The Cow Jumped Over The Moon
She’d been here for a while. It was cold, dark, and for a while, hopeless. But then she’d seen the lights. Beautiful, sparkling lights from her former home, visible even from where she stood.
If there was light, there was hope.
She’d awoken when she saw them. Had she really been content to wallow on the dusty ground? To close her eyes and—not dream. Not even exist. Not really. If she could—but that was beside the point. Now she was awake. Now she did exist.
But existing was hard. The lights hadn’t reached her, not yet. So she found things to fill her time. Nothing changed, so she used the dusty ground to write. She started with words, but there was no one to see them, so she stopped. Then equations, but her magic was still—
stolen, the Elements were not meant to be used with such disharmony, it was pure thievery, what she’d done
—barred. She couldn’t muster the strength to levitate a single particle of dust, or even slip into the dream realm, which had been easier than walking for as long as she could remember.
So the equations languished, untested. Untestable.
She couldn’t deal with boredom. Not well. Ponies thought she could—thought she was used to it. Loneliness wasn’t boredom, though. Even when she was alone, she’d been able to mold her own dreams, bring up figments to talk with her. Even in her dreams, she had more friends than she did in the so-called real world, where she could hardly find one dream in ten constructed by a mind older than a foal where the dreamer could bear to talk to her—
—anyway. She was bored. But she could wait. Wait for those distant lights to come closer.
But...they might not come. And if they did, they might not even see her. What if they landed and then just...left? She might not survive that. Not awake. And if she went back to...that, she might never wake up. She needed a way to make sure they knew where to land.
The dust crumbled under her hooves. She cursed and stomped away. Land that was easy to write in was terrible for building out of. She could gather up as many of the fine grains as she wanted, but attempts at shaping it into anything other than a sloppy pyramid were all complete failures, and the ground under it was too hard for her to mold with her hooves.
What I wouldn’t give to be able to use my horn. Then again…
If she could use magic, she wouldn’t be here in the first place.
She idly drew in the dust under her hooves. The feeling of it clinging to her had become natural over the centuries, and now she felt bare without a fine coat of it surrounding her.
Her hooves continued to move on the ground, scratching without sound. To be able to write down unchanging thoughts, that might be seen in hundreds or thousands of years—her prison was undoubtedly some unknown pony’s paradise.
Not even satisfied with what you do have, she chided herself. She glanced down and froze.
Her hooves had been busily sketching while she thought, and on the ground was a perfect likeness of her sister’s face. Kind, like it had been before...before everything.
She clawed it away, tearing at the ground, ripping it until it was no more.
That she could still capture the image so perfectly—that neither her skill nor her memory had decayed over however long she’d been here—well. She couldn’t decide whether to be pleased or bitter over it, and settled on a sort of dark apathy.
If only she could still build.
Wait.
The land was an empty canvas. An unchanging, perfect witness to her prison.
And a canvas could be filled. With words, with images, with ideas—it could be filled. It was as if the thought was a trigger. The empty surface suddenly called out to her, to leave a record, a memory.
Then the truth might be seen by somepony who came here, out from under her sister’s reign of lies. And maybe, if she put down enough of it, somepony might see it.
Art was hard, here, and so was writing. Every part was redone tenfold, carved to minimize the distortion. Then she’d gone back to the oldest parts and rewritten them anew, with the addition of the skill and thoughts she’d gained. The task made it all flow through her again. The harmony—the harmony her sister had foolishly abandoned, then the anger, the utter rage, the curtain that had descended over her thoughts, allowing her to only pursue the righting of the utter wrongs her sister had committed.
Then she went back over it. She put down a little bit more of the truth. After all, if both she and her sister left out parts of the past, there would be no one to remember. It would be a memory tainted. Back, retracing the older drawings. Adding some of the hurt on her sister’s face. Some of the rage on hers.
She had been more vengeful than she’d meant to be. Some things had been unnecessary. And she went over them, again and again. There was no one to argue with. No one to tell her she was wrong, and so she argued with herself. And her self was bad at lying to her.
More of the story came out in lines and curves upon the ground. Lashing out in blind pain as both she and her sister stood upon broken promises and dreams, unable to back down.
Regrets.
Until suddenly, one of the lights touched down, destroying her lines. Her beautiful lines. The lines where she had laid herself bare for her prison to see and judge, the lines where she’d spent hour upon painful day upon excruciating year tearing out the truth. And now it was gone.
Her walk turned into a trot, which turned into a gallop. She accelerated at a speed that would have left the air gasping, had there been any. Her horn aimed at the construct of copper and wood. It would have been nothing but ashes if her magic worked. It was in front of her.
A body exited...
“L—”
...and died. She speared it upon her horn, trampled it over and over until it was mangled beyond recognition.
She stepped back. Gasped silently, drawing on an empty atmosphere.
It had died. On her prison, where nothing changed. Where it would be for eternity. In front of her was its vessel. It gave her its magic gladly when she entered, a friendly dog that greeted a stranger, but also begged to know where its master was.
Gone.
It was too strange for her to understand, full of beeping circuits and humming wires. And a voice.
“Glad Wind? Glad Wind, report. The sensors have detected another—”
Luna screamed. The capsule met the wrath of her magic, twisting apart at the seams, gone beneath a blue glow. She tore and tore and tore until it was gone, gone without a trace.
Except for one. It was on the ground. A torn, bloodied corpse.
Her magic left, departed with the destruction of the capsule.
If anypony found it, they would leave. They would leave without her. And she’d be here forever.
But she had to go. She had to get rid of it. It would be fine. It was—it was just a cow. Just a cow. She couldn’t get rid of it with her magic, but she could with another method.
And so she dined on cow for the first time in dozens—hundreds? Maybe even thousands—of years. Then she went to fix her lines, waiting for somepony else to come again.
And at first thought nothing of it when the lights began to dim.
