Band of Five Attributes (Re-Written)

Yuuki tossed and turned in her bed, eyes scrunching one second and relaxing the next. The dream world had quite the oddity to give her this night: in that dream, she stood in vast white. Nothing was discernable from the color that reflected all others. There was solid ground, yes, but that too was pure as snow--perhaps even purer than that.

The pegasus didn’t bother taking a look around; there was nothing here, as far as she could tell. For a moment or two, she stood perfectly still.

“Where am I?” She wondered aloud, her voice faintly echoing in the white. This dream surely wasn’t like the others she’d experienced, and she arched a brow at the fact. Hesitantly, she moved a hoof, finding more solid white ground to work with.

Something was off about this dreamscape, but with all this white, Yuuki could not for the life of her put her hoof on what that was. She began to move forward, her hooves slow at first before quickening into a trot.

Nothing seemed to change right yet, so she kept going. Just what was this place, apart from a really odd dream?

She trotted for thirty minutes, then an hour, and still got no results as to what this dream had yielded.

“Ugh! Why doesn’t trotting do any good?!” Yuuki cried, sitting on her rump so she could throw her forelegs at the white sky. Her eyes narrowed low as she did this. “Screw this, I’m flying!” The pegasus tried spreading her wings, only to receive a surge of pain as they failed to respond. She shrieked in agony at this for a moment before looking ahead of her.

Still more damned white to scour. It seemed like it would never end. Why did there have to be so much white? The irritated pegasus got up and began trotting forward again, noticing a faint speck in the distance.

A very faint one too. It’d looked like it’d take forever to reach.

Slowly, oh so slowly, she got closer to the speck which seemed to grow bigger little by little as she approached. Eventually, it began to take on a shape that was erratic at first.

In this world of white, as she got closer, she found herself approaching a town of some kind. Even so, a question still lingered in her mind: what was this place, apart from being one with the dream world, and what purpose did she have here?

Familiar shapes began to become more defined as she continued her approach. Trees bunched up here, a barn near those bunched trees, a treehouse on the westmost side of town…

“Ponyville…?” Yuuki inquired, blinking to make sure she was seeing correctly. “Are the laws of the dream world fucking with me again?”

She got closer still, seeing a nearby carrot farm, and houses here and there. The pegasus continued, noticing the shapes looked black as night, sharply contrasting the white in which she was trying to leave.

At last, a path of dirt began to form before her. It was monochrome grey, and it hung heavy where bright colors should be. She, however, retained her usual tones of purple, which once again contrasted the dull grey path.

Something was definitely off now. She kept trotting, her eyes catching sight of the fields of the carrot farm and apple orchard.

The farm was barren, and so were the branches of the trees. Not a single leaf was to be had, which was funny because the grass surrounding the path was growing like greyed-out weeds.

Yuuki took a look around just to make sure she was seeing correctly. Upon turning around, the white she was in had suddenly turned to pitch black for a split-second, causing her to jump.

Her ears caught the sound of a child giggling. The sound held an air of innocence, with some hints of playfulness here and there. Turning back around, a silhouette of a foal was standing between a few houses in the nearby street. She couldn’t make out the features clearly, save that it had a mane and tail as long as those of a typical filly.

The foal giggled again, turning around and dashing off into the distance.

“Hey! Wait up!” Yuuki cried, quickly galloping after it. The foal outran her, which should not have been possible, given its small size. The foal seemed to have been taunting her with its giggles as it continued to run away in a straight line.

The pegasus stopped, gasping for breath. The foal had stopped as well, at a reasonable distance away from her. Yuuki tried flaring her wings again, only to grit her teeth as another surge of pain greeted her.

“Ha ha! You can’t fly!” The foal teased, the voice pronounced enough to tell the pegasus its gender: a colt. The colt turned around and began running away again, and the pegasus scowled.

“What have I gotten myself into now…?” She hissed in a whisper, quickly galloping after the annoyance again.

“You can’t catch me!” The colt teased incessantly as the mare continued her seemingly-vain attempts to follow him. Yuuki collapsed, adrenalin and oxygen abuse aiding her tired muscles in screaming at her to stop.

“Fuck…” She mumbled, “I don’t recall losing energy this fast…”

The colt turned around to show off his black-obscured side, and a peculiar point stuck out of his forehead. Was that a horn, or a tuft of mane? Yuuki was unable to tell which it was; her vision blurring slightly as she regained her breath again.

The pegasus rose once more, the pain in her limbs now numbed to a mere afterthought. The colt looked at her again, and only then she could see the color of his eyes.

A ruby red.

The colt giggled again, eyes glinting as he once more took off running.

“Can’t you stand still for ONE FUCKING MINUTE?!” Yuuki hollered, yet again chasing after him. As she ran, she looked over her shoulder and found the town crumbling behind her into that void of white. Her eyes widened, and she looked ahead of her whilst her legs kicked into overdrive and propelled her to wherever the colt was running off too. She couldn’t afford to stall, not when the very world was crumbling behind her every step.

The pegasus ran for what seemed to be an eternity of never-ending street lined with houses that appeared to repeat themselves. The colt suddenly ran into a structure that stood out from the rest.

A wrecked train cart that lay on its side.

Yuuki had no choice now; she jumped into the train cart’s back door quick as lightning right as the door behind her slammed shut. Metallic groaning resonated as the cart inexplicably righted itself onto its wheels, the white eating up all else that was outside.

On the other side was the damned colt, his pelt and mane colors now as clear as his eyes: a coat of golden orange, and a mane matching hers, albeit a darker purple. Protruding from his head was a horn--a horn that was glowing in deep red at that.

A red flag instantly went off in the pegasus’s head, and all she could do to the colt was gawk at him. The colt approached her, an innocent smile plastered upon his muzzle.

“Why’d you leave me, mommy?” He asked.

Yuuki’s jaw worked up and down, but she couldn’t form words with which to convey an answer. She did this for another moment or so, as if her brain shut down then and there. It didn’t help that he was still smiling, standing in front of her with seemingly no clue of what exactly transpired so that he was created and destroyed in short order.

She could've sworn he was terminated before he could develop. Why, then, was she seeing him as though she let him live?

The colt’s horn glowed brighter, and the pegasus found herself landing upon the door backside-first. Her front legs were held apart from one another, as if she had been crudely crucified.

“Why’d you kill me?” The colt asked, his smile fading as tears began to well in his eyes.

Yuuki suddenly found words, and she had at last spoken them. “I didn’t want you, and I couldn’t take care of you. There. You happy?”

A vase appeared from straight-up nowhere and was promptly smashed to pieces upon her head.

“But I wanted to live! I wanted to see daddy!” The colt whined, eyes narrowing as tears began trickling down his face.

“You can’t do either! Your daddy--no, sire--was nothing but a foul pony!” Yuuki hissed, eyes narrowing low.

“That’s not true!” The colt protested, making another vase appear so it could be smashed upon the pegasus’s head. “You don’t know daddy like I do!”

“That’s because the fucking prick lied to you!” Yuuki hollered, now becoming reasonably irate with this set of circumstances. Another vase was smashed upon her skull in short order.

The colt was angrily sobbing and screaming at the top of his lungs at this point, and he began hurling more and more vases until the pegasus could take no more, waking up screeching in pain whilst sitting up in her bed.

She looked around, seeing she was still in her room. The door was wide open, with Kaguya and Takashi looking right at her with wide-eyed expressions. The pegasus breathed a sigh of relief before a cold breeze hit her. She looked down, finding she was sleeping in a pool of her own sweat.

“Yeah...you don’t look alright.” Kaguya remarked, causing the young mare to shoot a glance at her.

“What time is it?” Yuuki groaned, removing herself from her soaked bed sheets. Her entire frame was still drenched in sweat, and she winced as the pain she felt in the dream came rushing back to her full-force.

“About eight in the morning.” Takashi replied, sighing. “Go take a bath and come down for breakfast, you honestly need it.”