“Berryshine,” a voice called. I opened my eyes and I saw a moon. Then, like a wave, millions of stars washed in around it. I watched the stars ebb lazily across the sky until something loomed over me. It was a shadow, bathed in the light of that moon. It brushed a cool silver-laden hoof across my forehead, as gently as a shadow’s caress would be, and I blinked. “There you are,” she soothed. A soft smile appeared on her muzzle that I could barely make out. Her brightest feature was her eyes: they were a deep but calm cyan, like portals to an unfathomably deep underground lake. Her mane flowed in gentle, ethereal waves around us and I realized the stars I had been admiring were part of that very mane.

She stood, dark against oblivion, looming over me but I wasn’t scared. She was a lighthouse, at the edge of a terrifying ocean, and everything about her was guiding me back to shore: from her twin lanterns, to her silver touch, to her beckoning voice, to the constellations in her mane.

I was aware of myself and that I was washed up on her beach so I sat up.

My hooves made ripples in the calmed, translucent water we were sitting in. Through the surface, I saw to the bottom of this ocean: it was the real ground far below us, still dotted with bonfires from the dead timberwolves. I saw my own mud-caked body and Ruby still under that tree. Ruby’s shattered horn still glowed a soft blue. I turned to the figure who woke me up to this place.

“Am… am I dead?” I asked the shadow. Her muzzle crinkled up a bit.

“The princess of dreams comes to you and you ask if you are dead?” she questioned me, sounding amused.

“ ...Princess Luna?” I addressed the spirit. A long horn lit up beneath whatever shadow she was under and her face was bathed in its blue hue. The light cast long shadows down her face that made her look tired. Her muzzle was longer than any other pony’s I had seen but it was slender and graceful. And yet, I expected someone more… blue; radiant. This wasn’t the Luna I imagined. She was barely more blue than the sky beyond us. She seemed… subdued. Hidden.

“It is I,” she answered. “Fear not: while the gates of dream can lead there, I am not a ferrier of the dead: I am a protector of the living during their darkest hours.”

I took that in silently and I think I understood. By the time I wondered if I should bow or something, the moment had passed and all I had done was stare at her. Feeling awkward, I averted my eyes to the weird astral ‘ground’ we were on and the real world beneath us.

“So… this is a dream?” I tried. This was a weird dream then, considering it looked like the real world was below us.

“Something like it, yes,” she agreed.

I looked back down at my daughter and saw her broken horn still glowing that unusual-for-her blue. The connection finally clicked and I looked back up at the light of Princess Luna’s horn.

“Wait! Did you… ?“ I trailed off gesturing towards my daughter.

“Yes,” she bowed her head. “I was expecting to meet under better circumstances tonight… but then I felt your daughter’s distressed slumber. I would have intervened sooner, but I was only going to get one surprise shot off and I had to make it a good one that wouldn’t hurt you.”

She didn’t hurt me, but she did something worse. I looked down at my daughter and back at Luna. There was an anger growing in me. It tore me up thinking my daughter had pushed herself and broke her horn trying to protect me but it wasn’t her sacrifice or choice. Instead, it seemed like this alicorn abused her powers and forced her.

“You… you broke her horn!” I accused.

“No. She broke her own horn,” she corrected me. “I was casting my magic through her but there was a righteous anger within her. She wanted to protect you and needed to overcome her fears… and I underestimated what she would do joining me in that spell,” she explained. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to blow your own horn off?” she added a little more casually.

It was an accident. Maybe.

“But… you can fix it, right?” I asked. The darkened dream princess gazed down at the scene somberly.

“ ...even if I knew the right spell, I could not cast it through a broken horn.”

“Then... use me?” I offered. She looked at me and gave a pained smile that fell into a frown.

No.

I didn’t like that look.

“Earth pony magic does not-”

“Please!” I cut off her moonlit majesty. I didn’t care if she was a princess. “She doesn’t deserve... she should have more than this! Not this life too! Not for me!”

She seemed to understand what I was referring to even without me elaborating.

“Berryshine, I…” she trailed off and grew quiet for too long. I didn’t know what she was thinking about but I was about to finally correct her on my name until she spoke up, more to herself than to me. “ ...what kind of princess would I be if I did not try?”

“So, you’ll do it?” I asked, hopeful.

“I will try. Tomorrow. Tonight I will stay and keep the nerves in her horn alive and then tomorrow morning... I can not explain how, for even now he could still be listening, but at that time, I will try.”

‘Try’ wasn’t good enough but I couldn’t ask more from someone than that. Telling me to just wait felt like an excuse though and she couldn't even tell me why we had to wait. I needed more than that.

I needed someone to fix my daughter; to fix everything. I needed someone to protect us. To get us home. To stop Discord and save Equestria. ...and I couldn’t do any of that.

And I started to fear the pony in front of me couldn’t either. She was an alicorn, maybe the last! Alicorns were supposed to be basically gods. And yet she all but admitted when she said she didn’t know a spell to fix this that she was as lost as the rest of us. If she couldn’t, then who?

Where could we turn for hope then?

What fate did all the lost souls in this world have?

My eyes stung with tears and I could feel the weight of my torn up body crushing me. I felt a silver foreleg touch my chin and raised my gaze back up to that false idol.

“Please believe in me, Berryshine: in the way you believe in your friends; in the way I believe in all of you. There is magic there and enough magic in this world to find a way home, to stop our oppressors and to save your daughter’s horn. I may not be part of your ‘higher power’, as you put it, but I pray I can earn a place in your pantheon.” Evidently, she heard me denounce her to Discord. “I do not care what the stars foretell: for we are the lights until the dawn. We will ‘burn’, as you would say; we will declare that our hope, our dawn, is coming. And I swear to you, as your princess, I will lead my little ponies to that dawn or burn out trying.”

I wasn’t roused from my hopelessness, but I did feel guilty now. She was missing a lot of herself, more than any of us in terms of number of years, and yet even without that past knowledge and wisdom from those years, she was still taking on the responsibility of her former life anyway. She felt the responsibility for ponykind on her back, yet here she was consoling me and promising to help my daughter tonight. How much time was this going to cost her? Just for us? I suddenly felt unworthy. Before I could apologize she changed the subject.

“Will you do something for me? Tomorrow is going to be... a long day,” she explained tersely with a heavy sigh.

“What is it?” I asked her, seeing it as a way to make amends. I pulled my dreambody up to a sitting position to do the task.

“Take up the notebook Discord wanted and read its contents to your daughter, loud and clear,” she instructed. “I will be listening through her slumber. When you have finished reading it... burn it so it will never be used against us again. Do you understand?”

I didn’t understand why, and I assumed she wouldn’t tell me that either, but I understood what she wanted me to do.

“I do,” I agreed with a nod.

“Excellent! Then let us start immediately,” she declared. She pressed a hoof gently against my chest and gave me a mischievous grin. I looked at the hoof and saw we were even farther up now. Even beyond the clouds. “This won’t hurt,” she promised before she violently shoved me backwards.

I fell back, phasing right through our ethereal ground, the clouds, then continued to plummeting: towards the trees, my body and towards the ground far below. Just as I was about to strike the ground-

I jumped awake. My hind leg under me felt twisted and raw. My back ached from the rough grooves carved into it. My barrel and muzzle hurt when I wheezed. My throat, mouth and eyes burned. My limbs were heavy. My head pounded in time with my heart.

I was alive.

I looked at my sleeping daughter. Her horn was still jagged and broken but it continued to glow blue. That was Princess Luna? Then it wasn’t just a dream.

I didn’t waste the energy my rapidly beating heart filled me with: I immediately dragged myself the rest of my way to my daughter. I collapsed, gently, against her and nuzzled her mane. Her warmth and her scent calmed me. It was overwhelming but not intoxicating. Just… perfect. She was perfect. I wanted to just hold her and cry but the blue light reminded me I agreed to do something.

I held my tears back and pushed myself back up and towards the bag with the notebook. I stuffed my head in, bit down on the old notebook and drew the tattered thing out. To my surprise it was still dry after the river crossing and the rain. Even a little warm.

I rolled more than crawled to my daughter. I leaned on one foreleg to handle the book as best as I could with the other and, in the pale blue light of her horn, I settled in to read my sleeping daughter a book. Like I imagined I might have a long time ago in better circumstances.

I opened the school composition book and read out loud what was written on the back of the front cover:

To My Best Friends,

No matter where we go from here, we will ALWAYS be connected with the magic of friendship.

Love,

Your Unicorn Forever,

Sunset Shimmer

I ran a dirty hoof over the fancy signature and the stylized sun beneath it... and I cried. I cried because I knew what it meant for me to have this, for that man to have this before me and for Discord before him to have gotten hold of this. I swallowed the tears down and my hoof traced over the edges of the torn out pages. From what the pony trafficker said, this notebook must have been something like Sunset’s journal in Rainbow Rocks that she used to talk to Princess Twilight: what was written in that appeared in an identical book in Equestria. Except this was apparently for Sunset to keep in touch with her human friends. I suppose everyone didn’t have cellphones in the 90’s. Were there seven of these then?

I looked past the ruffle of missing pages to the first page present. It was a list of names written in a very different handwriting from Sunset’s. Some letters were randomly capitalized in the middle of them, sometimes the writing became cursive and then drifted back into block print. Names were spelled phonetically sometimes, even when the same name was spelled correctly just a few lines above. Not that they obeyed the lines on the page, those were just suggestions that it drifted over.

I read them loud and clear and mentioned when they were crossed out -there weren’t many of those. When I flipped the page over there was a short list of instructions in that same mad style. They basically boiled down to keep it up to date, do all your trading and buying in this only, and to have fun. There weren’t exact instructions on what this notebook was. Maybe that was something he explained directly like Sunset Shimmer apparently did as well.

It listed ponies they could not capture or sell: the mane six and a few more. It listed where they were.

The next page began listing names, pony names, in that same horrible handwriting and town names. Sometimes full addresses. Sometimes descriptions of locations. Often new locations were written after the first. Sometimes by that odd writer and sometimes by a different hand. There were several more writers that joined in. They were harder to read and I struggled in the blue of Ruby’s horn and the burning timber. There were numbers and names in one column with one pair circled. In another column were comments and replies. These were even harder to read, but I tried to read it out loud as best as I could make it.

What was once used for friends to keep in touch, maybe after high school, had become a ledger for pony traffickers. Why would Discord do this? Just to harass us? To make sure we couldn’t hide? I flipped the page, leaving behind a dirty hoofprint. There were more names. Including ones I recognized.

“Comet Tail. Kansas City University north. Lawson Home. Farmhouse. Creighton. Farmhouse,” I read verbatim. I wondered if that meant Comet was back at the homestead now. I read out the numbers and was sure now these were bids. Then the comments: “Stallion and Mare equal endless pony. Bread? Take too long. No one wants a stallion. Horsecock.” I read. I was just below and saw my numbers were higher. I didn’t feel better about either set of bids. My last comment was “Buck where?”

My friends were in this ledger. They were selling us, even making bids on ponies they hadn’t even found yet. I was thankful there weren’t usually addresses.

The next page was an absolute mess, it looked like several people had written over each other, including Discord over himself. There were even drawings: mostly of boxes. One word stood out, as instead of being written over, it was traced over and over: “Derpy Hooves.” I could make out some words and read them, but overall it looked like someone had blindly written over the page several times. “Des Moines trailer. Tr… enton? … Kan… Bristol. Castle northwest. See…” and then several things were overwritten by each other. “I can’t read this page,” I admitted. I was going to hope whatever this was, it meant Derpy was fine.

Sometimes the pony names repeated in the ledger. I assumed most of those were rebids or swapping kidnappers. There were several attempts at Derpy that all ended with a mess of incomprehensible writing. Most of the ledger was hard to read though, being messy handwriting. I hoped I was doing good enough for Princess Luna. As my fire light grew dimmer it became even harder to read the messy scrawl. There were a lot of comments and numbers I couldn’t make out. I was feeling tired and my forelegs ached but I kept flipping and reading to my daughter and the presumably listening princess.

The lists of locations the ponies had been told hints of stories: stories of ponies trying to find sanctuary. Many were in ambiguous states, some were not. I read glimpses of Vinyl Scratch’s story that ended at a police station. Was she in jail? Did the feds catch her? I read about an Octavia just below on the same page that followed the same path and ended in the same fate.

None of these entries told of especially good bedtime stories and I couldn’t tell how most of them ended: Thunderlane, Amethyst Star, Caramel, Daisy, Cloud Chaser, Lyra Heartstrings, Bon Bon. Braeburn and Diamond Tiara seemed to be together wherever they were.

There were lots of names, most I didn’t know. Some were definitely captured and sold off, if I understood the notes right. A few were sold to a “Spectrum” which Ruby had said meant a terrible fate. I hoped they were okay and could still be saved. I wondered if that was why Princess Luna wanted me to read this awful thing. Maybe she was copying these down somewhere, somehow while dreaming, to make plans to rescue them. Somehow. I didn’t see how we could work together when we were so scattered and lost.

I was so physically exhausted and the book depressed me. I wanted it to end. I thought it was when I got to Cloud Kicker and Blossomforth. To my horror though, there were another two pages to read past them: more sales already.

The pony trafficking trade was going strong. I didn’t see how destroying the notebook would do anything to stop it or if it was supposed to. I didn’t see how such a divided and lost nation could be reunited or saved. It would take a miracle.

I flipped through the remaining blank pages to make sure I didn’t miss anything then checked the back cover. Nothing. It was finally done. I could stop reading.

I couldn’t walk to the fire, I could barely keep my eyes open. So I crawled to the burning timberwolf remains with the book in my mouth. It was a short crawl but my back legs and my barrel hated me. When the pudding and wine got into my wounds it stung.

I unceremoniously dropped the composition book in front of the fire then shoved it into the flames. At first nothing happened and it sat in there unharmed. Then after a delay the edges started to curl and the flames started to eat through it like any normal paper book. I expected a magical burst or a tingling or something but what happened instead was the flames rose high. A lot higher than I expected for being fed so little paper.

“That’s it!” I called out more to my surroundings than to Princess Luna. “ ...I’m finished.” I felt tired. I turned back to my daughter and expected some sign from her broken horn but nothing changed.

I continued watching for any sign as I crawled around behind my daughter and took my resting place with a hoof over her. I pulled her hooves near her and hoped I could keep her back warm. Nothing happened for the rest of that night though.

I nuzzled into my comatose daughter’s mane. I hoped I didn’t mess up too much. I hoped Princess Luna would keep her word. I hoped there was enough magic in the world to do all the things she said.

At some point while feeling the warmth of my daughter and smelling her mane my consciousness collapsed under the weight of my exhaustion.

The first thing I became aware of was how cold I was. The second thing were birds chirping. It must have been morning. There were steps, the thing that must have woke me up. Princess Luna said help was coming. In my grogginess, I assumed that was it, despite how odd the hoof falls sounded and I slipped back unconscious again for just a bit longer.

What finally woke me up was something cold and metal prodding me. I tried to open my eyes to figure out what that was. One eye was sealed shut from the dried mud caking the side of my face.

“Jesus Christ! It’s still alive!” shouted a man.

Heh. I must look pretty bad. I felt pretty bad too. I was cold all the way through and every limb was stiff. I rolled to sit up and every muscle I needed to do so protested.

And that was when the human, I realized, took a step back and leveled his rifle at my face.

Oh. Help didn’t come. He must’ve been one of the men from last night. I took in his face. His black hair was filled with gray streaks. He was stout, a little sloppy and seemed fearful of me. I saw someone moving behind him. It was a teenage boy dressed similarly to him: camo and hunter orange. Even if they weren’t dressed alike I could tell they were related: they had the same dark, curly hair. The boy even had a scraggly beard as a poor imitation of his father’s.

The teenager looked up from the remains of the dog, bewildered and unsure if he should be angry. The forest around us was trampled and burnt from the struggle last night. That vinegary sweet smell from my struggle still hung in the air, no doubt from the pudding and wine in the clearing. And my daughter and I were survivors at the edge of this mess. It was obvious we were involved.

I looked down at my sleeping daughter. Her broken horn still glowed that blue light. If Princess Luna was here I wondered if she could protect us. I couldn’t run. I didn’t even think I could stand.

I heard a soft click and looked back up at the hunter. I realized he turned the safety off of his rifle.

“Dad? We’re supposed to take’em in alive,” the boy behind reminded him.

“I’m going to put the big one out of its misery. We’ll just take the little one in,” the father explained.

“No,” I protested hoarsely. I couldn’t stand so I rolled my body over and on top of my daughter, shielding her. They wouldn’t take her. It would be over my dead body. “You can’t have her.”

The father was unsure when he heard my ‘no’ but looked horrified at my command.

“Don’t do that! Stop talking!” the father shouted at me. When he did I could smell the distinct smell of alcohol and cigarettes on his breath. He aimed the rifle back at me. I shivered, but I think I had been shivering already.

“Please don’t,” I spoke up again. I didn’t know what to tell him to make him not fire. ‘I’m friendly? I come in peace?’

I felt it before I saw it and long before I heard it.

I thought the feeling was the shivering changing into a strange tingling hum: like tinnitus physically manifesting. It started in my hooves and I felt it in the middle of my forehead and a little on my fur beneath the mud. I wondered if this was just what death felt like until the boy spoke up.

“Dad? What is that?” the teenager asked. From my periphery I saw him looking around. He felt it too.

“Just protecting her young. Lots of animals do that,” the father said without giving his son any mind. He seemed hesitant to shoot me now though. He was stepping around, trying to find a different angle and I laid my body as close to my daughter’s as possible. I expected he was trying not to graze my daughter. I felt sick and defeated using her like this to protect my own hide. That weird hum wasn’t helping.

“No, Dad! Up there!” the boy shouted and pointed towards the sky. I felt it too. It was still getting stronger, louder, like it was coming from that direction and above us. Something was coming. Something huge. The tingling grew stronger, I could feel it deep in my bones.

The sky burst.

A giant prismatic display began washing away the dull blue sky. An arc of red and orange fire bled into a yellow and green that was quickly followed by the cool blues and violets. It was like a rainbow halo on fire, with one point bleeding away quicker than the rest. As it traveled across the sky, its colorful bands spread wider until they filled the entire sky.

It was a rainbow. The most vibrant, powerful rainbow I had ever seen: vibrant because I could feel the colors vibrating. Powerful because I could feel its power and beauty inside of me. I felt like my insides were resonating with every color; every hue was singing in a voice inside of me.

The sun was shining now, through it, and it bathed the world in a kaleidoscope of hues. Under that rainbow sky, every color was so oversaturated the world almost looked like a cartoon. In that vibrant light the hunter and his son began to panic as weeds and wildflowers burst up from the ground around us along an erratic path. When the path ended at my hooves I realized it was the path I had fought and bled along the night before.

My gaze turned back to the sky. The phenomenon was the largest thing I had ever seen. It literally was the sky. It must have been hundreds of miles across, if not larger, I could only see an arc of all of its beauty.

Whatever had happened on the west coast days ago wasn’t this. This was impossible to miss and it was impossible to think this was anything else other than what it was:

A Sonic Rainboom.

While I had tears in my eyes, what made me start crying in earnest was when I realized what that bleeding edge was: the one point in the rainbow that had pulled away faster than the rest.

Rainbow Dash.

She got here on Earth the same way we all did and yet she was still as awesome as ever. I understood this was more than just her showing off too: this was a sign; a beacon of hope that could not be ignored by the world or the ponies lost in it. This was a promise to all of us that we were not alone and we were not weak.

Then the loudest, most deafening sound I ever heard happened. It blew the humans down and trees violently shook and cracked in its wake. I felt a horrible pain in my ears and held my filly tight.

And then, as quickly as it happened, that horrible pain in my ears seemed to reverse itself. There was something blinding me and I opened my eyes. That blue light from Ruby’s horn glowed white hot now and the entire forest around us seemed to dim back to a duller contrast, as if magic the Sonic Rainboom had ignited was pulled into it.

I witnessed two miracles that day.

The first was Rainbow Dash’s Sonic Rainboom, nearly right on top of me.

And the second, under that rainbow sky, started with a surge running through me. My back, my legs, and chest tingled so violently I thought I was going to throw up. The tingling almost burned and I could even feel it strongest in my hooves. That magic didn’t stay in me though, it was just passing through. I felt like a fountain as the magic vomited out of me through my hooves. I felt something in that magic funneling it, like a hand in running water, guiding and bending it.

The violent blue light burned deep from the inside of Ruby’s broken horn to the edge of it. I saw, in the middle of her horn, something pointy started to grow. Then something grew over that. Then more layers on top of that, making that originally tiny center mass grow wider and taller. When the layers finally reached the edge I could make out now that it was growing in a spiral. As the final layer traveled up, that righteous blue began to shift in color. By the time the final layer reached the tip it had returned to the most beautiful green in the world.

The light of her horn silently went out but a matching pair of eyes opened and saw the world again. Ruby’s eyes focused on me and we smiled at each other. I cried and hugged her with all the strength that had returned to me and she hugged me back and cried with me. I felt her look over my neck up at the sky but I was more interested in kissing and holding her than looking at the rainbow: a rainbow is beautiful, but I’m pretty biased. There’s one particular hue I like more than the others.

“Mom, she did it.” Ruby said into my ear. Princess Luna did it. Rainbow Dash did it.

We did it. Luna said if we all worked together, we could find Equestria and take it back. She said there was enough magic in the world to do it. We were that magic. I felt it and I believed it now. If Rainbow Dash could do this, then what could the rest of the mane six do? Maybe if we all helped them, we could figure something out: we had a beacon now and we could find a way home together.

I even had a direction to start in.

“Dad??” I heard the boy shout nearby but I ignored him. I didn’t pay any attention to the rest of the world until Ruby spoke.

“Mom!” She shouted in alarm and pointed. I didn’t want to but I stopped kissing and brushing her face to see what it was.

The old man was back on his feet and he had the rifle pointed back at us. There was something red coming from his ears: they were bleeding. There was no more anger in his eyes, only fear, as he stumbled towards us.

I didn’t know if Ruby was able to use her magic again already, if she wanted to, or if Princess Luna was still here to protect us.

We could still die here, healed, together, under that rainbow. I was just witness to more magic and miracles than in my entire life. And yet...

“Dad? Dad!” the boy shouted at his old man as he approached and shook his shoulder. The father was startled, as if he didn’t hear his son sneak up on him. The old man calmed though when he saw it was just his son.

“What?!” the dad shouted, clearly unable to tell how loud he was shouting.

“She’s not hurt anymore! Don’t shoot her!” the boy protested.

“They’re too dangerous to be left alive!”

“You’re the one pointing the gun at them! Dad, please!” the boy reasoned. He pointed at the rainboom phenomenon still hanging in the sky without any sign of fading. “They did this! One of these things did this!”

The father looked up at what the boy was pointing at and he seemed to be reevaluating it. As he did so I took the opportunity to stand again, back onto four fairly sturdy legs. I stood up to put myself between ‘Dad’ and Ruby.

“They didn’t do anything wrong. They were just trying to protect their kin! They’re just lost and scared! If they can make something so beautiful… ” the boy pleaded but wasn’t sure how to articulate what he was feeling. I saw in the father’s sobering eyes he seemed to understand anyway. He looked at my daughter and then at me with much more gentler eyes than he had before.

“ ...yeah,” he agreed with his son. He let out a sigh as he lowered the rifle to his side. He gestured behind him and to his right a little. “The rest of us are coming from that way,” he told me, still a bit too loud but calmer. He pointed another direction, away from the first. “County line is that way.”

I nodded, relieved to see there was good in this father and that the son knew it and was able to bring it out. I looked away from them to point the direction I thought Rainbow Dash went.

“We’re going that way,” I announced loud and deliberately.

“That’s east,” the gruff old man explained to us. Rainbow Dash flew east. Then that was the direction we were going. I nodded in acknowledgement. “Fine,” he said as he clicked the safety back on his rifle. He took several careful steps backwards and his son joined him in giving us space. “I don’t know what the fuck you are or where the hell you came from, but you need to go back there.”

“That’s the plan,” I agreed, loud and well-enunciated. We needed someplace safe to call home. Rainbow Dash was leading us, everyone, somewhere. If Carrot Top was right, maybe it would lead back to Equestria and we could take it back.

The father still seemed uneasy about us but didn’t respond with any hostility when Pinchy’s magic glowed its wonderful hue. I watched them cautiously as my daughter worked her magic.

She pulled an old shirt out of her bag, zipped our bags back up then stuffed her dirty Fluttershy back into hers. After she straightened out our impromptu saddlebags with her hooves I lowered myself and she tossed them over my back. She then pulled herself on afterwards. I stood up and felt the weight on my back. My back didn’t sting with the claw marks anymore. I was still covered in pudding and dried mud. I couldn’t tell what the damage was, if any, but I felt good right now: almost high, but a good high. A sober, clean high. Like my insides were full of light.

The father and son were waiting at a distance for us to leave. I rubbed the dried mud from around my eyes until I could open the one fully again. I really looked at them and smiled at them both.

“Thanks,” I said to the kid. Then I looked at the father. “ ...thank you.”

“We didn’t see you,” the father denied my thanks. He was a rough man, maybe even a temperamental one, but he had a heart and had mercy. His son knew it too. It just took a miracle to pry it out. Instead of a tragedy for the son to deny ever seeing it.

I nodded to ‘Dad’ and turned away from him.

Then, at a reasonable pace, Ruby and I headed east under that prismatic sky. We did what any pony would do: we followed that Rainbow.

I imagine Vinyl and Octavia from The Tunes Are A Changin' but the hint of their story fits many others just as well! I noticed a common theme.

And Derpy in this story...