Pinkie trotted through a field of grass, long stalks grazing her body as she traveled. She had long since given up on following roads. They were hollow emptiness; they told no stories.
As Pinkie crested a hill, the city of Hoofington appeared, sprawled out before her. It was a city much like her hometown of Ponyville, though a bit smaller. Pinkie looked as each building she could see. She did her best to identify what she could.
In the center of the town was a plaza, dominated by a town hall, she deduced. Such an arrangement was common in smaller towns, she had found. The buildings surrounding the area were most likely shops; one she recognized as a diner - it had tables and chairs arranged around it.
Closer to the side of town she faced, Pinkie spotted a few buildings reduced to a blackened pile. It wasn’t uncommon for her to find a few buildings that had burned down in whatever town she visited. Ponies apparently didn’t get the chance to turn off their ovens before disappearing. Some fires simply charred the kitchen; others destroyed entire neighborhoods.
She was fortunate, she thought, that the Cakes hadn’t been cooking at the time of the Disappearing. When the day came, she didn’t bother to check the ovens at Sugar Cube Corner. If they had been on, the chances were that her home would have been destroyed.
“It’s not… my home anymore,” Pinkie said aloud. She was surprised by her own voice - how rough it had gotten over the past year.
Pinkie believed it had been a year; she couldn’t be certain. With both Princesses gone, the Sun and Moon had stopped moving for a while. Pinkie had counted days by how often she slept, but it was easy for her to believe that her count was inaccurate.
After two weeks (by Pinkie’s count), she had noticed that the Sun had moved. When the Princesses disappeared, the Sun was just above the horizon. When she had awoken, the Sun was a quarter of the way across the sky.
It was the first sign that there might still be life. Perhaps Celestia was still out there? She tried to operate the train that with stationed at Ponyville to make the trip to Canterlot, but she was wholly unqualified.
So she set off on hoof. The trip would take about two days if she walked all day. By the time she was exhausted, however, the Sun was at its highest point in the sky, as if it were noon. She felt as if she had walked for hours and hours, but the Sun only moved as if it had been a few. Living for so many days without any sense of time must had ruined her ability to tell time, she reasoned.
She slept soundly in the sunlight. She had grown accustomed to sleeping in the light. When she awoke, everything was dim. The Sun was beginning to set. Now she knew something was still wrong. There was no way that she slept without an alarm to wake her for less than eight hours, and it didn’t take over eight hours for the Sun to set after noon.
When had she arrived at Canterlot, it was the dead of night. The streets, normally packed with busy ponies and rushing carriages, were silent. The carriages stood motionless, many crashed against a building, as if their drivers were plucked from existence without warning. Hats and ties, fancy dresses, and business suits littered the streets - the only indicator of where ponies once were.
Pinkie swallowed a biting sadness when she reached the Royal Castle’s gates. Flanking the gate’s entrance were two sets of royal armor, crumpled together in separate heaps. The spears that the guards held laid flat on the ground.
Throughout the Castle were the same - collections of armor where guards were stationed or patrolling. Pinkie Pie knew how to determine if Celestia had disappeared.
When she reached the throne room, her heart plummeted. Upon the Grand Throne there sat a bejeweled crown and necklace, and golden horseshoes. Celestia had gone just like the others.
It took many more weeks, but Pinkie overcame her woe at the loss of every other pony in Equestria. She found a fascination with the new world that lay before her.
The Moon, which previously had always been a perfect sphere each night, now rose with different shapes. It seemed to cycle through a range of shapes. Some nights there was no Moon at all. Even though she was confident there was no creatures in the entire land, those nights still made her feel scared.
For her entire life she had never known the Sun or Moon to move on their own. She had learned that dark magic is what made the plants grow and the clouds move in the Everfree Forest, but now she had a different theory.
After so long with no intervention from unicorn magic, pegasi weather control, nor earth pony farming, the world found its own way. Everywhere she went she saw new plants growing where there were no earth ponies to attend to them. The first gust of wind not created by a pegasus that she felt was a sensation she would never forget.
Pinkie couldn’t be sure that the new days created by the Sun were the same length as they once were. In fact, she was certain that they were different. Any clock had stopped working a while after all the unicorns were gone - there were no magical auras to keep magical things working- but she simply felt like each day was a little longer than it used to be. It was strange, but she found that she enjoyed it. She actually awoke as the sun rose, rather than hours afterwards.
“Maybe this is the natural way of things,” Pinkie considered. She had never thought of how creatures from other lands would have control over weather or growing plants, but now she thought that maybe they didn’t need to.
Pinkie was quite thankful that plants grew on their own. Though she was an earth pony, she wasn’t very talented at gardening. With wild veggies and flower soon growing everywhere, she never went without food.
For the first several weeks after returning from Canterlot, Pinkie was able to live off of the imperishables stored at Sugarcube Corner. She pretended that she was sick and couldn’t leave, and that the Cakes were out of town. It made her feel a little better to pretend.
The Magical Mirror Pool niggled in the back of her mind for several days. It would be so easy to repopulate the world using its magical cloning. Pinkie eventually dropped the idea. The clones wouldn’t be real ponies, just reflections of her.
Pinkie was glad she didn’t use the Pool. After being made to venture out of Sugarcube Corner for food, she was surprised to find that she enjoyed so greatly exploring pony’s houses. While she set out to find food, she also found great stories.
Each house had clues about who the ponies that lived there were like. Pinkie knew all of the ponies in Ponyville, but not intimately. With all of them gone, she could learn more about them than ever possible.
Sometimes she found interesting things. In Noteworthy’s house there was a collection of metal figurines displayed neatly on a bookcase in his bedroom. Next to his bed was a short table that had a lamp, small bits of metal, a device that Pinkie surmised was a soldering gun, and a few pieces of paper with sketches of potential figurines scrawled on them.
Sometimes she found embarrassing things. There were rumors that Big Mac had an unhealthy obsession with dolls; Pinkie discovered there was plenty of truth to the gossip. The first clue was a ragged old doll that she found tucked beneath a pillow in his room. Investigating further, she found several dolls stashed all about his room.
Pinkie never worried about invading privacy. After all, there was no one around to care, so obviously it wasn’t hurting anyone.
Each house she explored, every town she traveled to, had something new to be found. There was a mystery, a story, for Pinkie to discover all across Equestria.
Pinkie reached the city limits of Hoofington. The first stop for any new town was the post office. The post office was always near the town’s entrance, since it made it easier for things to be shipped out that way. Inside were hundreds of letters and packages that had just been received or about to be shipped. Pinkie took it upon herself to deliver all the things that never did. She also read each one.
Some made her cry, others made her laugh. Most just offered her a little insight into the pony’s life. Unlike in Ponyville, she didn’t have any knowledge of the ponies in the other towns across the land. The letters were great starting points for her stories.
Pinkie always had great memory when it came to other ponies, her friends. Even if these ponies didn’t exist anymore, she felt like she was getting to know them like friends.
So Pinkie sat in the post office, reading each letter, then tucking it away in her saddle bags, to deliver it later. One bag was for any letters for the city was in, the other for things being sent to other cities. If either bag got full, she made a promise - a Pinkie promise - that she would return to deliver them later.
“What great letters today,” Pinkie giggled as she finished reading a letter about a catering order mix-up.
She was about half way through all the letters at the office when her bag for local letters had filled up. She stood and picked up her bags before heading out the door.
“Oh!” Pinkie blinked. “Dark already?”
A strong gust of wind blew against Pinkie, making her shudder. Her tail especially seemed to shiver in the cold.
She turned to the nearest house. It felt strange at first, but Pinkie had grown accustomed to sleeping in whatever beds she found. It was like a sleepover with the friends from her stories.
As she opened the front door of the house, Pinkie heard a strange sound. For the past year, the greatest noise she had heard was a breeze rustling the leaves of a tree.
The sound was distant, but Pinkie could make it out. It was singing. A lone voice, repeatedly saying “La” to a melody.
She was hearing things, certainly, she decided. She covered her ears and hummed loudly, hoping to drive the sound away, but when she stopped, the sound had not changed. It was still a distinct, melodic, singing.
Pinkie had learned better than to get her hopes up. It had been a long time, but this wasn’t the first time that she had thought she might have found evidence of another pony still living. Still, her heart began to race.
“Hello!?” Pinkie shouted. The singing continued.
Now she was certain she was crazy. If there was a pony singing, they would have heard her and stopped. Right?
Pinkie wasn’t sure. All she could think of was the sound of the distant singing. There was a chance.
She listened intently, trying to determine which direction the voice came from. She took off in one direction, but the voice got quieter as she went. She stopped, was the voice fading away, or did she go the wrong way?
She galloped in the opposite direction; the voice got louder.
“Is somepony there?” Pinkie cried out, her voice cracking.
The pulse of her heart sounded loudly in her brain, adding a steady rhythm to the song.
“Please!” Pinkie shouted, “If you’re there, please, say something!”
The singing continued. Pinkie let out a choked sigh as she hung her head. She had truly gone crazy.
Pinkie sobbed for a moment before the singing changed. The voice became deeper, and the rhythm slower. It continued to drop and slow in pace,
“...like a broken record player…” Pinkie murmured.
She walked closer to where the sound came from as it petered out to a silence. There was a house, one of the burned homes that she had seen from the hill. Half of it still stood, but most of it was burned.
In the center of what looked to have been a living room was a table with a record player sitting on it. Pinkie walked over to the player. Laying next to the player’s on switch was a picture frame that was face-down.
The gust of wind before, Pinkie thought, and her tail, it wasn’t shivering. This frame fell and hit the switch. The music player must have had some magical power still left in it.
Pinkie sighed and flipped the picture back upright. The glass in the frame had broken, so Pinkie removed the picture from the frame. On the back of the picture was a small message: “Golden Melody turns 7”. The picture was of two ponies and what looked to be their daughter.
“I have a gift for you, Melody,” Pinkie smiled. She retrieved a large flat package from her bag. She had opened it before. It was a few blank records.
Pinkie Pie yawned as she gazed at the picture of the happy family. It was time for her to go to sleep. The bedrooms of this house had been lost to the fire, but there was a couch next to the old record player. Pinkie climbed onto it and made herself comfortable.
“Goodnight, Melody,” Pinkie whispered. “I’ll try to remember your song.”
Author's Note
Thanks for reading, remember to leave some feedback by commenting.
If you enjoyed this, consider following me, and if you haven't, give The Tragedy of Pinkie a read.
At some point I'll write some things that are less serious, heh.
