on a white canvas now, the snow crunching upon the ground. Red. Green. Blue. It all shone from behind it. Shapes were gone, and he was left with but an idea of what was truly there now, guided by form and colour.

“It was fun.” He steeled his defences.

“And there’s nothing wrong with that, we both know that. So why do you seem weirded out by it?” She pierced deep.

Ahrim sighed, defeated. “Was...impulsive. I care less before speaking. How you say...tease? Joke? Very decided. Like hunting. More than home. Surprised me.”

Nebula left him impatient as she thought that - for him - long explanation over. Eventually, her hoof melted the ice from his shoulder.

“Y’know...maybe being down here isn’t just you losing who you thought you were.” Her words settled gently on his mind. “Maybe out here? Away from whatever happened? You’re just more free to be who you really are. Do what you feel like. Nothing wrong with being impulsive for fun or humour sometimes. You’re clearly in control of it.”

He wanted to turn. He needed to see her face as she spoke. Met with nothing but the shaded, distant rainbow before him amongst the empty black and white. There was reassurance behind him and he suddenly felt like he needed it. Because she was right. His style of humour. His willingness to indulge. His desires. They were not different from before, just here they felt more open. There was more space for them to paint upon his life now that the world was new around him again.

They were his.

Yet, even as realisation began dawning over the dark winter’s night, and he was laying the strokes on how to thank and tease her at the same time to hunt a smile, his eye was pulled away.

Through the staggered lines of snow, a darker hue stalked. Brushing aside the cold white, melting into the black, he saw it prowl into his world through the sights. A long streak of dangerous alablaster began to emerge, and Ahrim hushed Nebula’s jubilant talk of their own bantering humour. He saw it approach the prey. The hog. As it approached, the pig squealed and ran, but it was locked in place, part of this painting, by the chain he had set it to the ground with.

And now, his true prey had emerged.

Unable to see its detail in the thick, slow storm between them, he knew by its motion. Gently, he turned in place, his crosshairs penetrating the drift to judge the distance. His rifle had been broken, repaired, damaged, fixed, fractured, rebound, but it was still his rifle that he had prowled the long, warm plains with, and he knew how it would pull. About its kick to the right, and needing to always aim a little lower than common sense would imprint on a hunter. He had sought to keep that spirit even as he had felt it change in his hooves, mile by mile.

All for these moments, when he could forget all the trials, and fall back into what he knew.

He caught the arcing silver of the hog’s chain in the wind, and turned to the side, aiming left of the grey streak’s path, almost resting on the hog itself. It wouldn’t attack yet. Its own prey was squealing and pulling. It would wait till the target was exhausted. They always did. He had time.

Time to fight the storm. Time to feel every angle. Every blow of the wind. Every slippery edge of the stone his barrel rested on. Every blink to wet his focused eye.

It was worse than the storms on the plains, and he had nothing but shapes to aim at. Nothing was clear in the city. A hazy rectangle of grey opened. It was close to its own moment to strike.

But with a small adjustment, Ahrim was closer.

He heard Nebula’s cry penetrate the night as his rifle pistoned his bruised shoulder, and its purple flare lit the white flakes around them. Slow. Expanding. A thrilling sting penetrating into him through his body as the shine grew and grew from the barrel.

The chemical round’s unique report reflected for a hundred meters, dousing the empty world in magenta fury, its crack running back and forth between them and Nebula’s home. Spotlights from the colourful city flooded out to cast over him, and he saw the glint of sights aiming toward him, piercing the drifting cloud of his rifle’s smoke. Calm, he released the trigger, having startled the world into activity.

And yet there, before him, his target came into view with its grey body turning and rising up.

It was not dead.

He felt a bubbling, oozing fear grip his stomach. The camouflaging sludge fell from its furred body, and he saw its venomous tail whip out, dripping from the tip, and its mauve wings snap to either side. Coursing, corrupted veins on the side of its shoulder around the hole swelled up and bruised, but it's piercing eyes stared at him.

Not the head. He’d missed.

Something had gone wrong.

“Bliksem…” He muttered, seeing the hybrid terror turn, its grey camouflage falling from its strong, regal, rosey body, and it stood to its full height.

And then, it leapt, surging through the whirling purple cloud that had erupted from the impact on its body before it even had time to dissipate. It moved so fast, its huge body drawing back and rocketing off with a snap of leathery wings.

He had only seconds to react, as its heavy, monstrous shape assaulted the air before it to reach him. He couldn’t believe its speed over the couple hundred meters between them.

“What is th-” Nebula yelped as Ahrim grabbed the soft mare, hurling her through a hole in the floor into what was supposed to be his own hiding spot. Dropping a cupboard on top of the gap, ignoring her protests, he had barely enough time to leap to the side as the barbed tail fired past him through the window, its stinger impacting and splashing its venom over the burgundy carpet and shattering stained glass from the broken mirror. Eyes wide, he saw it flail into the still boiling vessel he used for making the paralyzing rounds, the last of the fire-scorpion venom he’d brought with him from home bubbling within.

It toppled, and he saw it heading into the fire.

Its face crashed into the window frame, forcing through, teeth gnashing and chomping at the wiry hunter’s hindlegs as he dropped backward. Scrambling, leaping the noxious mixture creeping toward the fires, he fled into the next room of the ruined tenement, and dove for cover behind a once polished, now marred chest of drawers.

Behind him, the rich, combustible fluid met the embers, and ignited.

In a crump and a roar, the violet explosion blew the flimsy corrugated roof off his den. Ahrim felt his throat grasp and his skin turn to ice as the snow mixed with the hideous substance, coiling around him like a mist that warped through the building like an explosion’s fire. He heard scathing roars shake his eardrums as the beast took it in the face, and felt the building rattle.

The beast’s roar was made of shivering fury and driven by vengeance; he knew this wasn’t over. He had to stay on it. Kill it.

Pushing the chest of drawers away, Ahrim unsteadily got up, his rifle’s strap pulling him to the floor. Grabbing the prepared liquor bottle from the bed, he ignited the rag with his lighter, and pushed around the door to hurl it at the creature.

He didn’t expect it to be gone. In the haze of purple, eyes not leaving the empty window, he wrapped a scarf about his swollen lips and felt his eyes tighten and sear from its effects. Turning, turning again, he whirled and danced to the sounds that crunched and disturbed the violet mist, seeing warping flames from the explosion bearing the same purple shade as the residue that coated the walls and across his bedroll. The fire was slowly spreading. Lazy and weak, but stalking him as much as his prey as he stepped around it. The carpet was stepped in moisture, squishing beneath his hooves, and the heat of the flaming rag stung his hoof.

Yet he was ever watchful on every hole to the storm outside.

Then, he saw it. A disturbance, a ripple, a waver in the colour, like a stone in thick water.

He hurled the bottle, searing the air in a long lasting line behind the tinged flame, and he heard it ignite. Mulberry surged with orange somewhere beyond his sight, and he heard that terrible roar grip his skin. The warm splot in the mist where he’d thrown it rose like a sun, landing upon the uncovered roof so hard that dust and wood sheared downward at him. Hooves savaging his rifle, he aimed and fired the last round of his home’s origin directly upwards. Puncturing the purple fog, it disappeared, and he did not know of its end.

Like a spear, a sharp mauve line drove down, its bulbous appendage coming sickeningly close and crashing against his side. Missing by a scant inch, the wicked dark tip drove into the carpet.

He fell. Again and again, the deathly lines stabbed, like cutting a paintbrush down and down to disturb and pierce the colour. He rolled and rolled, each impact coming closer, until he pulled a mahogany drawer from its housing and held it above him in time to see the stinger pierce it, stopping an inch from his eyes.

Sizzling drips from the stinger marred his goggles from a tiny hole in its tip. Heart exploding in his chest, he used the drawer’s leverage to throw it to the side, and then drew and drove his knife deep into the whirling blur above him. Trapped outside the clouded mauve fire in the den, he heard it roar in anger, smashing the drawer to firewood.

Grinding his teeth, skin boiling in the heat, Ahrim tore his stained goggles free and picked up his rifle. Its easy bolt rammed home the first of the smoother rounds of this world, and he became the hunter once more.

Painfully stalking through the smoldering, poisonous house, he ignored the numbness. He ignored the dancing lilac pricks in his eyes. He ignored the swirling fear of his home’s own poisons tugging at every nerve. He knew it would not kill him. He could stay calm in its deadening embrace.

Instead, he crept up to the sharp, firm stairs to the roof; his hooves soundless. His ears trained on the rampancy of the target. Every inch of his body moved in firm, rigid motions as his joints clasped together and his muscles thickened with paralyzing violet horror. It was seeping into him, but he forced himself to know that he had pierced it into what he hunted. It would be feeling it more than he.

Climbing, emerging above into the tinged colours of snow that reflected the explosion’s fog below, he witnessed the hybrid limping on the jagged spars of the broken ceiling, staring down. It was sniffing, but it was a pathetic spluttering.

Ten feet above it, Ahrim laid his barrel on the back of its head. He had merciful time. Time to control the agony. Time to finally make this hunt worth it.

Time to win his worth and his life back.

His hoof rested on the rough trigger.

Its beady eye, stained with veiny flowing wine, turned.

Ahrim’s heart stopped.

Above the lilac tipped fires and hazy lavender mist, predator and prey locked eyes.

His hoof tightened on the frozen trigger. Its legs curled.

He let out a breath. It drew one in.

And in one moment, they both moved.

In one smeared second. One adrenaline fueled moment. Rifle fired, and beast leapt. Bullet flew, and claws reached.

The reliable impact of his stained stock penetrated his shoulder, before the shearing agony of a piercing claw carved up the side of his weapon and drove through him. He screamed. Driven backward, its wet foreleg clamped around him to pierce his body. Tumbling, its massive weight careening into him, and he fell.

They twisted, both struck. Both frozen by a paralyzing, far-off toxin. Predators. Prey. Both fell. Fell from the top of the stepped roof toward the chilling snow below. The cold numbness of his body met the crunch of matted and warm fur, and Ahrim felt the shock drive the life from him but for the searing burn of flesh in his shoulder as they hit a balcony and whirled. And then with one final crash, they both met the unyielding ground, and his eyes turned to black.

There was nothing. Nothing to see. But everything to feel.

A smooth talon tugged, and slid smoothly through agony as it retracted from his wet shoulder.

He felt his target push up and lift him.

Glinting stars spun, small colours that faded to the black and white once again. He hated it, he realised, hated it since he had come here. Now he felt the black and white pull him up again. Death and cold. It roared in his ear, and he accepted it at last. It was just the way of the hunter.

“-t up! Come on!”

Blinkered, he found his eyes worked, even if he couldn’t feel them. He felt wet. Damp. he could feel painful life pouring from his shoulder, and something pushing hard on it.

And then, soft, softer than purple, he saw her. Soft blue, cool and comforting, wrapping him in itching red cloth.

“Get up you stupid ass!” She screamed, and life finally rushed back to him. Gaping, he felt the mare yank his body up in a blitz of pain. Whimpering, he fell against her, his hooves tingling in relief from the poison. She was limping too, and he hurt to see her affected.

“Nebula…?”

“You stupid, stupid, stupid...ass!” She repeated, and almost punched him down, before turning, breathing hard. “You don’t take on those things alone! Come on, before it-”

In a flash, her city lit up, its lights searched the ground until they found the commotion that had erupted on its borders.

The hog nearby rolling over itself in now pointless panic. Eventually, they found the terror.

It was still. Dead. The patient poison, and the bullethole in its cheek counting for all it needed. He had killed it.

They stood together for a moment, and he enjoyed the soft crinkle of her neon jacket as the numbness faded. Pushing off of her, hooves scraping through the cold snow, tripped and fell next to his fallen tool.

“Come.” Ahrim spoke, and got up, lifting his rifle by the rough canvas sling to wrap it around a shoulder. It seethed with every motion, but he felt victory drive him.

Nebula blinked, grabbed her own belongings, and gaped as he began to cut off the tail.

“A thank you would be nice? What are you…”

“Come.”

“Ahrim!”

“Come.”

The white and black that the city so sternly warded away from its playful colour was now weaving its way right to the walls. The spotlights centred on it, picking out both it, and the bloody slur that slid behind it in the goopy, sticky slush. It came, legs dragging through biting snow, out on to the flexing boards that crossed bitter and still water and boldly toward their persistent guns; it reluctantly marched with its pained head high, through the gates, and dropped the remains of the city’s terror at the hooves of the great pony itself.

Yet as it advanced, as it invaded the spectrum of life, the colours shrank back from it and gave way to a hazy yellow hue of dirty lights and quiet whispers with every step it took. It stood in sharp relief, a diseased, pus-like trail having followed it on the ground from the corpse. The air stifled under the judging spotlights that rotated to follow it, black blood sliding down its stained side to pepper the white between its uneven steps, clashing with the warmth beat upon it shoulders from above, turning the winter to desert.

Snow turned to a mustard glow in the powerful beams of light, clumsily falling in thick, ungraceful clumps that melted under the heat of the lamps, and the beauty seen through a rifle’s sights fearfully hid itself the moment this new presence entered, leaving only the barren and pale remnants of yellow.

Pausing within the clearing over the bridge, it ignored the nervous guard ponies that gripped their saddle-triggers and peered side to side, silently arguing over which would have to approach. To comment. To invite its presence in from the storm. To relight the colour. None did.

There were murmurs, oozing like honey from the edges of the light. The terror’s killer, battered and hurt, stood impassive with its head slowly turning, goggles reflecting the cream glare.

Finally, he pulled them up to let them see his weary eyes, and he witnessed a collection of ponies approaching from the bronze tinged hooves of the city’s watchful titan. A tired unicorn stallion of advancing years and a haughty earth pony mare with brilliant gold pearls around her neck led them, coming to a halt just short. The stallion scratched the back of his head, looking at the severed tail with bewilderment. The mare turned up her nose at the rancid smell.

His mouth thin, Ahrim stepped forward, and witnessed the mare step back in turn. The stallion remained where he was to accept what their home’s unwanted guest held out in his hoof. A stained bag, shimmering with decor and promises of tooth-rotting pleasure, and a loose branch of papayas, swollen with still ripe juice.

“Safety now for the ponies. Gift for the...foal ponies.”

His words were dry and quiet as the desert of yellow he stood under, the blood red of the tail’s end beginning to leak to either side. The stallion regarded him, scratching the back of his neck.

“That thing been terrorising the caravans for sure…” He began with worrying uncertainty, eyes always glancing to the battered rifle by the figure’s side.

Behind Ahrim, a gentle breach in the still scene followed him.

“What are you all looking at him like that for?” Nebula’s voice pierced the thick tension like a beam of sunlight, and she stepped into the light. “Can’t you see what he’s done for you? He killed the manticore, Rain Cloud! I saw it myself!”

“I can see that, Nebula.” He dryly followed, making a loud throaty sound as he thought something over.

“Those gifts are most likely looted and stolen!” The voice was prissy and sharp as glass. The mare behind Rain Cloud peered around him, her mouth twisting into a long craggy ridge.

“Is not all looted in this plain?” Ahrim looked her confidently in the eye, holding out the treats. “Tradition? Greeting?”

“We’ve all seen you aiming at the caravans yourself. This is likely to remove your own competition. Where did that fruit come from? You can’t grow it, and we know you’re without caps!”

He struggled to keep up with her accent and rate of speech. “Fruit from...far away. Another life. Seeking life here. This is common, how to say...gesture. To...greet.”

“A life? Corpses for greetings?” She seethed, then shook her head. “This is the third time he’s dropped something dead on our doorstep. I do not abide it to my cats, and I don’t trust him for it either, Cloud! The council does not trust him in his little den out there, watching us!”

Nebula spoke up, interrupting Rain Cloud’s slow breathing in to speak. “He’s been protecting you, Mrs Kittens! He’s a hunter, not an assassin! And he means the fruit and sweets is how his home would gree-”

“By dragging cut up dead bodies into our town in front of the foals, and offering candy on top of it? He’s a killer, Nebula, and we won’t have him here! Didn’t you hear the rumours of raiders who talk their way in and then open the gates from inside? There’s a group in the area right now! They’re killers, and this is all he seems to be here! Friendship City has no need of the danger, or his ‘protection’.”

Ahrim did not feel any anger raise. No red pierced the yellow haze about them. He could scarcely understand her, but the pointed hoof and dismissive shakes of her head were enough for him to grasp the expected reaction. Hooves pointing away from a home. Angered faces barking at him.

It was not new. Not here, not elsewhere. He turned. Exiled.

“It took him months to get here...he’s not-” Nebula began, but Rain Cloud waved a hoof, voice reluctant and drained.

“Mrs Kittens represents the council, Nebula. She’s spoken.” He sounded reluctant to say it, but indicated the shining gates back into the empty darkness beyond. “I’m sorry, son. Appreciate what you did, but you’re not from here. So hanging out there, shooting things down and asking in? It’s scaring folks in here. They ain’t changing their minds on their decision. For what it’s worth I-”

Ahrim didn’t pause to entertain Rain’s own powerless opinions. He simply began trotting, leaving his prize and its potential with them. The words deflected off the back of his skull.

Rain Cloud sighed, and shouted ahead of Ahrim. “Plein Air, get the gate for our...guest.”

Streaked in hatched yellow and black, the barrier between the two, the ward against the dark world opened to let the tracking hue of the lights die before they could even illuminate the other side of the bridge. Even as Ahrim made his way out, fighting to keep his head level, he heard Nebula angrily arguing with the council members behind him. Much as his bibi had in her own way. Now, as then, they didn’t see the truth. And now, as then, it meant nothing.

As soon as he was safely across the bridge, the spotlights cut, and the tall city once again began to twinkle with red, blue, green, gold, and silver; its happiness had returned the moment he was no longer present to witness it as anything but a small portion of the landscape.

Only now, white and black sunk down, and he walked calmly and quietly in their sight, making his way back to light his fire once again and stare at life from afar.

Ahrim felt the blanket of snow thicken below each of his hooves. He trotted softly, quietly if he could, and carefully entered the door of his ruined den. With utmost grace he closed it behind him, even holding the icy latch down to silently let it click shut, before the whole frame fell off completely anyway. It was a ruin. Unable to hide from the scything blizzard, he painfully kept his bearing, as he stoically climbed toward the dead embers awaiting him.

The purple cloud had been trampled and darkened, blown away to fade in the winds, or falling away to the shadows, and left it empty. His skin bore its remains. Invisible. Stinging. Running wild below his coat like a searing anger he did not display. He took up a needle, and sank it into his shoulder, breathing out in measured, calm motion to fight the medication calming the agony.

Slowly, shivering with numbed pain, he sat and nurtured the flames back to life. His forelegs glided through the air around a dry, smooth stick in their rapid motions until fragile sparks glinted and began to grow under his protection. He could have used a lighter, but he found his hooves falling into the motion without thinking.

Then, he stood up and watched them. The faintest of warmths failing to spread despite all his care. Calm, he lit a cigarette, took one breath, and set it upon a stone. He breathed, vapour flowing over his face as much as the tobacco in the frigid landscape. He exhaled steadily. Evenly. Carefully.

And then savagely hurled his rifle against the wall.

It struck with such violence that the sights atop it shattered their glass and snapped the joining bracket clean off in a twang of broken metal.

He marched toward it. Saw it broken. Felt guilt. Recoiled. He turned. And then again. He didn’t know where. How to express it. What to do. How to let it out. How to reduce it.

His knees felt loose, and the crushing weight fell upon him, driving him to stagger. He fell to his rump, and focused on breathing. Long inhalations. Longer exhalations. Keeping his eyes open, he opened his ears to the sounds. The crack and snap of the fire as he shovelled more wood in. The wind in the empty rafters.

Slowly, he reached a shivering leg down, and brought up his cigarette again. Slow puffs, letting each one linger and relax him.

His hoof came down to find a book under it. One atop a pile. One of those Nebula had given him.

He stared at it, and felt something rise in his stomach. All that time. That effort. That hope! For what!?

The calm about him once again shattered, and he hurled it into the fire with a sharp, vicious motion.

Pointless!

He took up the next one. Its smiling ponies mocking and happy. He drove it in, and the flames roared about the new fuel, flaring up before him in bitter, jagged barbs.

Pointless!

Another, and then another. Harder every time. Speeding up. Book after book, until he upturned his bag in a sudden rage as he used it to dump all the remaining novels and guides into the conflagration. The fire, growing angrier and more uncontrolled with every thrown book leapt upwards, filled with passion and rage, searing a wicked mood of dancing shadows. Fury threw his hooves, and the tomes that had taught him the words of those here were scorched to ash in the inferno. His hurling foreleg caught his bag, slamming it upon the floor last of all as he shot upwards to his hooves with silent, restless anger.

The bag had spilled open, bottles breaking to let now very irreplaceable spirits and reserves waste and spill. Their bright colours bled into one another, dissolving as they spread and sank between the floorboards, disappearing and fading. Restless, he staggered, not knowing which direction to fall in. To limp in. Lost, he felt agony lance up his limb in scathing blood red as he swung hard and punched a hole in the plaster, lacking anything else to lash out at. At last, a single, anguished cry of frustration and hurt finally emerged, before he fell.

His hoof swollen and red, he dropped onto his front, feeling his vision grow blurry and wet. Snow fell upon his searing leg as his opposite hunched around his own head in regret at having done that. His pierced shoulder bled. The end of his hoof felt cracked. It hurt. It hurt so bad now.

Shivering, frozen, he lay there and heard an unwanted and unwelcome choke finally creep to the surface for the first time since it had happened. It had been chasing him all this way, but he had always stayed ahead of it. Always moving on. Always indulging. Almost losing in the hunt. But now he had stopped, and dared to hope. And he had let it catch up.

It had reminded him that he was not here to find anew. He was here to die in exile. But worse, it had reminded him of all that had been lost.

The numbing flakes fell too slowly, and time crawled by him. Far from the warmth he knew, he lay still in pain; numb and alone. Around him, he heard the sounds of others moving toward life, the crump and rock of ponies and wagons going to and from life. They passed right underneath him, never knowing. Never noticing. Never caring. Distant sounds in the black carried and welcomed them home safely, and yet Ahrim felt only the grip of freezing white and deathly black holding him prisoner, far from it.

Slowly, the fire began to die, and with it absolute exhaustion crept in. The hope that had let him ignore the sting of the new scars and the weathered chips in his hooves now reminded him of the whole way. The whole, utterly pointless, way.

“There’s always other settlements.” She had said as he had watched her bright, soft face light up his den for the first time, to pointlessly apologise for how the guards had repulsed his plight.

She hadn’t understood.

She’d never understood.

It hadn’t been about finding a wooden roof and warm food. It wasn’t about finding existence. It never had been. Just surviving wasn’t enough to drag a stained soul across far lands. Life wasn’t just continuing to exist.

None of it mattered now. Every time he had walked into the life they possessed, it had corrupted and frozen around him until he’d left. They wanted the same for him that the place he had stumbled away from had.

Feeling his soaked clothing grip to his body like the icy sheets surrounding the city, Ahrim got up, a tear stained mask of black tragedy settled upon him. There was no life now. And that realisation left him feeling empty. Instead, in its place, he felt sheer instinct begin to grow. A hunter’s instinct. It took over, survival reasserting the priorities in his whirling, confused panic.

There was a winter to survive.

He took up his rifle, and tore the broken sights off of it, eyes never leaving the coastline.

In the distance he could see a returning wagon, laden high. Alone.

Vulnerable.

Perfect.

Drawing a blood red square box from his ripped bag, hearing the rattle of brass from within it, he began to feed the deadly intent into his tool of survival with shaking hooves. Then, into the darkness outside, he left his den for the last time.

Years before, the ponies of the city of light had sought to expand their home’s glow.

Seeking to nurture the roads, they had lit the lamps that scattered the edge of the coast. Once brilliant white, they had decayed, now projecting only a sickly crimson glow over the mile beyond the city to try and ward off those who used to prey upon them in shadow.

It had failed. The stalkers had not cared.

Now it reflected the road’s legend. The last stretch that violence and death could occur before sanctuary. Over a hundred lamps in perfect spacing, bathing the riverside road in gore. The blood washed over its cobble and snowdrifts, crept over rusted bollards, and bled over the stone into the thick waters, littered with spars, wheels, and empty boxes. The graves of those born unlucky.

The Bloody Mile.

A two-headed, vulnerable bovine slipped and hobbled down it. Its hide scrawny and emaciated, sloshing through red with tripping lunges on torn hooves. An unaware and young stallion sat hunched on the wagon’s platform behind them, mouth hanging loose, eyes low and fixed on home. Heaped mounds, the bones of the old world, clattered behind him.

Tinged snow gushed and squirted either side of its wheels as they wounded the flat crimson sheets of the mile. The moaning axels cried out in their weary torture at the load. They were so very close. Close to failure. Close to rest and repair. A last golden hour for it all to go right or wrong. Life or death.

And from the skeletal brickwork remains of a once bright shorefront, a frustrated and venting fury lurked. Tired of being rejected. Tired of the cold. Clad in a ruby-toned rag to blend in, its draped barrel raised, and spat the road’s name into reality.

The first head of the ponderous cattle fell, its perforated cranium dropping, followed by its whole weight. The wagon shrieked, warping and splintering to a halt. Baskets and containers toppled, as did its scared driver. He fell into the blood, even as a second vicious crack set the second of his creature’s head to fall and snap the spar of his prizes.

Focused, shaking eyes eased away from the hated rust of his rifle’s irons, and Ahrim stood. Every limb felt energised. His veins were pumping hard, heart twisting and thrashing. ‘Give over’, he could only think. Give over to survival. Wander. Hunt. Indulge. Why was this any different from the forest in the end? Why any different from the exile?

It wasn’t. He knew that now.

Weapon hanging, he stood to trot down to the shivering hostage. He came down a gutted slope of a building. Its insides spilled out to the road, until his hooves splashed in the falling, tainted gore of the murderous haze.

He locked eyes with the stallion, but the look was not returned. The wagon driver was staring into the buildings further down, eyes wide.

And then, from within the grisly street, came its deeper horrors. A warcry pierced the air, the wind howling down from the alleys to carry it with skin-piercing power. Dark, frenzied and spiked shapes of slaughter and carnage spilled forth, pouring into the snow. Clad in striped red and stained white that billowed behind them, their charge fell upon the road as a gout of murderous, wavering terror. Hooked knives, stained like a butcher’s carver, were waving like half crescents.

All of them headed for the wagon and its prize.

Caught in the moment, suddenly an onlooker to the impending violence, Ahrim stood stock still as he witnessed this land’s own hunters. Desperate and driven by bloody rage, they descended, and fell upon the wagon’s driver. He was grabbed, held down, and a hateful barb of metal sunk into his upper foreleg to pin him to the side of his own wagon. The hopeless and agonised wail penetrated Ahrim as well as any creature’s claw ever had.

This was not hunting.

The stallion’s head was held against the wood. He was crying.

This was not respect for your prey.

They were laughing.

Something deep down, something important, something built of a substance that could scarcely be described as fury bubbled.

And exploded.

His rifle erupted in vengeful hatred before he even processed having raised it, and the leering shape before their plaything snapped backwards in a blur, splattering into a drift of blood, a curled spray of red liquid arcing up from them, as hooked as their merciless blades.

They looked up as one, pinprick eyes swivelling, but he had not hesitated. The pain in his shoulder hurled his mind on and on, as he smoothly racked the bolt, dropped where he was, and unleashed hell. Steady. Tranquil in absolute lividness. A single point in the thick red hue.

They rushed as another of their number smacked against the cart. Howling, they came, bounding over the two hundred meters between them. How many, Ahrim did not know. Their edges bled together in the falling scarlet. He stood his ground. None of them possessed the means to kill from range. He could focus. Focus on the smooth grain of the wood against his body. The burred metal of the bolt. The hot flare of the muzzle. The cordite stink of the ammunition. The dryness of his eyes as he fought to not blink.

Whichever one was closest fell. Three. Four. Reload. Fire. Reload. Fire. A sequence he had repeated ad nauseum throughout his life.

Track. Hunt. Kill.

Track. Hunt. Kill!

Track! Hunt! KILL!

Each target fell, careening down in a spiral of flailing limbs. They didn’t scream. There were perhaps a dozen left. He couldn’t tell. They ran in a collective, desperate mass.

Too many. He hadn’t the rounds on him, and with the tenth, his bolt brought nothing more up.

Empty. He could feel their hooves pounding the sodden road, and ran. Wicked blades cut the space behind him, sent spiraling through the air as he fled into the buildings. Scrambling up the scattered bones of the slope, and ducking below a frame, he fell into the black, and they splashed in after him. Loud. Eager. Unfocused. He turned, diving through a shattered window and stumbled unsteadily into the red muck of a garden. Knives whistled, and he felt one sear his side before embedding in the ground next to his hoof.

Rifle painfully clattering around his seeping, wounded shoulder, he scrambled up. He could hear their jeers, their taunts that he had turned from killing them to fleeing. Turning into the next row, Ahrim paused, leapt the snow that had fallen through an open roof and collapsed wall, and settled into a pantry against the course stonework.

His lungs burned. He needed the rest.

Hearing them crying out for his location, Ahrim sought to reload, cold metal in his hooves trying to slide stripper-clips in quietly.

One of the murky killers followed as they poured through the doors and windows of the buildings, hunting for him. He smelled her before he saw her, and paused, rounds half loaded. Streaked in damp, flowing stripes of her camouflage pulsing in the cutting wind. She looked to and fro, her quivering and pinpricked magenta eyes severing the room in two to find him.

Ahrim waited and, when he could hear no others, raised his rifle from behind her. She would turn as soon as the rounds were pressed in. Quaking, he took a short breath, mentally working through the motions he would need to do quickly.

There was no honour in this kill. No prize. Not even satisfaction.

They didn’t deserve that.

He ran even as the echoes of his shot made them cluster and meld into one another in their race to find the source. Holding his shoulder every couple steps, they found the stairs, and raced up them before the unwitting target’s body lay still on the ground, thick blood melding with the haze in the air behind him. Every wound. Every death. They didn’t stand out here. They became a part of the road.

Windows smashed, and they pulled themselves raw through it, tearing and bleeding until they were a swirling, maddened group in the room. They argued violently as to where he went, striking and clambering to hunt in wardrobes and cupboards. It chilled him. Images of them catching him up here, holding his limbs down, and the torturous knives falling from laughing faces scared his heart till it felt still. He couldn’t deny it.

Taking a moment to gather himself, Ahrim sat and seethed directly above them. His stabbed shoulder from the beast was throbbing, staining him in the same colours as they bore below. He felt faint all of a sudden. He wasn’t sure if he could use his rifle now. In his anger, he had let it crash into his body time and time again, and now his right foreleg was a shivering, shaking mess. The agony grasped at the edges of his confidence. Pulling at it. Fraying away pieces of it. Degrading it piece by piece, threatening his will to fight back.

But with any luck, he wouldn’t need it now. Instead, he drew his last bottle of akra. Homemade.

Home…

Far from there now. Fighting to keep anything of himself, he held the very last remnant he had with him. His clothes were torn, replaced. The poisons, used. The fruit, rejected. The customs, lost. His rifle had broken, been fixed. His sights. Its barrel. The trigger. The stock of himself and Al-

Every piece eventually. And this bottle all that was left.

Drawing his lighter, he took one last indulgent gulp of the stinging liquid. Stuffing the rag of his torn clothing into the bottle, eyes closed, he fought the hurt down. Drawing back his foreleg, he lit the rag, threw it off the balcony into the mass of violent hate below him. There was a shattering of his final belonging, and the crump and roar of his final gift going up in dark, charnel flames.

He didn’t even listen to the panicked stampede, or the high pitched screams. He simply sat still, head in his hooves, until the choking smoke was too much, and he limped free, adrift from all he had left.

The waterside was not warm. From fire and death, he stepped out, coat prickling, his red clothing meshing with the bloody mile all over again. He could hear the stallion whimpering, trying to separate his foreleg from the cart. Water from a sudden rush of wind blew upon the shorefront, splashing up, crimson mist crossing his face.

Blood. Like the red snow. Blood. Like himself. Like the stallion. Like the bodies whose warped stripes stirred in the wind. Like every step out here. Savage. Simple. It blended; melted like watercolours.

He felt heavy. Soaked. Bled dry in a way that walking hundreds of miles could never convey to the soul. It had been at most one minute, and yet it had left him empty.

Stopping, he opened his eyes to the carnage.

And the knife into his back sank deep into his momentary reverie.

Hot, sanguine metal erupted through him, and its bearer crashed into him. It crashed into the still reprieve with chaotic, dark thrashing. Gurgled anger spat over him, and he screamed from the lance of agony caused by a fiendish twist of the blade that ripped under the tendons of his shoulderblade. He fell, rolling end over end with the smothering corpse atop him. He felt the knife rip free, and the smoldering, blackened body straddled him. One veiny eye stared with singular purpose, hooves crashing down upon him as he warded and pointlessly fought. It was larger, it’s crisped skin scraped and hung. Mindless, vengeful, it pushed his head back, and he felt himself pushed back into the road’s freezing drifts of blood. It fell about his face, blinding him, numbing him. His throat constricted. He choked and kicked and beat fruitlessly at the burnt cadaver’s side, the ice burning the sucking slice out his back.

He realised he was going to die here. Restless corpses fighting over bones and blood, rejected from life.

His vision grew starry. A mess of silvery points. He could just barely see the face with its gleaming bone staring down at him, insanity driving a smile at having its revenge before its passing.

Everything pulsed. Darkness welled. Panic surged. His heartbeat thudded harder. Slower. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t cry out. His limbs weighed as much as a rifle.

A pained shriek came to his ears.

It was not his voice.

The stallion from the wagon hit the corpse like a cannonball, falling over it and splattering into drifts as he ripped it from Ahrim. Invigorating air rushed down Ahrim’s throat, and he gasped, roughly choking and retching. Everything was spinning. His head throbbed. He could see double. A vague after image of the burned one hammering a hoof down upon the wagon driver came to his eyes, and he let instinct take over.

Ripping a shred of his red clothing away, he wearily fell upon them. Dropping his weight, he caught the thrashing head, wrapping the fabric about the seared neck and drove the back ends over one another. Falling backward, he cried out at the stab wounds glowing hard with agony and felt the corpse’s sluicing, hideous back rub and smear his chest. Desperately, the stallion recovered and held down the body’s flailing legs, trapping it between them.

Together, they pinned it as it fought and panicked. As it made rasping, pleading sounds. As it jerked and began to grotesquely spasm.

Until it made one final groaning release, and its remaining eye rolled back.

Unclean. Drawn out. Imprecise. The antithesis of the kill.

But the definition of survival.

Sitting up, panting, bleeding, the pair looked to one another. Too exhausted to speak, the stallion tried to nod, and almost passed out. Ahrim watched him; a slumped and quiet figure on the bloody mile, now a survivor.

Slowly, with horrendous effort, Ahrim pulled his legs under him, and stumbled toward the wagon. He collapsed mid-way, his shoulder blade feeling something stretch suddenly snap within it; moving in unnatural ways with a hot iron sensation smoldering away. He whined in pain, falling. Dragging himself, using the body of the cattle, he got back up.

Survivor. Survival. Needs first.

Falling onto its caked boarding, he shook his head to clear the whirling red pricks, and stared into it to find what he needed. Potions, maybe. Medicine! Then, he would be on his-

“Electric! Electric, oh no!”

Nebula’s voice surged over the mile like a clean ocean wave. It swept away the gore before it, lifting the red mask over his eyes. His shaking hooves were already pulling the rare medicines from the cart, and its fresh food was set to enter his saddlebags, Ahrim turned his eyes.

Six ponies came running from the city, Nebula ahead of five armed guards. Casting up crimson snow behind them in the lamplight, the mare outran them all as she raced to the wagon stallion’s side, and hugged him as tightly as she dared. Tears of worry stained her face.

“Electric, oh thank Equestria...you...oh no, w-we’ll fix this! Oh thank anything and everything, you’re alive...you’re alive...”

The pair swayed and embraced. The guards paid attention to them, and Ahrim regretted knowing he had to disappear now, before he fell. The guards wouldn’t stand for it. He lifted the bundle of murky vegetables.

“It’ll be all right, sis’...”

Ahrim froze, the loot shamefully leaving his hooves. His eyes opened. Wider. Stretching. Staring into space. Slowly, his head crept around.

The stallion, ‘Electric’, spoke for the first time. Voice thin. He stared into Nebula’s eyes as he cried in relief. “It’ll be fine…”

Nebula stared down at her brother, and pushed her head into his foreleg to get him up.

In the scarlet light, Ahrim felt himself turn sick. His stomach churned, his balance failing. He reached for the food again, and heard the shout of a guard. But it was miles away. Eyes fighting to keep from drifting he tried to lift the food, but it weighed more than the world itself.

With a shout, guards rushed, sloshing through the snow, barrels pointing with fierce intent. Scarcely hearing, Ahrim felt his legs go loose, and the pain swamped over him. Something buckled.

He fell into the blood, and lay still.

They played together. Laughter, silent and painful, arced between them and yet never reached. One shared, passing a flavourless herb, it never reached. The other carved bare wood to offer. It never reached.

Two shapes shared a moment in empty time.

The pair were galloping through a world without colour or sound. It had once had it, but no longer. It had faded. No, that was wrong, he knew. It hadn’t faded. It had been washed out. Stained. Ruined.

Exiled.

“Don’t worry! Don’t worry, we’ve got you!”

Cold white. Cold white racing across the sky, burning lights dotted one by one.

The smaller shape paused, and turned. It was hazy, like a pastel sketch. Black and white fading into one another, curling upwards.

A lost smile.

“Please, will-”

“Out! Out!”

“But-”

“Let us do our job!”

Painful black. Warping and clenching. Dark shapes below a dark sun.

He reached out for her, but he could not feel her. He tried to move closer. To hold her. But he was clumsy and still. His own limbs felt like charcoal lines, frayed and jerking. The world was thick, like running through rustling and dry water.

“There’s too much, we can’t-”

It was suffocating. The worry. The unknowing.

The inevitable.

Yet as he struggled and fought with the void of empty colour, he felt a crack, like the shattering of a wooden stock. Ripping, tearing. Every inch driving the hot metal back through his body, the world broke in half. Fraying at the edges, ripping on all sides, the white expanse tore into stark black, and fell away before him with a shatter of crystal glass. She was falling, a still expression drifting away from white to black.

“We’re...we’re losing-”

“Keep going!”

A singular, last ditch hope against all reality.

Desperate, he threw himself into the dark to find her. Held in darkness between the world he knew, and the part leaving with her, he fell. Tumbling, reaching, grasping, clinging.

And the tighter he held, the further she dissipated into nothing.

Leaving him with nothing but black.

“It’s over…”

And at last, there was nothing. A final, peaceful nothing after the descent into blood and darkness, held away from the once beloved colours of life.

Time.

There was a passing. It felt like life, but then the realisation swept in.

It was only time. Time with nothing to witness. Time with quiet. Time with empty feeling.

But eventually, that time gave way to an end, and he felt the warmth of the desert sun draped light over him. A heated, colourless glow upon his numb body. Reassuring, homely, it began to grip him so tightly that it hurt, and he felt its damp tears.

He couldn’t move to comfort it. To say he was also here. It hurt too much. But gradually, the pain became a relief. A reminder that there was still some part of him to feel at all.

Impatiently, he felt it slide through him. Shoulder and back first, like a white-hot iron was being held into his body. But then came the cold sting in his limbs and on his cheeks. And then finally, the body-wide ache of his harsh trek.

And with that, he could finally reach out. To catch her at last, to tell her he was sorry. That he should have listened. That he wished to be more like her.

His soul grimacing, he fell as much as turned to grab hold of the warmth, and relished in the agony it took to do it. And like breaking the water, it all gave way to a soft, comforting serene blue.

His face fell into Nebula’s chest, his forelegs grasping like limp rope about her shape; pulling, gasping, trying to grip and hold his head above the empty water to wherever she was.

“Woah, woah, easy! Easy!” Her voice wrapped around him. Holding him still she caught his fall, and he felt himself exhale at last. Searing air invaded his cold lungs, and he caught himself babbling.

“Nini kinaendelea? Iko wapi Alcionne?”

“Sshh…” Nebula held him where he was, pressing his head to her chest even as she fought to cover him with the thin, smooth white sheet again. His eyes shot around, confused and wary. He was on his back. He was dry. It was no longer as cold.

Then slowly, as her gentle hoof stroked his mane, his heart finally slowed, and he craned his neck to stare at the still room.

Blinding white and clean. Pure. He saw cracks winding up strong cream walls, the black arcs of fractured lightning supporting drooping waves of corrugated metal against the cold. Only after he blinked could he pick out the glazed squares dotted along the walls, gleaming glass vials and sachets half hidden behind their glass fronts.

A stab of tenderness pulsed through his shoulder and back as he looked down. Everything was wavering, but he could see more itching white stripes coating where normally they would not. Some were darkened in patches.

The warm hoof rested above his eyebrows, and he quelled the throbbing resentment to be held like this. Right now, he didn’t care. Confusion began to settle, and he drew in a ragged, scraping breath.

“What I...I say? The wagon-”

“Don’t worry.” She hushed, and he felt her other hoof slide down his foreleg. Hard metal met them, heavily locking him to the flexing mattress. “You’re safe now. I...I don’t know how to thank you…”

He disbelieving, guilty eyes looked up at her genuine, shaking gaze, and he saw nothing but honesty radiate from the mare.

“I did...what?” He gasped.

“Saved him, dummy! Electric Lemonade, my brother!” Thin mirth snuggled around her heavy words, and he felt a pleasurable squeeze through the pain. “The raiders, they shot his brahmin. They were going to kill him. He told me, told everyone how you drew them away, killed them. How he saw you taking the knife for him.”

Nebula took a low breath.

“I’d have lost a sibling if it weren’t for you.”

Guilt crashed against the bulwark of her words. Ahrim felt a gnawing, horrific clarity come across the frenzy. He remembered his sights. The cattle falling like prey.

But he also remembered sitting in the chilly snow, locking eyes with a relieved stallion. A stallion who could now see his sister ag-

Nebula grabbed him as the spasm ripped across his body, drawing a bucket over as he retched, and felt searing bile in his throat as he bent over it to relieve himself of the sickness. He heard her telling him to take it easy. To stop. To lie still, but he had to pull himself up. The cutting loops of metal snatched and tugged him down, but he got his other foreleg up, slinging up in an arc, black and white blurring through the air.

Till he had it around her head, to pull it down, until her forehead rested against his.

Eyes closed, he held the surprised mare there. Breathing hard, chest heaving, he felt much of it well up. The journey. The exile. The fight to find something. Some life. Something to replace the colour that had faded shade by shade to leave him with nothing to remind himself. Not even his own body, sooted and marked by this land. Scarred anew. Changed.

Only now did he realise what he’d truly lost, by confronting the reality that he had prevented another suffering the same.

Nebula, much as she was shocked, didn’t pull away. Instead, she slipped forward, and he heard a click on his foreleg. Suddenly free of his bonds, he had enough motion to hold her, and to hold tight as he quietly fought the last great battle of his journey: to accept what was now gone, and to understand what he was still capable of.

His eyes stayed dry, but he felt her firmly hoof wipe them anyway, pushing his wilted mane back up. He angled up, and looked at the mare who had been there this whole time. Who had been a lifeline without him even knowing, but he couldn’t yet smile.

But he could try to finally answer her question.

“I was hunting.” He began slowly, stopping quickly. “It went wrong. I became...lost. We both were. For too long. There was something, and I was hunting for it. And she…”

He quaked.

“The blame fell. And I had to hunt anew. But you cannot hunt what is already gone. You cannot hunt life back into being. You cannot hunt such colour.”

His chest rippled, and his wounds seethed. He ground his teeth, hooves on Nebula’s shoulders.

“But she would have still tried to go out and save it. I know this.”

Nebula held on to him. Even if she lacked the fine details of this strange wanderer, she believed his every word, and she felt the weight of the strokes he cast across whatever guilt or blame had sent him out here.

But she also knew what he needed.

“Then you should get out of that bed, hotshot.” She let mirth creep into her voice, energising his blood as her forelegs ran along his body and helped pull him to his hooves, looping a foreleg over her back, melding and keeping him standing upright. “And see where doing what you feel she wanted got you in the end. There’s been a few changes of heart after a life was on the line, you might say...”

“I do not-”

“Let’s go.”

“Neb-”

She shook her head, and guided him forward. Staggering, feeling pulled down by his efforts, he leaned on her, until she met the door...and swept the white, emptiness aside.

His eyes, stung by the blank white, now were seared anew.

And were met with a cascade of texture and sensation.

Dancing starfields of light and colour hung in peppered lines across the world. Flickering, joyful in patterns of ruby, emerald and sapphire, they swayed and bounced upon the energy of an active, living world. The ocean blue mare pulled him forth, and he felt his weary neck crane only up and up.

Greeny-bronze dominated his sky. Tall, weathered, strong, and dignified, it stood high above his head, bearing gleaming angular diamond trees from its many holes and hard curves. But down here, all around him, bustled shouting faces below brightly-braided winter-cloak and around radiant smiles atop a gentle cream gravel. They melted from opening to opening around painted huts and pitched tents, gaudy yellow and blue on his right, and a sea of crashing, comforting orange to his left. Verdant grass swept before him in a perfect rectangle, where vibrant foals bounded and screamed and chased the thin streak of a maroon ball.

Then he was being guided. Shuffled through the colliding mass of hue and rainbows. He saw resplendent banners of embroidered silver and shining tangerine being hung from frosted trader windows. He saw rows of amber sculpts, rich navy books, neon yellow clothes, grassy blankets, and searing pink, bubbling bottles. He felt the soft massage of mellow blue from a violin’s entrancing work. He saw the shimmering speckles reflected on the still water past mahogany topped docks. He saw the ever so sweet untempered scarlet of a furious Mrs Kittens after slipping on glass-like ice in shock at him being there, before galloping off in a spray of glittering, snowy dust. It made him smile.

Hazy, ochre tinted tufts whirled and clammered busily before his sight, and his eyes fell to chase them back to a sizzling, ravishing glow of warm flame and the searing, meaty blocks of succulent red and crisp brown. He squinted as foals ran past, two-tone scarves of pink and yellow streaming behind them, chasing a young rosey and lilac teen in a purple hooded top carrying a shimmering yellow sun on a stick.

They circled and spiraled, leaving blinking afterimages in his sight behind the sparkling rod as they ran and ran about a raising, evergreen cone of fir and viridescent leaf. Already, smiles swarmed it, depositing crystal, topaz, and lapis gemlight across its body.

Ahrim stood rock still in this one moment, and held Nebula close.

And it all stayed.

It remained.

Even with him in it. Part of it. Part of the canvas of this world. It did not shrink away.

He felt her foreleg reach up behind his head, and the soft pillow of her mane rest on the side of his neck.

“What you said...that she’d try to save something.”

She turned his head, and through a ditch of patterned tents and past a staccato of shimmering candlelight upon the verge of winter’s edge, he saw the stallion from the wagon laughing in relief about a churning hazel mess of frothing mugs and barrel. Foreleg wrapped in soft white, Electric waved, and began limping forward, several of the guards coming with him, their relieved smiles growing.

Before Ahrim knew what was happening, the navy stallion also pressed in chest to chest, and he felt the delightful, welcoming pain of a clapping hoof over his bandages.

“Saved my hide. Threatened to cut the council out of my haul of medicine if they didn’t allow this. You’re a good stallion; Neb was right.”

There were thank yous. They surrounded him, wrapping him in their shocking meaning, but he could hardly process them, or determine the catastrophe that was the frantic flighty speech of ponies who were overcome with emotion.

But he heard Nebula’s long pause eventually break.

“I don’t know what happened, Ahrim. I don’t have all the details. Just...just a smudgy impression of what you went through.”

They released him, and he realised he was staring in shock to see Rain Cloud offering a small nod from the balcony of the bronze icon amidst the town. He looked back to Nebula, flaring light and iridescence blurring across his overwhelmed eyes, and her firm hoof stopped him by the cheek, his mouth hanging open.

“But it’s what you did for us...and maybe that’s all you needed, huh?”

She winked.

“Whoever ‘she’ was. Whatever happened. Whatever it was you did wrong...at least for me? For us? For you to be here?”

And then she said it. Words that were so very heavy. So wrapped in warm comfort and cooling balm that he felt them lift him out of the dark. Out of the cold, to be with them in this world.

“I forgive you.”

Those three words.

Those simple three words. Even if not from the mouth he hoped them from, even if not from one who could say them with the true weight… he had never expected to hear them ever again. They shattered what he realised was but a fragile shield of cold ice around his heart, and let the emotions pour back in. He dropped, falling to his knees. Electric and the guards caught him, Nebula coming down with him, ushering them for space. Yet all the blinking lights, laughing colours, and draping shades turned wet and blurry as his eyes felt swollen and loose. His lips curled, as he heard Nebula continue. She lifted his chin to stare at his wet eyes, and finally saw the real stallion. Not the stone wall of snark and stoicism he’d put up.

But a grieving protector.

She spoke quietly. Just him and her.

“If that’s all you needed. A chance to show you’d save what mattered this time. Just a chance. And from what you said, hey...bet she’d say it too. And that...that’s all that matters to us. Heh, especially at this time of year.”

“I…”

He paused.

“I do not. I...how you say…”

He mumbled. He turned again, disbelieving as he witnessed a pegasus sweep golden lace across the sky, winding and tying about post and monument. He looked to the stallions as they chattered nearby about what job Ahrim might do on his recovery, or where he might live, or that maybe he could do the job to a ‘Cornerstone’. Nebula’s soft motions brought him to drop into a bench as he tried again.

“...understand the gratitude. To say. How to...put-”

A hoof touched his lips. Nebula’s bright eyes captured his own, and a playful smirk took her over. Welcoming. Inviting to be happy.

“You can say it in your own form if you want, Ahrim. It’s all right. You can say it’s something you’ve been ‘nimevutiwa na viuno vyako’ about wanting this for a while if you want.”

“Nebula...” A releasing, unbecoming laugh suddenly emerged from him, crashing through the healthy, mournful relief. Surprised, he almost stopped, but then it erupted in splendorous, relieved light, like an aura that lit his face as his expression relaxed and grew soft. “That...That didn’t mean-”

She giggled, and winked. “I know what it means, you rascal. You think we don’t have a library with a book on your language I looked up first chance I got?”

In that brief pause, both exhaled sharply. One that grew to a laugh. And then an explosion of mirth and ridiculous joy amidst the dance of a hearthswarming winter, as he found himself holding her against his chest, nuzzled into her mane. Mixing, swaying amongst it all, together in the dotted twinkles of the city of lights.

Finally, with others surrounding, and one close. He formed one part of the whole amongst the smatterings of every joyful hue thrown haphazardly out in a fit of long sought relief. It spiralled around him, warding off the cold and the pain to let them see who he really was.

To see a worn figure be brought back from the transparent grave, to again feel the touch of colour.

And once again, life.