It was beautiful.
All of it.
Each color, each hue, each magical piece of Equestria's beautiful landscape.
It had started with grey, a grey so grey that it completely shrouded her life and depressed her to no end.
It was the rock farm. Her birthplace, where she would spend her entire life laboring at, looking at nothing but rocks; mining nothing but rocks; counting, scoring, rating, watching, and gazing at nothing but rocks day by day by day. Day by day by day brought nothing but a shallow insight into a bleak nothingness, walking out into the farm ground with a pick and a firm reminder of what she was and would always be.
It was the rock farm, in all its grey, depressing, shrouding glory.
But it was beautiful.
All of it.
It was her life, after all. It wasn't like she could have just left. Her family was there, all of them. Her father, Igneous, and her mother, Cloudy. Her sisters as well: Maud, Marble, Limestone. All were set solely on doing nothing but residing at the rock farm for the rest of their days, doing nothing but anything involving rocks. Rocks. Rocks rocks rocks.
She couldn't have just left them. They were her family. She loved them dearly, more dearly than anypony she had ever met. Quite the same, she had never actually interacted with anypony else in the first place. The rock farm was miles away from any kind of official establishment, and was even distant enough away from any roads that any caravaner would dare wander on. The rock farm was distant, like a lost place that nopony in their right minds would ever dream of, like an idea that nopony truly wanted to think about. The rock farm was it all. It was depressing. It bore down on her every waking hour upon every waking day upon every waking week that she found herself walking out into the fields with her pickax.
And, yes, it was grey. Oh, so, so, grey.
She remembered that one day, while she was in the western field working away at a large pileup of sedimentary's, she looked to the sky and practically broke down, sobbing into her forelegs that she would remain, forever, there.
It was her home.
But she hated every single thing about it.
It was constricting, like a snake wrapping itself around her body in a death grip, or like a small, rusted cage set out for nopony to see. It was like a prison cell that she could not escape. And she wanted out. It bit into the back of her brain and took her entire mind, her entire body, and made her want nothing more than to leave, to escape.
But, in the end, there was no leaving. There was no escape.
Only miles upon miles of barren fields, and thousands upon thousands upon thousands of grey, grey rocks.
There was no escape.
Her father never said it out loud, never spoke it clearly when he interacted with his daughters. He only implied it.
"Now remember children," he would say, lowering himself close to the ground, dirt or wood, to speak more appropriately to his offspring, "Mommy and Daddy won't always be there to help you, and when they get old, they're going to need you here."
"What do you mean by that?" her sister Limestone would always ask, eyes wide and brow raised in confusion.
Her father's eyes would always narrow in response, if only for a brief second, before the smile on his lips returned, and he replied, "We just want our children to be here to help us as we get older. We can't do this all ourselves, now, can we?"
It was a lie. A straight lie. A stone cold lie, like the rocks his children would forever harvest. And only she saw through it.
Only she saw through the filthy, dirty, cheating, stone cold lie her father spoke. Limestone, Marble, even Maud never saw their father for his true ways.
But she did.
And she wanted no part of it.
