They say you can never go back home.
I mean, they aren't entirely wrong.
Sure, you can go back home. Daring Do was in the process of doing so right now. It involved flying, mostly. Woe be it the pegasus who can't have that melancholic moment--as if the subject of a motion picture--where she sits on a bus, silently asking herself what she seeks and what she leaves behind, and whether all this upending and unfinished business and new beginnings will really amount to anything, or whether this cross country journey upon a seat in a vehicle of public transportation containing dozens of other souls--some lost, some found, and most somewhere in between--is even really worth it, or if it's just a sad attempt at escapism on a geographical scale.
Not because she's a pegasus, and pegasi fly everywhere rather than use public transportation. No, that would be silly. Sometimes a mare doesn't really feel like flying, and would rather use her bits--hard earned or otherwise--to pay somepony else to get her where she needs to go. Nothing wrong with that, and it is in fact not the reason Daring--or any Pegasus for that matter--couldn't enjoy being moody and contemplative on a bus.
Ponies don't have busses.
Ponies don't have busses, but they do have trains, but you know, trains just aren't as sad. I mean, Eakin wrote a story about trains being vehicles for new beginnings, but that was over a year and a half ago. He hasn't published anything since. Clearly the take away here is that trains will derail your writing career.
Yes, it's a pun.
Daring Do's name is also a pun, on the phrase "derring-do". Don't read too far into that, though, because most ponies names are bright happy nouns, sometimes with adjectives or verbs attached to them. Scootaloo and Cheerilee are exceptions. Actually, maybe they aren't. I don't want to spend the next fifteen minutes researching pony names. What I was going to say was that while this practice may seem strange to humans of the European tradition, it is commonplace in Asia.
But it's irrelevant, because Daring Do isn't Daring Do's real name.
Daring Do was in fact named A.K. Yearling. Or perhaps A.K. Yearling was Daring Do! Is her change of name a metaphor for how we reinvent ourselves as people when we leave the nest? Is it a metaphor for abandoning our family roots and who we really are? Is it a metaphor for the irrevocable experience of growing up and out of our childlike ways? Or did the mare in question simply not want throngs of ponies bugging her? We'll never know Cynewulf's thoughts on the matter though, because 188 weeks ago, Daring Don't was but a twinkle in Dave Polsky's eyes. Actually they were probably in storyboarding by then, but that's a lot less poetic.
At any rate, Daring Do was heading home. Not to face a reckoning over some old family feud, or to start anew ironically in the place where it all began, or hold up her part of the custody deal, or to attend the funeral and pick through her mother's stuff, inevitably spending several thousand words meditating on the nature of stuff and how transient and ephemeral our lives are and whether one of those reality TV shows would find anything of worth among all this junk. Nay, she headed home for none of these reasons.
Daring Do headed home to the Delta Lands (the name of which, were this a humanized story, would be excuse enough for a pun about commercial aircrafts of a certain aviation company reuniting with the terra firma)--those magically sun-scorched lands where lots of poor ponies lived that were slowly drying up despite being nearly at sea level and near the water, probably due to chaos magic or something, but really, it's not that important to the story and doesn't at all serve as a metaphor for the decay of life--because she needed to fix her jeans.
Just as when she left her home she tore a tiny bit of life out of the community hanging on so figuratively precipitously (not literally because this is a delta we're talking about, and deltas are pretty flat, save for the presence of levees.) to life, so an errant swipe of a tiger claw had ripped a hole in her jeans. It wasn't that she didn't own a sewing machine, though that wouldn't be all that surprising given most ponies don't wear many clothes and probably just take stuff to a tailor when they need repairs, but rather she did, and it was broken. Her sowing machine was broken and it was a metaphor for how so often in life the people we depend on to help us flake out. Sure, she could have just patched the hole by hoof--she still owns a sewing kit after all--but then this would be a one sentence story, wouldn't it?*
*Who am I kidding, I'm sure I could have still stretched it out to a thousand words. I mean, we're at 870 and Daring hasn't even gotten home yet. This whole experience is like my first time having marijuana edibles shortly after they were legalized in Washington State at Everfree Northwest 2015 (Or was it 2014, I can't remember, just as Daring's memories of the ponies in her life also fade and distort), when I left the writer's hang out and headed back to my hotel room across the street and even though it probably took about 25 minutes including a few stops along the way at other parts of the convention, it felt like an eternity because time dilation hit me really hard. The next year I again had too much in the way of edibles and I decided consuming marijuana at a convention just wasn't for me because it made me antisocial. I was surrounded by FimFiction friends I wanted to talk to, but I just didn't feel like engaging in conversation, just as Daring Do and so many others are reluctant to engage with the important ponies in their own lives, even as they slip away, victims of the cruel ravages of time.
Anyway, Daring used this as an opportunity (or an excuse, depending on the connotation you're going for) to go home to the Riverlands (Which I realized was what her home was actually called but I couldn't dare to part with that aviation pun so I'm just going to retcon it here) to reconnect with her family.
Daring Do continued to fly. In the midst of all these empty, hollow words, reminiscent of our empty, hollow lives, it might have been easy to forget that she was, in fact, flying home. How easily we forget about the important things in life, only to have them rush screaming towards our face when it becomes too late to ignore them, like a school research project that's due tomorrow night and was assigned three weeks ago but you're only just now reading through the assignment requirements with an ever-increasing sense of dread as you stare into the mouth of the beast that is the impossibility of actually completing this project within the next two days to anything remotely approaching a satisfactory degree, and you must reconcile with the fact that you're going to get a bad grade, and--to quote another early blues song that Led Zeppelin threw into a psychedelic hard rock blender--you realize it's "Nobody's Fault But Mine".
Daring Do continued to fly, and as she did, the lands below her changed. Where once below her were vibrant verdant forests, now there were only what could generously be called scrubs. Gangly trees hanging onto life but fighting a losing battle with death punctuated the dusty landscape, and the sun distinctly felt five degrees hotter. Fahrenheit. This is analogous to the American South, after all, and they don't use none of that Commie centigrade rat droppings there. Anyway, I suppose the above statement is inaccurate. The Sun sits several hundred miles from earth, held aloft by Celestia's divine will (formerly by some unicorn nobles--make of that what you will.) and powered by her warm heart and also nuclear fusion. Were Daring Do to come close enough to it to discern a minute change in temperature upon its surface or within its body, the results would be very graphic, and I would have to bump this story's rating up to "teen" and slap a "gore" tag on it, something I do not wish to do. Nay, rather, daring felt the harsh electromagnetic waves of the sun upon her back, and the air around her felt at least five degrees warmer than it had previously. Just thought I should clear that up.
Daring flew over this almost-desert waste land, when she saw an azure snake. That's a fancy metaphor; she saw the Marementau River**.
**Yes, that's a lame excuse for a horse pun that involved combing the Wikipedia article List of rivers of Louisiana until I found something that worked. Bite me.
Once, perhaps thousands of years ago, it was a proud flowing body of water, but tainted by the malevolent touch of Discord's cruel chaos magic, today it was but a gangly (like those trees earlier) husk of itself, sheepishly barely-more-than-trickling erratically through its mostly-barren and much-too-big bed. I mean, it was still a river, even if it was much smaller than it once was, and so it still had vibrant greenery sprouting up around it, but what I'm saying is that it was a pathetic remnant of what it once was. But around it was where Daring's people called home.
Home. She was home.
Daring barged open the rickety door of the rickety building she had once called home. She stood in the hallway for a moment, absorbing the sounds and smells of cooking coming from the kitchen. She steeled herself, then announced her presence. "Mom, I'm home; can I borrow your sewing kit please?"
A sweet lilting sound rose above the clanging of pots. "Hello? Daring, is that you?"
"Hi, Mom, it's me," Do answered, moving towards the commotion.
"Oh, hi honey, how are you doing? Is adventuring going well? Have you found a marefriend yet?"
Daring trotted into the kitchen, blushing. "Mom, I told you, I'm not gay. I'm just too busy for a coltfriend!"
The elder Doo grinned, nuzzling her daughter. "And I'm not your mom. Welcome home, Sweetie. What brings you back? Miss your mother?"
Daring returned the nuzzle. "No. I mean, yes. But I need need to borrow your sewing kit. I ripped my jeans fighting a tiger."
"Oh, you're so brave. Please do be careful! Sewing machine is in the cabinet in my bedroom, bottom floor. Let me know if you need help.
"Thanks Mom, will do," Daring replied. She found the machine and fixed her jeans.
And then she flew away.
Author's Note
BUT CAN JEANS EVERY TRULY BE FIXED?!?!1/11/1!?!!1!1?/?//!1?
