Two days had passed since AJ and I held each other in our arms, or rather our forelegs. Sadly, the next few days didn’t go better, nor was it easy for the others. For one, there was the thing with Scootaloo losing her mother. Rainbow had more or less voluntarily spent the night with the foal and talked with her about everything. Sunshine, who had been hospitalized due to the large storm that had hit Ponyville, had passed away a few days before the start of our journey, and the government had planned to put little Scootaloo in a foster home in Trottingham. Separating her from her friends seemed rather cruel, and I could understand why she ran away. However, the possibility of finding a solution was a world away at the moment since we weren’t able to contact Equestria at the moment. Twilight had woken up yesterday, as did Fluttershy, but she was way too weak to even try to open a portal. Of course, Twilight had a little freak out when she was greeted by the Princess of the Night, as her being here was definitely not on her list. Luna had assured the panicking unicorn that Celestia would be more than capable of moving her moon in her absence.

The second thing that kept us busy was the ship and the search for supplies and clues. Shining Armor had removed me from my position as leader of the expedition and ordered me to stay near the ship. My new task was to answer Star’s – my successor – questions over the radio. Armor and the other three pegasi used the radios to ensure smooth communication about what they found and what was needed. The three reported to me what they saw and their position, and I would tell them where to look exactly. A large stack of supplies had thus gathered on the balcony of my old house, though a good bit of the supplies had to be checked to see if they still worked. There were things like car batteries, a scooter, and even a bicycle, which was obviously useless since nopony could use it. Dash had brought it in despite my protest.

Then there was the situation with AJ. She wasn’t mad at me for yelling at her because she knew how it was to lose family and the feeling of wanting to keep the rest of them safe. At the same time, she made me remember something I couldn’t do stuck on the ship. Since all expeditions were canceled for me, I had to make a new plan of action. I had used the last few days to gather everything I would need. I stole a few of the parts from the scooter, a few of the enchanted diamonds from the conference room, and a bottle of apple juice that nobody seemed to like besides myself. Trixie called it unbearable compared to the puddle water she had had to drink in the woods around Manehatten. I still couldn’t believe she had lived out there for such a long time. In the evening, I finally had everything I needed together. The only thing missing was a distraction. Night Hawk had been sitting on the deck and passed the time with playing cards, which wasn’t really helpful. With a small wind spell, the one I had seen Glimmer use, I made her cards blow away from the ship. The mare had sped after them, and thus the way had been free.

Walking between the dark fields and then the cold stone buildings maybe wasn’t the best of ideas, but I didn’t had a choice. I kept the nightmares at bay with a simple daylight spell, not unlike the globe I had used in the media store. Of course, that didn’t keep away all of them, and some tried to grab me. As soon as they made contact with the light, they shrieked in pain and dissolved into nothing. The only sad thing about this, which actually managed to kill my mood after being able to laugh just once, was that a replacement immediately crawled out of the ground nearby. It was admittedly scary to know that from behind me, in front of me, or basically everywhere around, these things were waiting for the golden opportunity to end my life.

But here I was, just a little past midnight, in front of the entry to the tunnel that led to my destination. If the humans would be hiding anywhere, then on the other end of the city and during night time would be the only chance to find them. They must have had light or some sort of electricity. The scooter I watched passing by surely didn’t run on positive thoughts alone, though that might be a nice idea for Equestria. It disappeared into the direction of the city, admittedly taking a detour, but still. Knowing the surroundings was both my greatest advantage and disadvantage, especially because every little corner looked a little different and every new shadow creeping by meant possible danger. It was because of this that I was glad once I had finally left the suburbs and once again walked on the bridge, the streaming river beneath me. This meant that I was done walking approximately the half of my total way. It felt as though I was at the entrance to Khazad-dûm, not knowing whether or not the way was safe.

A quick peek behind my shoulder showed me what I did not want to see. About twenty nightmares waited at the other end of the bridge. They were crawling back and forth, climbing on the defunct street lanterns, hissing and shrieking at me. The red eyes never stopped glowing at me, the only other lights in the darkness. Although I was actually safe, it was still a pretty spine-tingling thought, having to pass through them. I gulped and started to move down the way from the bridge that led into the tunnel. The tunnel had been built years ago in order to prevent the overflowing traffic that occasionally formed on the bridge. On some days, people used to have to wait an entire hour on this bridge.

The tunnel was terribly dark. There was at least a little light coming from the moon when I was outside, but down here it was pitch black. Not the smallest trail of light could be seen for the eyes to adapt to, except for my small magical orb. Even though I wasn’t in the mood for anything fun, I still found myself reminded of that scene from “A Link to the Past” where Link had to wander through the canals with nothing more than a lantern. Continuing this thought, I was happy that I didn’t need to collect little green bottles that were dropped by monsters.

With every step I took further into the depths of the tunnel, the echo of my hooves grew louder and louder. At one point I even turned around to make sure that I wasn’t followed by anyone else, given how it didn’t sound like I was alone anymore. However, the only things that kept following me were the glowing red eyes that had stuck to my tail ever since I left the ship. I remembered the good old days where I was happy to stroll through the night, a beer in my hand and my headphones stuck in my ears playing a nice tune. Nowadays it would be hard to restore that feeling.

“Piss off!” I yelled at the nightmares as I turned around again. However, there was no reaction except for the echo of my last word. Frustrated, I stomped one of my hooves on the ground and fired another light ball towards the tunnel’s entrance. The nightmares didn’t even try to evade the attack, and so they just ended up melting like butter in the bright glow of the light ball, a shallow rattling sound following the process. I forced my eyes into slits so I could fight the returning darkness. With pleasure, I realized that all of them were hit by this attack. Just as I started to return on my way, I saw just how many of them were already approaching me from the street.

“I’m sick of you!” My initial plan was to save up my magic, mostly so I wouldn’t draw any attention to me, but they wouldn’t catch the sight of me in this tunnel anyway. I jumped on the small sidewalk, which was originally meant to be used by maintenance workers, and grabbed the electrical cable that led to the dark lamp above me with one of my hooves. I hoped that all the lamps in this tunnel were in some way connected whilst I drew a rune circle with one of my hooves. In the next moment, the lamp above me started to flicker in the same light as my orb, then the next one fifty meters later and so on. With a shallow magical hissing sound, the lamps all started to glow one after another, and after a few seconds, the tunnel glowed in bright light. All the nightmares that had just appeared before suddenly disappeared again, and thus the path was free to traverse. This little trick, however, came at the cost of a lot of magic, so in order to keep as much of it as possible, I released the cable once the last nightmare had vanished in a little pile of blackness.

The little orb floating above my head quickly became the only source of light again, and so I immediately went on to trot through the dark tunnel, soon passing the first curve inside. This tunnel had a rather peculiar shape of half an eggshell, meaning that it was practically impossible to directly gaze from one end to the other. Every few seconds I made sure that no more nightmares were following me, but for now it seemed like I had shaken the majority of them off my tail. Unfortunately, no one really knew whether or not light killed them or only forced them to back down for a while. Only one being could give me this information, and it was currently trapped inside the crystal that hung from my neck. It still managed to give me nightmares even from its prison. If it wasn’t for the fact that it would release the being inside of it, I would have already crushed the crystal from the frustration alone.

After about ten minutes of silently wandering through the darkness, my only assistance being a light that was barely brighter than a candle, I reached the other end of the tunnel, the bright full moon greeting me yet again. The light it delivered was more than enough to make my magical orb rather useless.

“If I was in Equestria now, I knew whom to thank for this,” I thought. Our existence was probably created by someone similar to Albia, who was now sitting somewhere and watching how their creation slowly bit the dust. Said creators most likely had various different personalities, and Albia was probably one of the better sorts. I kept walking down the expressway. It seemed peculiar to me that something appeared to be blinking in the distance, despite all the lanterns on the side of the street not working. It was a faint orange light that hung at the right height to be one of the lanterns. I went over into a slightly faster gallop, which wasn’t particularly good for my injury, but my curiosity was piqued too much to have resisted the temptation of this strange sight.

The source of light became clearer in a moment. It turned out to be a huge billboard that was used to display information about traffic and things like that. The difference was that this one wasn’t advertising anything, but rather displayed a big warning. At least that was what I interpreted the skull that the LED on the board to mean. I saw two smaller wires that were connected to a car battery standing on the ground, the contraption most likely responsible for keeping the electricity in the board working. The fact that the contraption was still working meant that this was probably the humans’ work, seeing how they had to exchange the car batteries regularly. This in return meant that I was on the right track. With quick steps, I reached the so called ‘pear’, basically just a roundabout that connected the downtown area with the tunnel, and the industrial area with an electronics store, a hospital, and the main street.

I immediately took the path into the city, passing the usual stores and buildings. First there was a McDonalds, then a car shop (the inventory of which had apparently already been raided a while ago), and finally the Novum. I used to park here a lot back in the old days, seeing as my father’s flat used to be right next to it. It wasn’t like he didn’t know how to enjoy a good porno – it was just that the internet was always way cheaper.

For a while I stared at the rusty fence and the white front door with the broken glass before I entered the property. My father had moved here after he had had to sell his house. During the first few years after his divorce from my mother, he had still been able to pay for it. Once he had lost his job, everything had started to fail: first his flat, then his reserves, and finally his health. Leo always used to be a heavy smoker, running through two packs a day in his better days. Unfortunately, that caught up with him sooner than he, or I would had expected, and a year ago he had found himself unable to move ten steps without having to gasp for air. One day he had gone into a restaurant with my younger brother Nils and had promptly had a heart attack. No actual seizure, but his breathing had stopped for a few seconds. My brother had naturally been in shock after that. We all knew that he wouldn’t be able to live for long, especially because of the problem with his lungs and his weight.

I just hoped he hadn’t suffered too much, as I had come here to give this man, the one who had raised me like his own blood, his last rites. My biological father had left my mother shortly after I had been born. In my entire life, I had only spoken twice to that man, and I wasn’t even interested in his name. I just knew it because my mother had mentioned it once. I despised him, and why not? After all, what sort of coward left his wife and son alone to fend for themselves? Even if their relationship was over, I was his son, yet he had found himself incapable of being able to call me once in eight years? After that, it took another eight years just to ask about how I was doing. And his primary objective in that talk was simply to ask my mother out. He had balls, I had to admit that. If there had been one good thing that came from him was the realization that I was better than him. I would never leave the mother of my child behind, even if we would live apart from one another.

Deciding that I didn’t want to sadden the memories of my father by thinking about that sperm donor, I slowly pressed down the door handle and allowed the gate to the garden to swing open. The rust on it proved traditionally effective since it created that high-pitched squeal that fittingly reminded me of a graveyard. The glass continued to crunch under my hooves as I walked from the entrance to the front door of the house.

A ton of mail was lying all over the floor, and with a sudden tickle of curiosity, I picked some of it up to check the dates on the mail. Although the light of my aura and magic helped see the smaller details, it was still difficult to read what was once written on the moldy envelopes. That the weather hadn’t treated these letters particularly well didn’t help matters either. In the end, I was only able to read a few dates, like the twentieth of December, 2012 and the fifth of January, 2013. This, at least, gave me the slightest impression of when the nightmares had attacked. I placed the mail back on the ground and started to look at the closed door to my dad’s flat. I wished that Trixie had taught me that lock picking spell, but a simple explosion spell would be helpful enough to jolt the wooden door out of its frame.

I went into position, leaned forward, and pointed my horn at the door, but I stopped just before I could cast the spell. It wouldn’t be beneficial to me to have the humans notice me, and if they reacted like Julian had done, I’d be in big trouble. Not all of them carried around a blank gun. Instead, I changed the kind of spell I would use to one of my beloved transformation magic. The wood melted and revealed the chaos I was already expecting. It had been years since my dad was still in the form to clean up this mess himself, so occasionally either Nils or I would come to bring some order into this place. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to do everything that needed to be done, and we never got to come as often as needed either.

Plastic bags were stacked from the floor to the ceiling, and thick dust covered everything in layers that were hardly imaginable. Whilst taking a deeper look into the apartment, I turned left and threw a look into the kitchen. As usual, I stepped past the several pots covered in green mold and instantly decided that it would be the best to not look into the bathroom, which could only be entered through the kitchen. I took a deep breath for the first time and made the big mistake of using my nose instead of my mouth. Adding to the smell of old tobacco and mold came a smell that I knew very well, a smell that I had already breathed in a few days ago. Down the hall was the living room where my father had practically lived in. Many times he never even made it to his bedroom because he had been too exhausted. With a deep breath that I drew through my mouth, I tried to prepare myself for the sight I was about to witness.

Nothing prepared you for the view of your dead father. He sat on his sofa, head tilted backwards on the cushion behind him, his face staring into the air with empty eyes. His clothes were dirty and soiled as always. It was sad that I was already used to seeing death, but knowing that it had finally happened, the one thing that I knew might happen every moment of every day for several years, felt like a kind of relief to me. This spontaneous feeling was immediately crushed and dissolved into pure sadness, my eyes growing wide and warm tears starting to stream down my cheeks. I had connected to Scootaloo when I heard what had happened to her mother, but I had never told her. I felt sorrow for not doing so, mostly because I wished I had someone with me right now.

My legs wobbled the further I walked into the flat. I made the orb float in front of the room. I wanted to remember my father with a smile on his face and not as a corpse lying far too long on a couch. The corpse itself was in a worse condition than the pharmacist, meaning that he had been dead for a longer period of time. I hoped that he had died because of natural causes, even though that meant nobody had ever found him. That was probably just as sad as if a nightmare had killed him.

My path led past the sofa towards the large window that was closed by its blinds. With a little magic, I moved them upwards and back into their box, and opened the window. Cold, fresh air of the night entered the apartment and allowed me to take a deep breath. Still having tears in my eyes, I levitated one of the old blankets over my dad’s body and then lifted him upwards. At first I was rather confused about how easy it was to lift him up, considering that he was about two meters tall and overweight, but the silhouette underneath the blanket showed me how much of his body mass had degraded. I made him float through the window into the garden and softly placed him on the soft green grass, my wings quickly allowing me to follow him through the window. Once I got outside, I created a new light source, seeing as the old one had vanished with the transformation before, and I started to look for a good place. Said ideal place was found after a bit of searching, and without wasting any time, I started to make a hole where a flower patch had once been. Slowly and carefully, I lifted his body into the new hole as I stood on the edge.

“Thanks for everything…” I sobbed with a trembling voice whilst letting the earth slowly rain down on his lifeless body.

Trixie and the others sat in the conference room of the Celestia and listened to the fascinating discussion. Applejack had woken about an hour ago and noticed that Light was missing. Worried, she had searched through the entire ship until she had met Hawk, who decided to help her. After a while, once both of them determined that he was nowhere to be found, they had decided to wake everyone up.

“And nopony saw him leave the ship?” Shining Armor asked the others. He had already interrogated Hawk repeatedly about this, the same with Star who laid down to get some rest in the conference room.

“No, sir.” the white pegasus replied, conviction in his voice as looked at his female colleague.

“I spent the entire day on the deck. Nothing odd went on.” Shining Armor nodded, but she still saw in his face that he wasn’t very satisfied.

“And it’s impossible that he’s just hiding somewhere?” he now asked everypony, since they had all searched through a part of the ship.

“As long as he isn’t as small as Scootaloo, no.” Twilight spoke with a bit of sarcasm in her voice. “I think we would have noticed if he was hiding behind a crate or something.”

“Well, he’s the only one familiar with this place, and it’s his mission after all. What does he think he’ll get by leaving us here?” Rainbow Dash was already not in the best mood when it came to Light for these past few days.

“I uhm… don’t think that he really just left us.” AJ nodded in approval at Fluttershy’s comment.

“I know him. When he sets his mind on something, he’s gotta do it right then and there. But why did it have to be at night, when all those damned things are out there?” Everypony at the table felt a shudder going down their spines as they thought about the nightmares.

“I don’t want to sound selfish and all, but this is his own fault.” All eyes fixated on Rarity. “I mean, he did go outside without asking any of us. I’m sure whatever his reason was, if it was important enough for him to take this risk, than it would also be important enough for us.” Silence held the room in its grip, everypony staring at the table.

“Since we don’t know where he went, or how far he already got, I’m afraid I have to agree to Miss Rarity,” Shining Armor spoke after thinking briefly. “Could you perhaps track him down with that spell you used in the desert, Trixie?”

A little confused that she was suddenly dragged into the discussion, Trixie quickly remembered what was said and then responded. “I don’t think so… Princess Luna doesn’t have a connection to these stars, does she?” She looked over to the still exhausted alicorn. Just like Pinkie Pie, she was lazily laying her head on the table as she followed the proceedings. The transport into another world had left her and Twilight drained and with a huge depletion of energy.

“Indeed, Beatrix. Our magic isn’t familiar with these constellations.” As the last option now also laid shattered on the ground, Shining Armor lifted himself up and wished everypony a good night.

“We will rise at dawn and go looking for him!” he added, as he left the room with a worried-looking Cadance, who briefly looked over to her mother.

“That idiot…” murmured AJ, Trixie the only one who could hear her.

Like in an hourglass, the last piece of dirt hit my father’s grave. However, I did not want to leave the grave as unadorned as it was. I turned to the window, broke off two of thicker plastic bars, and with fused them into a cross with a spell. With the same magic, just with a little more focus, I melted the words in the plastic that everything said about this man:

"Father, unsung hero."

I stood for a few minutes before the grave, thinking of moments that showed how much my father had taken care of me. As a child, he used to buckle me so firmly into the car seat that moving was almost impossible. I had no doubt found it to be annoying and stupid, but now I understood the gesture behind it. As a child, I only got spending money when I helped out, and what did my father do? He left behind all returnable bottles on purpose so I could keep the extra money for returning them. I remember the only time he had hit me, when I was three years old. I had tried to put my finger into an electrical socket and had gotten shocked so badly that the pain still came to mind all these years. All he had said was “This is going to hurt me more than it will you.”

I forced myself to finally turn away and took the road through the small garden of the three-story building. I stuck close to the wall and avoided the nightmares that had gathered there. They had been there all this time, and had watched. Nightmare had once said that it was pleased by death and misery, and I felt that this held through for its followers. Throughout the funeral, none of them had tried to attack; they watched and observed. Around the corner and on the street again, I went back to the pear, seeing as I had already done what I had came here to do. Now it was time to find the hiding place of the humans, and a building with a generator and a large amount of water came to mind.

The Kampa-Halle was a two-storey hall, about the size of one and a half football fields, and had a direct connection to the local thermal baths. There were filters to purify the water and large tanks for it to be stored. In addition, the hall itself was equipped with a small generator, meaning it could maintain a certain amount of people. I knew the way very well as my old school was halfway there. It was a vocational college I had attended before I started my education. There I had done a course to prepare me specifically for my job as a computer scientist. Programming, hardware engineering, and math had been the main subjects in which I had always excelled. The funny thing was that I never had to learn it, because it simply interested me. Therefore, my brain took all the relevant information like a sponge and could retrieve them at any time. It all went back to the time when I had worked on a computer role-playing game in the sixth grade with a friend. We never came to implement the thing, but the folder with the concept and the story was still in my apartment.

The McDonald's was right at the large roundabout and between the way to settlement and the main road. It wove through the entire city in a U-shape and ended up in the center where the bus station was. I would have to go up this road a fair bit, so I wasted no time. It was more than unusual to see this otherwise busy street at any hour in complete darkness, just like the houses on it. Immediately after a car dealer was an Aldi supermarket, and right after was another car dealer. There were many of them along the ring road, but the special thing about these two was that my father had worked for both. I paused and hit myself in the face with a hoof. I could not let my fatigue get the best of me. To sleep somewhere here would be my death sentence.

I went on past a Subway and the opposite pizzeria that lay just beyond the first of the three crossings. Every now and then I saw a nightmare by one of the shop windows, but these seemed to ignore me. The two or three that had followed me since I came back out onto the street also seemed to be further behind than they originally were. Apparently they lost interest because my defense was too good. After a few minutes came into view the shop where Nils always bought the parts for his skateboards and then the ruins of the old hospital. This, after the SEC had finished their exercises in the abandoned complex, had been blown up. I found it somewhat amusing, despite the circumstances, that the place I had been born was now rubble.

I left the second intersection behind me with the ruins, and it did not take long before the third was also passed. Only a mattress store and another car dealership separated the two intersections. I went off the road onto the sidewalk and tried, at some distance, to glimpse the building of the Melitta Company. They had their headquarters here and guaranteed work for people in the area. My gaze wandered up the large light brown building where somebody had written something in white paint on the topmost window. My plan was not to make this detour; that was for another time. I turned into the street leading to the hall and the school. The houses here were all a little older and made from dark red bricks that adopted an almost black tone in the moonlight. I paid no attention to the shadows that were cast by the railings and bushes in front of houses and stepped forward. It struck me again that despite the size difference, a pony went much faster than a human being. Our walk was already a light jog for a man. I could tell from how I quickly I had passed the houses and how it had been for me back when I was a human. I was not really surprised by it, because after all, the two police officers had had little chance as Twilight and I had galloped away back at the beginning of my adventures. Against a scooter or car we'd look slow, but so it was an advantage to keep in mind.

With a single leap I hid in the next bush. My ears twitched as they heard voices as soon as the outline of the school came into sight. I raised my head out of the greenery and saw that the fence around the school was entirely lit up, seemingly with UV lamps. Slowly and crouching, I left my hiding place and scurried as quickly as possible to the other side of the street and pressed against the lower part of the fence. This one was made of solid concrete of which single bars of metal rose from the top. Now I heard them more than clear: voices, maybe three different ones. Unfortunately, they spoke a language I didn't understand. Cautiously, I lifted my head a bit to have a better look at the courtyard.

On the way to the entrance of the school, three figures stood and conversed with each other, one of them holding a rifle over his shoulder. I looked further and saw on the grass a pile of car batteries, all connected with each other. Two cables finally led to the lamps. They operated them like the warning sign on the expressway. I looked up to the lamp directly above me as I heard something behind me. Startled, I turned around, was blinded by a lamp, and was struck hard on the head with an object. I sank to the ground and everything slowly turned darker than it already was. In front of me were two sneakers and those slowly advanced towards me. I had been only unconscious once in my life, but the feeling was one which I was not pressed to remember.

Author's Notes:

Thanks to JBL and Verequus for translating. (They only did the last 1000 words or so, the sloppy rest was done by me this time.)

Special thanks to JBL and Dj7291993 for editing.