The Temple of Avo

She was very young when they came. Great bursts of fire falling from the sky, igniting the grass beneath her hooves, charring great, black holes in a sea of soft green. She remembered the screaming - her neighbours were running past, and behind them large black stallions with crossbows thundered, and her - ten years old, left alone on the dead, dirt-ploughed acres outside Barrow Fields. There was mud and ash in her mouth, but she could not spit it out. She could not move her body. She lay on her side, wheezing for breath. She did not remember how she got there. Everything looked and sounded like she was underwater, but fire seared heat through her coat and smoke filled her nose and there was a sharp pain on the left side of her head.

Her brother. Where was her brother? He'd been here just a second ago, standing on the road, so close........

And then, there was darkness. It was as if she had been rushed into a tunnel: the screams vanished, and all was silent save for the crackling of fire. The sun had been extinguished forever, the inky darkness compressed around her like a thick blanket. She climbed to her hooves, moving as if on strings, pulled around like a puppet. Mechanically she walked back through the ruins of her villiage, alive with happy people what seemed like only seconds ago. Now, their corpses lay strewn about the road. She looked at them, but they didn't register. She didn't want to really see at them, didn't want to recognize someone she knew. The smog in the air was thick and acrid, and her nose burned as she neared her house. Her father lay on the cobblestones outside it, the lower half of his body missing.

"Oh," she thought, before swaying on her hooves and throwing up in the grass next to her. There was so much blood. So many broken houses and broken bodies. A great, heavy hoof was laid on her shoulder, and a gruff voice said "Twilight Sparkle, pull yourself together." She couldn't see him. She couldn't see anything. Her eyes were filled with tears and smoke.

"They've taken your brother."

Slowly, Twilight looked up at the stallion towering above her, but could not make sense of his face. Every time she examined it, it swam away from her. It didn't matter. Her father was dead and-

"Don't you want to do something about it? Come on, stand up straight. You can grieve when the bastards responsible for this are dead."

She turned blurry eyes back down at what used to be her father, and rage seared through her body. Her horn tingled excitedly, the magic in her veins agitated. "That's right," the stallion said, "you will get through this. A person can live on hatred alone. It is a hard life.....but it looks like you have no other life left now."

"Come with me. I can help you."

And Twilight went with him, and did not look back. She didn't doubt this tall, strange stallion for a second. He promised revenge.

The Hero's Guild was nothing but an old castle when she joined. It would be filled with other young pupils soon, the Guildmaster had promised, looking down on her with pity. There was still blood on her face when they met for the first time. The room she stayed in was empty, and Twilight didn't sleep. She stared out the window, the gash on her forehead dripping slowly onto the oakwood windowsill with an oddly-comforting plink.....plink.....plink, and waited for the sun to come back and promise her that it was all a dream.

Plink. Plink. Plink. Plink. The sun did not rise that day - clouds rolled in from the north, and the ten-year-old unicorn alone in a grand, abandoned bedroom knew that it never would again.

She was so young.