It was a bright Saturday afternoon in June, and Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon were giggling and talking with each other as they made their way through the forest. The trees were fresh with the growth of the new season, and the sun was full in the sky for the first time in weeks, owing to a mistake by the weather team that had necessitated almost continuous hydration to avoid a drought. As a result, the mossy earth of the forest floor was a bit damp, but neither Diamond Tiara or Silver Spoon seemed to notice.
“Are you sure it was around here?” Silver Spoon asked. She was following Diamond Tiara’s lead, as always, and carrying a small saddlebag containing the necessary items for the rest of the day—a small portable music player, paper and pencils for planning and drawings, and a bottle of apple whiskey Silver Spoon had snuck from her mother’s liquor cabinet.
Diamond Tiara rolled her eyes and brushed an offending branch out of her way.
“Yes, I’m sure. Or… pretty sure. It’s around here, anyway.”
The destination for the day was a new spot Diamond Tiara had found during one of her trips to the nearby woods. It was only natural that having a giant mansion and every toy a young filly could desire would make the alluring chaos of the outside world attractive. This spot was somewhere Diamond Tiara could come to be away from herself for a moment, to take a brief moment to breathe, separate from the constant vortex of social obligation and nuance that was her life in school and elsewhere. The fact that she was showing it to Silver Spoon was, though neither of them drew attention to it, something special; usually, time together was time to be immersed in the world of pony social dynamics they both tried so hard to stay on top of. This was a special afternoon then; an opportunity for something real.
Silver Spoon swallowed a lump in her throat as she followed Diamond Tiara past a set of nasty-looking dead stumps. How did someone as civilized as DT find herself at home in a place like this?
“You remembered to tell your mom you’d be gone the whole weekend, right?” Diamond asked. She held a branch bent backwards as Silver Spoon wiggled past it. The two of them brushed flanks for just an instant.
Bump, bump, sugar-lump-rump. The chant was Silver Spoon’s idea. Diamond Tiara had never said what she really thought of it—that the whole thing seemed like a transparent excuse to practice rubbing their bodies together. That Silver Spoon seemed just a little flustered when she had suggested the idea. That was all fine, because they were here now, and the awkwardness of hidden desires and unspoken veins of want in their friendship could be left behind for the time being. Even though the isolation and privacy might provoke a confession… but Diamond Tiara could deal with that. She’d been snubbing Silver Spoon’s advances for years already, after all.
“Yeah… and you told your dad you were at my place, right?”
“Yep.” Diamond Tiara nodded and laughed, the sharp, joyous cackle she’d practiced when she was young, knowing its cutting power and utterly demoralizing tone would come in useful all throughout her life. “Daddy’s so stupid sometimes.” She laughed again.
Silver Spoon laughed as well, but nowhere near as loudly.
“Ugh, I know it was right around here. Why can’t I find it?” Diamond Tiara began to swivel in circles, snapping her head quickly in one direction, then the other, as though her secret spot might be hiding at the edge of her periphery, waiting to jump out until she managed to catch it in her glance.
“What was it we were looking for again? A cave?”
Diamond Tiara nodded. “Yeah, a little cave. It’s dry, and there’s light because of a hole in the ceiling, and we can spend all day there if we can just find it…” Diamond Tiara sighed. “I swear it was over here… but now I’m not so sure.”
Silver Spoon gave her friend a pat on the back, taking care to remove her hoof before implications of anything other than friendship bubbled in her mind. “Don’t worry, I’m sure we can find it if we keep looking.”
“If we haven’t found it in ten minutes, we’ll go back to Ponyville and find out what the Cutie Mark Losers are doing. That should take up the rest of the day.” Diamond Tiara smiled her jewel-glimmer smile and laughed.
Silver Spoon smiled, but didn’t laugh. “Did you say it was by something? A big tree, or a river, or…?”
“I don’t know. The last time I was here I was a little drunk. Daddy was out of town and I made myself a few Horn Island Iced-Teas…”
Silver Spoon held a hoof to her mouth as she giggled. Diamond Tiara was always fun when she was tipsy.
“Well, try to think. Do you remember anything in particular that was near—“
The ground giving out was a spectacle of unannouncement. Even before the floor of the forest began to slip away beneath their hooves, Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon felt the catch in the atmosphere, like the captivating air of a signature on a document—the mark of finality before consequence.
Suddenly the surface of the earth was gone. In replacement, the forest offered crumbling cliff-ground, collapsing nothingness, and pain relative to velocity as Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon tumbled down their newfound hazard, bodies bouncinglike insignificant pebbles down a well. Limbs flapped like useless opportunities for injury. Rocks and clips of terrain introduced themselves. Eventually the cliff ended. Blackness, even in the sunlight, followed.
Pain wasn’t something Diamond Tiara was used to. She’d been hurt before—scraped herself on the playground at school, burned her hoof on the stove, even felt the sting of her heart in some more intangible way when other fillies at school had been cruel to her, cut her inside with the same sharp tools she made instruments of her social trade—but this was a sensation with a new category all its own. Diamond Tiara hadn’t realized how complete pain could be—how wholly it could consume all of a body’s thought and function, making it almost impossible to do anything other than fixate on the enveloping texture of agony. It was, through no stretch of her recollection, the worst thing Diamond Tiara had ever felt. It hurt so bad it made her want to throw up. She did that, but it still hurt, and now everything smelled disgusting, like the backwash of the apple whiskey she hadn’t consumed yet.
It was also dark. That was because Diamond Tiara couldn’t bring herself to open her eyes, because no amount of pain that extreme could come with a good physical accompaniment to match. Diamond Tiara was vaguely aware that her lower extremities felt less like limbs and more like sleeves filled with blood, bone, and rusty nails. With a sickly heave in her stomach, Diamond Tiara opened her eyes, but refused to look down at herself.
The haze of Diamond Tiara’s pain clouded everything a little bit, but it also made it much more appealing to focus on the minutiae of her surroundings. She might use the word 'chasm' to describe her current location. Brown, mossy rock jutted out at unpleasant angles all around her, and the forest floor she only vaguely remembered as a dewy series of hoof-prints looked very far away—at least more sheer and jagged cliff-face than Diamond Tiara could ever imagine scaling, even if all her legs were functional. Maybe they still were. She’d check later.
As she stared at the obstinate stretch of separation above her, Diamond Tiara became aware of a sound below the threshold of her own aching body’s ambient noise—what sounded like a low humming, or whistling, punctuated every few seconds by silence. Diamond Tiara wondered if the fall had injured her hearing in some way.
It was only after a few minutes of acclimatizing to the sound that Diamond Tiara recognized it—remembered that Silver Spoon had been with her; finally looked to her right, where her lower legs and torso were twisted behind her. Where Silver Spoon was.
“Holy—“ Diamond Tiara went to swear, but her throat wouldn’t let the words out, because there was more vomit, and the impulsive head lurch was only just enough to save Silver Spoon from a face-full of bile and stomach acid. Instead, her face remained silver and red, with glints of glass mixed in. The frames of Silver Spoon’s glasses lay just to the side of her head, bent into strange angles the same way her body was. The lenses weren’t missing—just in pieces, throughout the bits of Silver Spoon that Diamond Tiara could see: face, nose, mouth. Eyes.
“…DT?”
The whistle was the sound a filly’s lungs are forced to make when they’re boxed inside her body under a few sizable chunks of boulder. When she’s breathing through a mouthful of blood and lens shards and the skin of her mouth that’s been torn off with her own teeth as she’s landed.
“Oh my… oh my gosh. Silver… don’t… don’t talk…” Seeing her friend’s face in its own continuum of suffering was enough to clear away Diamond’s clouded perception, like a spear of light piercing a grey sky. The reality of the situation rapidly asserted itself: that the two of them were lost, hurt, and missing without anypony having a clue where they were. They were at the bottom of a large pit with no way to get out. It was getting dark, and Diamond Tiara wasn’t sure how they were going to get home.
Compared to the reality of five minutes ago, which consisted largely of laughter and impending underage drinking, Diamond Tiara was almost sure she was in the middle of some horrible nightmare, and would wake up any second, back at home, possibly with Silver Spoon in bed curled up next to her.
Overhead, a bird cawed, the throaty call of a raven or crow that Diamond Tiara couldn’t see. Something tickled on the roof of her mouth. She coughed and, though it was uncultured, spit. A torpedo of red and bits of pink sprayed from her lips and splashed onto the brown rock floor. Diamond Tiara felt at the roof of her mouth—the tickling was gone, but so was a large piece of skin that had been there before. Everything tasted of iron.
“Don’t… don’t worry, SS. I’ll get us out of this. Just hang in there, okay? Everything’s gonna be alright.”
“DT?” Silver Spoon asked again. Even with her voice struggling through her body under the pressure of the rocks atop her, Silver Spoon still sounded every bit as cheerful and doting as Diamond Tiara remembered her. As always when it was just the two of them, Silver Spoon’s voice carried an “I’m sorry” with every word.
“…Yeah?” Diamond Tiara couldn’t look at first, until she realized not looking might be like a knife blade in an open wound, and turned her head, forcing the clench of her throat and surge of bile in her stomach to remain bodily impulses, rather than manifesting as another bout of vomit.
“Are you… okay?”
Lying wasn’t something Diamond Tiara had ever had qualms with, but the truth seemed to insist itself, and Diamond had to swallow it through years of practiced deception to force the words out of her mouth.
“…Yeah. I’m… I’m okay.”
Silver Spoon let out a noise like a balloon being deflated. Only the look on her face told Diamond Tiara it was a sigh. Before, she would have just read her eyes through silver frames, knowing instantly what she was thinking, sometimes even before she said it. But now she…
“I’m… glad…” Silver Spoon’s words came between wheezes of breath, audible testimony to the emptiness of the world around the two fillies. Confirmation of their isolation. A stab in the coffin of hope.
“Yeah… we’ll both be okay. Just… don’t talk for a little bit, okay? I’ll try to think of something.”
“Okay.” Silver Spoon turned her head on its side and let her cheek rest against the cold, hard ground.
Diamond Tiara tested one of her legs. She awoke to stars rattling in her eyelids—opened them to realize she’d passed out from the pain.
Overhead, a crow cawed.
The night was as easy as it could have been. Every time Diamond Tiara would flicker out of unconsciousness and remember she was supposed to leading, finding a way out of a predicament with no exits, she would glance over at Silver Spoon and let out an internal sigh—Silver Spoon had let unconsciousness take an even harder hold. It occurred to Diamond that this might be the knell of a young pony crushed to death, but she could still hear the tell-tale whistle-breathing that signaled her friend was still alive.
The two of them at the bottom of a pit, in the middle of the forest, with no magic or wings or way out. With no way to contact anypony. With no likelihood that anypony would find them, if they even thought to look. No food. No water.
For the sake of assessing her available assets, Diamond Tiara scanned around for the saddlebag Silver Spoon had been carrying, which might, in the most miraculous of uni-verses, still contain a bottle of apple whiskey.
In the most miraculous of universes, Diamond Tiara was well aware she wouldn’t be where she was right now. The saddlebag was still attached to Silver Spoon’s side, crushed under the right-most rock that was pinning her to the ground. If Diamond Tiara tried very hard, she could detect, through the musk of blood, vomit, and salt, a hint of the whiskey’s distinctive apple scent, like a delicious cider just gone bad. Barrel-aged.
Before sleep took her again, Diamond Tiara took a moment to lay her head face down in her hooves and sob. She knew this would dehydrate her further, but it seemed the only available option.
When sunlight came, it was to the sound of coughing, and the wind carving through the trees so far away. Diamond Tiara lifted her head from its pillow of nothingness on rock and turned towards the source of the coughing—the silver mouth spewing black and red liquid into the crook of a nearby pair of rocks. Before she committed to waking up, Diamond Tiara tested her legs again. Icy fire shot through her nerves, detection so deep that she didn’t know it existed, beneath skin and bone and even what felt like her consciousness—there was pain in all of those, and more than that, and she could sense it, feel it, trace every one of her thoughts through the web of neurons that reflected it—and this time remain conscious, but still unable to move. With a lurch and a loud groan, Diamond Tiara heaved herself slightly to the right, within foreleg’s reach of Silver Spoon’s body—Silver Spoon, Diamond corrected herself. Swallowed the mixture of tears and blood in her throat.
“Hey… Silver Spoon… are you okay?”
Louder coughs answered. Diamond Tiara remembered her grandfather, how off-putting he had seemed in his last years, a slow-moving bout of hacking, wheezing fits and misremembered anecdotes. He smelled like wet earth and diapers, and Diamond Tiara had resented every second with him until he’d died, apart from the moments where he’d bought her things. Even that cough had been disquieting, as though a permanent part of her grandfather’s body was being wrenched away every time he spat out a mouthful of himself—and that was the cough of a body only continuously besieged by the light tapping of age. Not a young vase crushed into powder by the fist of unfortunate coincidence.
For a moment, Diamond Tiara felt offended, as though the world was personally responsible for where she was. Things like this didn’t happen. Death, certainly, and accidents, maybe, and tragedy, well…
Tears came from Diamond Tiara’s eyes, breaking the silence instead of Silver Spoon’s answer.
More coughing, then the wiping of a silver mouth with a nearby silver hoof.
“DT… I’m… okay. I just… hurt… a lot.”
The crying was hard to stop. Only hope could sustain them now.
“I know, Silver Spoon. Me too. But… we’ll be okay. If we can just hang in there for a little longer, somepony is bound to find us.”
Diamond Tiara waited to have the absurdity of the plan she had finally come up with thrown back at her like a violent weapon. Instead, she received the rhythmic whistle of Silver Spoon’s breathing, a signal of her return to the inky void of unconsciousness, where maybe there was no pain for a little bit.
This left Diamond Tiara to her thoughts, which she resented almost more than the whim of whatever chance had put her here.
It was hard not to grapple with unpleasant questions, given the circumstance. There was no room for contemplating happiness or joviality—the construction paper and pencils Diamond Tiara had brought to spend the afternoon sketching plans and schemes on were long since soaked through by blood, pulverized by the weight of the stones atop them. The obligation she had already decided to ignore—her homework for Monday—had been replaced by the most burdensome duty imaginable: to live, despite the world’s insistence that she do otherwise.
It seemed to be necessary to ask difficult questions.
What did I do wrong? As though there was some purpose and intent to the universe as a whole, and that tragedy could only happen to ponies who deserved it. If Diamond Tiara’s conduct her life so far was any indication, all the good fortune that befell her otherwise was vastly undeserved. So it needed to be asked, though the question was unanswerable and unavoidable and immaterial and hurt her inside in a place that was almost more powerful in its agony than the places on her body that now functioned only as memories: Did I deserve this?
Diamond Tiara refused the answer for pain-induced nausea and unconsciousness a few times before there was no more avoiding it.
“Silver Spoon?”
Only a wheeze came. It was dark again, and even though the unmoved silence of the chasm was a metronome in the score of death, the whispering fangs and invisible eyes of animals that must be overhead still sent a chill through Diamond Tiara’s body. She had forgotten how cold the world was sometimes.
“Silver…” The words wouldn’t form, even though, hoping, there would be no response. But still they clumped on her tongue, refused to come into being, until suddenly, they did. “…was… was I a bad pony? Did I... deserve this?"
Silver Spoon’s only reply was her wheezing breath. Still alive, despite everything. The wind howled overhead, cutting through the bows of trees in the night.
Maybe Silver Spoon was thinking: I hate you.
Maybe she was thinking: I counted on you.
Maybe she was thinking: I love you.
Maybe she was thinking: Yes. You do deserve this.
Diamond Tiara didn’t know which one was worse.
Diamond Tiara’s had put her hoof against Silver Spoon’s side so she could feel her breathing, and maybe provide some reassurance despite the fact that she had no sense of any inside herself. So she could feel the wracking wheeze that was her friend’s lurch towards the candle-flame at the end of a long, empty hallway.
“Silver Spoon…” Diamond Tiara started, but any sense of language left her. There was no way to convey everything she wanted to—no word that meant everything she needed to say. No way to combine “I’m sorry” along so many axes.
Silver Spoon raised her head, eyes permanently closed. “Diamond… I… I’m… sorry… I didn’t…”
Diamond Tiara raised her hoof and patted it against Silver Spoon’s side as she lapsed into a coughing fit. Diamond Tiara was almost glad for it; the idea of Silver Spoon apologizing for anything hurt too much to be real.
“Shh… don’t talk.”
That was what ponies said in movies, wasn’t it? When breath was a limited thing, con-served like a drop of water in a near-empty flask?
Night came slowly, but eventually, like most things. Diamond Tiara couldn’t sleep, or didn’t want to—maybe because if she slept, the slow rise and fall of silver coat under her hoof might disappear. So she stayed awake into the night, staring into the darkness as it stared back.
It had been four days. Diamond Tiara knew this because it was impossible not to know, because every minute since the fall had been a praying that chance would save them, that the beautiful happenstance magic of Equestria and its many intertwining lives and their outcomes would result in a saving grace the same way it always had in Diamond Tiara’s life. She prayed to Celestia, who seemed the most logical choice, but also to Luna, and her father, and Silver Spoon’s mother, and to Twilight Sparkle, and Cheerilee and Nurse Redheart and Mayor Mare and even Applebloom and Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle because there was no better time to become a new pony capable of friendship and compassion than when the metallic taste of blood was more familiar than the air itself and fate seemed a cold and cruel thing, only inasmuch as it failed to care about anypony within its machinations. She wished Applebloom would crest the invisible horizon and make fun of her for the predicament that she’d gotten herself into—that she’d laugh at her broken limbs, that she’d giggle and guffaw at Silver Spoon’s torn-apart face, at the way she was slipping one wheezing scrape of a breath at a time towards the end of two ponies in a pit and the beginning of one. All that would be fine if she would just come—if anypony would.
How long could it take to be sure there was no hope left?
Diamond rubbed her hoof against Silver Spoon’s mane. The familiar whistling gasp in her right ear continued.
Longer still, it seemed.
It was odd to let whole days pass without speaking—and yet, there was nothing to say. Life ached. Despair encroached. There were so many unfinished apologies, but no reason to give them. Silver Spoon’s eyes, if they were there anymore, had spelled out her heart, even crippled and breathless as she was. Diamond had wept, knowing as she had always known that Silver’s heart was hers to break, but refusing to do it in words, because that option was a difficulty now anyway. And still it didn’t matter—the two of them were still hurt, still together, still waiting for a respite that seemed impossible. The knots of their friendship had been shredded and reknit into a tether between them, a link between their souls that made communication an act of being. There were no grievances to hold, everything laid bare on the rock floor, gifts and forgivenesses stained red.
On the night of the sixth day, it rained.
There seemed to be sun when Diamond Tiara opened her eyes. She remembered when she cared about the sun. It seemed like such an inconsequential thing now; whether she was dry, whether she was wet. There was just the passing of time, the ache of being. The idea that eternity was, in fact, not a very long time.
“Silver Spoon?”
It was the first time either of them had spoken in days. Words felt unfamiliar on her lips, but the name didn’t, and she needed to hear it, because of what she couldn’t hear.
“Silver Spoon?” she asked again. With her right hoof, she jostled Silver Spoon ever so slightly, the way she might wake a sleeping baby filly from sleep if she were tasked with the responsibility.
With her head tilted, Diamond Tiara listened to the silence of the rocky walls that surrounded her—the forest above had fallen into a hushed quiet, as it did sometimes when the wind was absent.
If she listened very heard, Diamond could hear the faint pulse of the heartbeat inside her own chest.
She felt like she should say something. Maybe there should be tears? Of course there should. But there weren’t any.
Diamond Tiara closed her eyes and craned her head as far to her right as she could—just enough that she could rest her cheek against Silver Spoon’s coat.
Sleep came, a small mercy for once.
There didn’t seem to be much reason in hoping anymore. In opening her eyes. In taking the next breath. But her body was surprisingly insistent, and the next breath came anyway. It tasted like stale blood and a dark hole in the world. Diamond Tiara shut her eyes tighter and nuzzled her cheek into the silver mane beside her. No more days. No more sun or moon.
Did it matter what kind of pony she was? Whether she’d done the right thing, or if this was her punishment for the things about her that she knew were wrong. Like the heat of the sky or the cold of the rain, it seemed irrelevant. There was nothing like right or wrong where she was now anyway—no room for regret or despair, for rewriting the past or imagining the future. There was only silence, and with it the darkness that came from the soul and absorbed every facet of a pony’s being—the darkness that reminded them of the only place everything is truly alone. There was only Diamond Tiara now, and a sense of emptiness—of the chasm that she was in fully realizing its potential for vast, inscrutable nothing, even darker than when her eyes closed their tightest. There was only that, and an apology on her lips that she couldn’t say, that disappeared as the day turned into night and the clouds overhead began to pour, flooding everything underneath in rain.
