The Hoofprints in the Snow

Chapters

1: A Puddle of Starlight
2: The Mist on the Lake
4: Hearth's Warming Blizzard
5: The Hoofprints in the Snow
6: Timber Wolves
7: Walking on Clouds made of Gold
3: Conversation with Death

1: A Puddle of Starlight

— Chapter One —
A Puddle of Starlight

So picture the scene. It’s a cold blustery night in Ponyville—long before the move to Trottingham—and my mum’s in the hospital when the doctor comes in and says to her, “Congratulations, it’s a beautiful baby colt!” Then he shows me to her, and you’d best believe that I was the most adorable earth pony that you ever saw. I had a pale grey coat. I had a bright blue mane and tail which matched my eyes perfectly... and I’m forgetting something, what was it? Oh yeah, I had this winning smile too, much cuter than all the other foals. Quick! What d’you call me? Sunny Days, ‘cos of my smile? Ocean Dreams, ‘cos of my eyes?

If you were my mum then you named me ‘Camera Shutter’, despite not having touched a camera all your life or even knowing anypony remotely interested in photos. Camera. Shutter. Go ahead, say it out loud. Did you shudder? ‘Cos I’m telling you, if you didn’t than you should’ve. Imagine going through school with a name like that!

On the other hoof though, I guess you could say that being called ‘Camera’ is fitting when that’s what your cutie mark happens to be, and especially when the only place you can see me now is in photos. For example, there’s this one of me on my fifth birthday which I really love where I’m blowing out candles—I had it stuck on my wall for the rest of my not-very-long life (I’m nine and a bit years old, thank you kindly). There's others of me and my friends at school or out playing in the street. Out of all of 'em, my favourite’s the one of me and mum at the beach on holiday. There’s this big red sunset. We’re both smiling and our forelegs are wrapped around each other, a hug which’ll last ‘til the end of time.

Camera Shutter’s a silly name but so what? Makes me special. Makes me one of a kind, like mum always knew I’d be...

Look, let’s get one thing straight before I start: this ain't gonna be a happy story. You like sunshine and rainbows? Forget ‘em. Lollipops? Throw them away. You wanna hear stories about cute li’l bunnies? In fairness there is a bunny in this story, but he sure ain't cute in any way, not even a bit. Plus first you’ve gotta know some stuff and it’s about what happens after you die. It ain't what you might think. Nothing is as it seems.

A lot of ponies have this idea that dying is the most painful thing in the world, but that the moment you’re dead an earth pony with a skull for a face pops outta thin air to whisk you off someplace awesome... and all I gotta say to that is, hah! That ain’t what happens at all. Dying, it turns out, is the easy part—doubly so if it’s quick like what happened with me and the cart crash—and then it’s the waiting which is painful, the endless waiting around afterwards and wondering what’s going on, how come nopony can see you? Why are you all see-through? Why are you outside of your body, looking at yourself sleeping on the floor? Ponies crowd around your body trying to save you but it’s too late. You’re already gone.

And then time slows down.

“It’s just a dream,” you whisper to yourself. “This is all a nasty dream. In a minute you’re gonna wake up and mum's gonna be there and everything’ll be alright.”

You keep repeating it. You’ve gotta, ‘cos deep down you know that the moment you stop talking is the moment it becomes real. So you wait there sitting on the edge of the pavement and watching the sun go down behind the buildings. The sun's cold. It's always cold in Trottingham—nopony ever seems to realise how far north it actually is, close to Dundeer and almost on the edge of the Arctic Circle—however at the very least you’d think you’d feel the sunlight on your coat. But nope, not even that. You can't feel the heat. You can't feel the wind on your coat. In fact, apart from the fear in your ghostly belly you can't feel a thing.

You hold a hoof up to your face and you can see the sun through it, and 'cos by then you ain’t thinking straight the first thought that pops into your head is how awesome this is gonna be! For a split second you imagine all the cool stuff you can do now that you’re a ghost. You can pull pranks and nopony would ever know who done 'em. You could wait ‘til it was dark, walk through the wall of the bookshop and read Daring Do novels as long as you pleased, and you wouldn’t even have to put ‘em back on the shelves afterwards. You grin to yourself... that is until the sun drops behind the buildings, then you finally came back to your senses. Pranks? Bookstores?

I was dead. What in Equestria was I thinking?!

As I thought this, the ambulance cart arrived to take away my body. That’s when the real panic set in.

I’m uh... I’m not proud of what I done next, but the fact is that I had a choice: go back home to mum or run away. It should’ve been a no-brainer. I shoulda gone home where I belonged and where I was loved.

But I ran.

Hay! Don’t look at me like that. I knew it was a mistake, but I was scared, alright? Stick me in a room full of manticores and toss away the key. Shove Discord in there. Go get Night Mare Moon riding on the back of a windigo to join him; all of that and it still wouldn’t have made me half as frightened as I was right then. And oh man, you know I’d love to tell you that I had a good reason for staying away from home, like maybe there was demons after me and that if I went home I’d lead them straight to my mum.

There was no demons though, or monsters of any kind. I was running away for no reason other than I was a massive chicken. I wanted to throw up. In my belly I could feel my stomach squirming—or at least I imagined that I could—so I dashed as far as possible and right into the city centre, to the huge expanse of Hampstable Heath.

Aw yes, Hampstable Heath. The green jewel of northern Equestria some called it (usually stuffy boring ol’ ponies who also called Trottingham ‘the Manehatten of the north’ or whatever other rubbish), but in winter that nickname never made sense 'cos the park was anything but green; it was always white with snow and tonight was no exception. I rushed across wide open fields and through thickets of conifer trees, deeper and deeper into the park. It was getting dark. There were no lamps here and the only other lights were from the city, the moon and the stars.

That and my hoofprints, which just so happened to be glowing.

I slowed down and stopped, my mouth dropping ‘cos at first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Yet there were no doubts about it. Wherever I ran I left behind a constellation of hoofprints in the snow, and I say constellation ‘cos that’s what you call a group of stars and that’s kind of what the prints looked like, like I'd been jumping in a puddle made of starlight! Hesitantly, with the memory of my heart pounding against my chest, I pressed a see-through hoof down in the snow and then lifted it up again. Staring back at me was another glowing hoofprint.

A nervous laugh left my mouth and a tiny voice at the back of my mind asked the same questions over and over. I s'pose I'd been thinking about it ever since I realised I was dead, but 'til now I'd been trying my best to ignore 'em.

What did being a ghost feel like? Did ghosts need to drink, need to eat, need to sleep? Were there other ghosts around or was I the only one? Thinking about it, I couldn't have been or else ponies wouldn't even know about ghosts. Did ghosts go to ghost school? Did they all have to live together in big creepy houses? I shuddered. Dead or not, I didn't wanna live in a haunted house.

“Stop it,” I whispered to myself. “There’s better things to worry about then all this.”

What could've been more important I didn't know, but at the same time thinking 'bout all these questions was making me proper nervous. My hooves trembled something fierce as I forced myself to carry on. Finally I came to a halt by the big lake in the middle of the park, and across the ice I could see the gleaming lights of far-a-way towers. I was a small ghost in a big city and I had no idea what to do. How could I? When I'd woken up that morning the worst thing I'd had to worry about was other fillies and colts calling me 'Camera Fluster' or ‘Camera Stutter’ (even though I don’t even have a stutter).

Near a path by the lake, I found this big ol' tree with wild twisted branches. I lay beneath it. I figured that it was a nice quiet spot to go to sleep.

Sleep didn't come easily. As I watched the moon trace it's path along the sky I thought 'bout the mess I was in, and I suddenly realised there was only one other thing in the world that I could think to compare my terror to: this horrid dream I had a few years back. In the dream, I was running through a town filled with old buildings with roofs made out of hay, and... and then there was this big red barn. I kept on running. I was late getting home, and just as I was thinking I wasn’t gonna make it in time I came across a hole hidden next to a little stone bridge with a stream running under it. And you know how in dreams you just know certain things without having to be told ‘em? Well the moment I saw the hole, I knew that it was a shortcut back home. I was sure of it. I’d never been more certain of anything in my entire life.

So I wiggled my way into the hole, pleased with myself that I was going to be on time after all... but it turned out not to be a short-cut at all but a deep black pit which I tumbled into, chilly air rushing past my ears and then whumph. The wind was knocked outta me as I landed smack bang on the floor. With a groan, I looked up and saw the sliver of light that was the entrance to the pit. I couldn’t climb up the walls ‘cos they was all smooth and slippery. There was no other way out.

I was trapped.

I took a deep breath. “Help!” I yelled, but no answer. My mouth tasted like throw-up and I kept thinking of skeletons chained to walls in dungeons. I was going to die in there. I was going to die and turn into a skeleton and then my bones would be white and my mouth would be grinning in that creepy way that skulls always do. Hundreds of years later, ponies would find me and know that I had died in the dark with nopony but myself for company.

My panic turned into outright terror. “HELP! HELP!”

It’s impossible, absolutely impossible to even begin to get across how scared, how petrified I was—anypony who’s ever had a similar experience will agree with me on that one. I ain't talking 'bout some run-of-the-mill nightmare. This was a proper night terror, the sort where you wake up screaming, boiling hot and so delirious that even after you’ve woken up you think you’re still dreaming. “HELP! SOMEPONY HELP ME, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEEEASE!”

And that’s when my mum burst into my bedroom and then the dream was over. “Camera!" she exclaimed. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

I blinked. The walls of the pit transformed into the walls of my room. Mum looked me right in the eyes. “Darling, what’s wrong? Nightmare?”

I blinked, glancing around to reassure myself that it had all been in my head. The sliver of light I had mistaken for the entrance of the pit was actually the moon shining through my bedroom window. It had all been a dream and I wasn’t trapped in the dark. I was safe.

For the rest of that night I stayed in mum’s bed. “My little earth pony,” she whispered as she stroked my mane. “My brave little stallion. Be brave, now. Be brave and don’t let anything get you down.”

My eyelids drooped. Sleepily, I told her about the town in my dream and she said it sounded like Ponyville—my first home. Strictly speaking we still had the house there, however I think that though we didn't live there, mum never had the heart to sell it on. Not grandma's house. Not the place where she'd grown up.

The next morning I woke up with a smile on my face and with mum bringing me up breakfast in bed. It was oats and hay. When I shut my eyes and think hard, I feel like I can still taste ‘em.

Dying’s the easy part. It’s the waiting what’s hard.

The next day I woke up under a tree, and I was ready to rush back home to mum. In my head it was so simple. I’d walk up the street, walk through the front door, head to the living room and then sit down next to her on the couch. It didn’t matter that she wouldn’t actually be able to see or hear me; she’d feel my presence and that would be enough. “You can do this,” I told myself. “There's nothing to it.”

Yet if there was nothing to it then why was it so hard to creep out from under my tree? Every time I did, I looked up to see these great whopping snow clouds being pushed into place by teams of pegasi, and they made me feel tiny and ill, the same feeling I’d had standing next to the lake in the dark. So for the rest of the day I refused to emerge from under my tree, telling myself things like, “Mum’ll be sad and you don’t wanna see that,” or, “The house’ll feel empty, plus she won’t be able to see you anyway.”

Soon enough, day turned into night and the lights of the towers shone in the distance. For the second night in a row, I’m ashamed to say that I lay there worried out of my mind. With a jolt, I realised that I hadn’t eaten in two days but that I wasn’t even hungry; and I dreamed about being buried under snow or trapped inside a dark cave, and I think the reason for that is 'cos... well, have you ever put something super important off? If you have then you’ll know that the longer it goes on for then the harder it gets ‘til the only thing that’s on your mind is the awful feeling in your tummy, as though there’s an imp pushing against the inside of your chest trying to escape. It was shame, I think. I was so full of shame that it’s a wonder I didn't burst... and despite of what mum once told me, I wasn’t a brave pony. Not even a bit.

The second night passed. I was woken up by a pale sun shining through a break in the clouds; another day, another chance. But like Equestria's biggest idiot I went ahead and blew it once again. “She won’t be able to hear you,” I told myself, still afraid to venture out from under my tree. “There ain't no point. Don’t bother, Camera.”

So on it went. The third night started off even worse than the second, ‘cos on top of everything else I hadn’t seen anypony in days, now. Who goes to the park in the middle of winter?

I was gonna be sorry I ever asked. So ridiculously sorry. Everything was about to change.

2: The Mist on the Lake

— Chapter Two —
The Mist on the Lake

“Come here Camera. Stand next to mummy.”

Curious, I trot up to mummy at the top of the sand dune, unsure of what she wants. She levitates a camera in front of her. I glance at her horn blazing with magic, and sometimes I wish that I was a unicorn as well ‘cos having magic would make holding my camera a snap. “Say cheese,” says mum.

Throwing my hooves around her, I beam and stare at the camera. I say “cheeeese,” just like she tells me to and I hear a clicking sound. The flash goes off...

I dunno what it was about the third night but I just had this feeling that something was off, something was wrong. And perhaps it was ‘cos of how anxious I was, but by the time the sun had fully set I was quivering under my tree next to the lake. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. Through the branches I saw the first delicate flakes of a fresh snowfall, and with a gasp I remembered the date: December the twentieth!

How could I have forgotten? This was no ordinary snowfall. In fact take ‘ordinary’, stick it in the ground and then find a pegasus to fly you away from it as far as possible; this was the start of the annual Hearth’s Warming blizzard! I guess you could say that with Trottingham being so far north we had a head start with the snow, but even so it didn’t make the thought of the blizzard any less magical. Tonight, weather teams all over Equestria would be overseeing the first light coating, no more heavy than sugar being sprinkled from a shaker. Tomorrow they’d pick up the pace. The snow would get heavier and it would be the last day the trains ran before stopping for a week; shops would close for the holidays; everypony would be snug and warm in their homes with their families. There would be snow everywhere, more snow than you could dream of or could shake a hoof at, and it'd all be falling across the whole entire land at the exact same time...

Was that why tonight felt different, then? 'Cos of the blizzard? It would’ve been easy to think so except I had this creeping feeling running up my back as though a shadow was falling over me. There was something else ahoof, something more sinister then blizzards and Hearth's Warming.

“Hello?” I said. There was no answer, though then again of course there wasn’t—though I had the feeling that somepony was watching me, I was a ghost. They couldn't have been watching me. They wouldn’t have been able to see me, let alone hear me. “You're already dead,” I whispered to myself. “Nothing bad’s gonna happen to you, Camera.”

A voice in my head replied, you sure about that? A few days ago you thought that all ponies went to heaven but here you are stuck in Equestria. You don’t know a single thing about death, and things are never bad enough that can’t get worse.

It was true, and I gulped. Things could always get worse. It was something mum used to say after dad left (whenever she got like that it had been my job to remind her that ponies loved her), but try as I might I couldn’t imagine anything worse than being a ghost. It wasn’t like anypony could hurt me ‘cos their hoofs would’ve passed straight through me. On top of that was the fact that I was already dead, so there was no danger of me stepping out into the road and being hit by a cart once again. I couldn’t starve to death. I couldn’t drown. Nope, as far as I could tell I was getting creeped out over nothing because the worst had already happened. “What’s worse than death?” I asked myself, thinking that it might calm me down.

It didn’t. Between my fear, my loneliness, and my confusion of what to do, there was only one thing in all the world that I was absolutely certain about: I did not want to find out the answer to that question, and thinking ‘bout it all the time was making me nervous.

After taking a deep breath I emerged out from under my tree onto the path, and I’ve no idea if it’s a city thing or a snow thing, or both, but even though it was cloudy and the moon wasn’t out, it wasn’t a particularly dark night. I guess it must be a city thing. Whenever it snowed the clouds were always this strange dull orange ‘cos of all the streetlamps, and there’s nothing quite like pure white snow for making things seem brighter than they actually are. There weren’t any stars either. They’d abandoned me.

The lake was frozen and covered in snow, and somehow, dunno how, all that snow made it look twice as big as it usually did, like it wasn’t a lake in a park at all but a chunk of the arctic ice sheet. Once more I saw the lights of the towers in the distance. “H-hello?” I said again. “Is somepony there?”

Just then, there was a gust of wind. I gasped as it knocked me down! And it was cold, colder than a freezer, brutally cold. It felt like a thousand knives digging into my coat. I wanted to scream but my mouth was frozen in horror. I wanted to run away but my legs couldn’t move. The cold made my head swim, made my mind go almost blank. All I could think of was mum whispering in my ear, be brave, my little stallion. Don’t let anything knock you down.

Then just like that, it stopped.

Shuddering, I picked myself up off the floor, a new thought popping into my head: get out of the park. I had to get to get out of the dark and into the light of a streetlamp or the warmth of somepony’s fireplace, 'cos I knew with all my being that if I stayed there then I was a goner (whatever being a goner meant when I was dead). Not wasting a moment I turned to run but stumbled in the snow. “Get up,” I told myself. “Get up and run!”

And that’s when it finally spoke to me.

“Run away where?” came the voice, and sweet Celestia, that voice! That ghastly hideous voice which was full of ice and darkness and which made all my hair stand on end. “There’s nowhere to hide, little pony. You’re all alone.”

It was the longest few seconds ever. “W-where are you?” I asked. Though deep down it was the last thing I wanted to know, at the same time... well I’ll put it like this. Have you ever known anypony who’s scared of spiders? I knew a few ponies who were and they all said the same thing, that if you knew there was a spider in the room then it was always better to know exactly where it was, because if you didn’t then it was everywhere and nowhere. In your hoofboots. In your wardrobe. In your bed lurking underneath the blanket. So although I was so terrified that I was frozen to the spot, I needed to know where the monster was. “Where are you?” I asked again.

“I’m close,” it said. I shook my head.

“That, that ain’t good enough.”

“You’re happier not seeing me. You’re happier not seeing my jaws as they snap around your body. It’s better for you this way, by far.”

Visions of beasts swamped my mind, monsters with too many teeth and a hundred claws and gorging on ghosts. I imagined slimy creatures with skin that oozed and pulsated, and which had tentacles that split open at the ends to form mouths. I dreamt up dragons, ‘cept they was smaller than normal ones—they’d have to be in order to hide in the park—but what they lacked in size they made up for in being twice as agile and quick, vicious and cruel, and I thought about their fangs dripping with ghostly glowing blood. On the one hoof the owner of the voice was right. I didn’t want to see what it looked like ‘cos what if it was even worse than what I was thinking? On the other hoof it was also lying. If there’s a spider in the room then you needed to know where it was.

A long time ago, I heard that dogs can smell fear and for some reason that always stuck with me. I wondered if the monster could smell it as well. Was that why it was tormenting like this, so that it could bask in the scent of my terror? I stamped a hoof in the snow. “Sh-show yourself, you coward!”

The creature replied in a tone that said all too plainly, you’re-seconds-away-from-being-eaten-and-there’s-nothing-you-can-do-about-it. “As you wish,” it said.

Something stirred on the lake, something huge. Turning round to face it I almost fell over again, but from fright this time, not 'cos of the wind. “It’s alright,” I whispered to myself frantically. “It can’t eat you. It can’t eat ghosts so everything’s alright.”

The lake was dark, however the cloud of shadowy mist which had formed over it was darker still, and all I could do was watch as it drifted lazily onto the shoreline where it began to change. If it was possible, it seemed to grow even darker than it already was ‘til I swear to everything that it looked like a patch of midnight which had dripped out of the night sky. A few seconds later it began to form itself into dreadful shapes, claws and fangs and teeth and paws and black matted fur which had never been washed. Less than a minute later, the mist had changed into a gigantic bear.

Now you gotta understand that up north seeing a bear ain’t all that unusual, particularly on the train to Dundeer. This one though was like none I’d ever seen before. For starters it was enormous, fully four or five times bigger than the biggest stallion I knew. But even if it had been smaller it still would’ve terrified the mane off me ‘cos it just didn’t look right, it didn’t look normal. Its face was rotting. Fire seemed to burn behind its eyes and it was thin to the point where you could make out its skeleton beneath its fur. It had so little flesh on its legs that they was like bones, and looking at 'em, I had no idea how it managed to hold itself up without those legs snapping in two, and I swear to Celestia herself, a slight breeze should’ve been enough to blow it over. The fact that it seemed so frail honestly terrified me more than if it had been all big and strong, ‘cos staring into those eyes, you sensed that it was desperate and angry and would stop at nothing to get its next meal—that's to say, me. I guess that’s what happens to you when you live off a diet of ghosts.

It leaned down and whispered in my ear. “You’re a fresh little spirit, oh yes, I can smell it. I’m going to enjoy eating you.”

“Th-then why don’t you get it over and done with?” I whimpered. If I ran across the lake it would catch me. If I ran down the path it would catch me. If I ran through the trees... you get the idea.

The bear gave a sickening laugh, circled me and drew deep breaths, taking in my scent. “How does it feel, foal, knowing that nopony is coming to save you?" it said. "The living can’t see my kind either. We walk in plain view of them in the streets and yet they never glance at us, never hear us, never smell us. So to answer your question it’s because you’re on your own, and there’s no rush whatsoever. You smell like you’re going to be especially tasty. I like to savour my food.”

The snowfall was getting heavier and the bear’s stomach growled. Something wet trickled down my face. It was tears, ‘cept they weren’t made from water but from the same glowing substance that my hoofprints were. My tears were lights shining in the darkness.

By now the brute was drooling, and when it stuck out its tongue I saw that it was forked, not at all like a regular bear’s. It took a great big sniff of me and sighed, overjoyed to come across a spirit as tasty as me (told you I was one of a kind! Even the bear knew it). I was deader than dead. I wouldn't even be a ghost. I'd... I'd...

I'd be nothing, nothing at all.

I gulped, my mind refusing to accept the full horror of it. I'd be nothing. No flesh, no thoughts, no sight. Just nothing. Nothing at all. I guess I might've lost my head there and then and let the bear swallow me up, 'cept one single thought kept me going, like the light at the end of a long, looong tunnel: I was still here, wasn’t I? Then that meant I still had a chance! For a second I shut my eyes, and I was gonna see mum again. I was gonna play on my street one last time and see my friends, see my family. The snowflakes would pat against my window and I’d be there to watch ‘em, and then on Hearth’s Warming Eve I’d go and see the light’s being switched on in town and I’d see the pageant and cheer at all the right parts and join in the carol singing afterwards. So what if I was a ghost and the performers wouldn’t hear me cheering? Every year I looked forward to that play, and I was gonna be damned if I’d let some horrible monster take that away from me. He wasn’t allowed. He wasn’t allowed to eat me...

For mum's sake as much as my own, I had to escape, I had to see her again. I had to, I had to!

But how? I guessed that the bear was faster than me, but maybe if I hid in the trees? Would it simply be able to pass through ‘em like they weren’t even there, like what I could do myself now that I was a ghost? Whatever the case there was no reason not to try, and my head told me that for the moment I had to keep the monster talking. “You, you must be real lonely,” I said. “Can’t you go vegetarian? Err, I bet we’d have loads to talk about if only you didn’t eat me.”

The bear sneered. “I’ve already eaten the ghosts of two fillies today and they both told me the same thing. Treasure your last moments, colt. Don’t waste them on talking.”

The way it spoke, you would've sworn that it was doing me a massive favour, letting me have a last few seconds to have to myself before those jaws ripped me apart. Look at the way he circled me, safe in the knowledge I had nowhere to run. I thought of a playground bully picking on a foal half their size; the bear was enjoying torturing me like this. Yep, it was nothing more than a bully with fangs and claws.

“You’re lying,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady. “You can’t eat ghosts.”

“Accept it, spirit. You died and of all the paths you could have crossed, you ran into mine. You’re plain out of luck.”

The moment, I knew, was seconds away, ‘cos either it was gonna get bored of watching me quiver or I was gonna run and it was going to try and catch me. It was simply a matter of who’d act first. Me or him?

I wasn’t gonna give it the chance.

Faster than a Wonderbolt, I ran like fury, ran like nothing else in the world mattered, and I swear to everything that though I’d never been much of a runner you’d never have guessed it from how fast I was going. The bear roared. It was a sound straight from a nightmare, a noise to haunt your dreams for the rest of time.

Knowing that carrying on down the path would’ve meant certain doom, I turned sharp left back into the trees. Mum’s voice was in my head. Faster Camera, run faster!

The bear was charging right behind me. I didn’t dare turn round.

Trees, branches—

Snow, ice—

A streetlamp...

I burst outta the trees and bushes and onto a new path with iron gates waiting for me at the end, along with a streetlamp on the other side of it. If only I could reach it then perhaps the light would scare away the bear, and—

“WHOA!”

Too late. The great beast emerged from nowhere, shoved me to ground and pinned me down. Rather than passing through me like everything else has done, its paw, bigger than a yoke like what farm ponies use, felt frighteningly solid again my chest.

I screamed.

“No use in crying,” it spat, furious. I s’pose it wasn’t used to its food having the nerve to run away like that. The bear opened its mouth, filling my vision with teeth and slime and tongue and drool, and though I couldn’t smell anything being a ghost, that didn't stop me from imagining the stench of death on its breath.

There was nothing more I wanted than to close my eyes and think of mum, think of hugging her, remember the way she comforted me after nightmares or how she used to make me hot chocolate on chilly winter evenings and make me lemonade in summer afternoons. More than anything else, I remembered all the times she told me to be brave...

This, more than any other in either life or death, was a time to be brave. I didn’t wanna give the wolf the satisfaction of closing my eyes, so though it meant that my last few moments of existence were gonna be the worst by far, I kept ‘em open, I kept them open for mum's pride and for my own. The bear’s gaze caught mine, and—

And what I saw caught me so off-guard that for a moment I forget to feel afraid. Was I seeing this right? No, I couldn’t have been, surely not. I must have been dreaming it.

The bear was terrified.

“Hah!” I said, a million billion times more bravely than I felt. “Ain’t so tough now, are you?”

The bear ignored me completely. Instead it stared at the sky as though able to sense something hidden by the snowfall. It jerked his head this way and that. What was it looking for?

Without another word, it transformed back into the cloud of black mist and fast as anything disappeared into the darkness of the park leaving me all on my own, still on my back in the snow.

I blinked.

I stood up, every tiny sound making me jump and the noise of the snow patting on the ground putting me on edge. My whole body was in shock as I tried and failed to take everything in; the light of the nearby streetlamp; the snow; the tears rolling down my face; and of course my glowing hoofprints. It was all too much. The snow had never felt so wondrous. Every second which passed was a gift, and I was still here and when it finally struck me that the monster wasn’t coming back, I laughed! I mean, not very much, but all the same it was my first laugh for days.

I was still here. I was still here!

Something the bear had said hung on my mind. Two things, actually. The first was that he had referred to himself as ‘we’ so I guess that meant there was more of 'em. The second was when it had said that of all the paths I could've crossed, I had run into his. It got me thinking. If I hadn’t have spent three days moping in the park feeling sorry for myself then this wouldn’t have happened. If I’d gone straight home, then right now I’d be with mum and I’d be safe. If I’d left my house a minute later or half a minute earlier then I wouldn’t have been standing in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time and the cart would’ve missed me and I’d still be alive and everything would be alright and everything would be fine and everything would’ve been brilliant.

As the wind whipped the snow into my face, I realised that I was crying again, silently this time. The bear did at least one good thing: I was out in the open, and I wasn’t trembling under my tree no more. In fact, I was flat out of excuses about why I had to stay in the park. There was nothing else for it.

It was time to go home.

4: Hearth's Warming Blizzard

— Chapter Four —
Hearth's Warming Blizzard

As I hurried to the train station, I thought about photos, and what photos actually are: moments frozen in time. Maybe it’s ‘cos I’m interested in ‘em, so I overthink things, but have you ever looked at one and wondered what had happened in life for everypony to be in front of the camera just as the flash went off? I have. It’s one of the reasons I love photography so much, because I like finding weird pictures and thinking up stories for everypony in them. If the ponies hadn’t been in the right place at the right time—or all too often, in the wrong place at the wrong time—then they’d never have appeared in the photo...

If I crossed the road a second earlier or a second later, I wouldn’t have been hit by the cart, and I wouldn’t be telling you this story. If I’d gone home a day earlier, I wouldn’t have missed Mom, and so I wouldn’t be running to the station. I guess I had the wolf to thank for snapping me to my senses; and again, what had his story been. What had led him to the park in the first place? Had he hunting me, or had our paths crossed purely by chance?

I suppose it didn’t matter much. In the end, the result was exactly the same... though I got to admit, there was something about the idea that I had been meant to die that comforted me, if only a tiny bit, ‘cos if that was really the case than maybe it had happened for a reason, though Celestia knew what.

“The train now approaching platform two is the ten past eleven to North Polecat, I repeat, the ten past eleven to North Polecat.”

“This is a customer announcement. Bags left unattended will be removed by security, and possibly destroyed.”

“Customers are advised to always stay behind the yellow line. Thank you.”

Fairflanks Central Train Station is the worst place in Equestria, period. The kind of place that made a small, guilty little part of me feel kinda glad that I would never, ever see this city once again. Oh sure, that wasn’t to say I wouldn’t miss my friends (I often wondered how Star Light and the others were doing without me). I’d miss my house, the park, and the shop around the corner. But never in a million years would I miss that station.

Once upon a time, it must’ve been a marvel: it was a cathedral of glass, and a vast, steel lattice reached across from one side of the terminal to the other. There were these massive metal columns which looked as though they had been built to support the sky itself, and there were these huge staircases; and there were shops and cafes and restaurants, not to mention all the ticket offices. But a hundred years of ponies can do a lot to wreck a place like that. The glass was covered with soot and grime. The platforms were dotted with chewing gum, and even at night there were countless earth ponies, unicorns and pegasi all mixing together, bustling crowds which never seemed to die down.

I watched them all from the train I had sneaked on. Lucky me! Lucky, ‘cos the whole back carriage was empty, which meant I had my choice of beds. Choosing one right by a window, I kept the curtains open, because hay—it’s not like anypony was gonna spot me or anything... and man, it was super weird to see so much life a couple of hooves beyond my grasp, separated by a sheet of glass. A dog stared me in the eyes from the platform as its owner talked to another pony. I stared back. I rather got the impression that, like the wolf had been able to, it could see me perfectly fine, and that I wasn’t invisible to it the way I was to all these crowds...

I shook my head. “Get a move on, train,” I whispered. “What’s taking ya so long, hmm?”

A clock hung at the end of the carriage: it was quarter past eleven. After everything that had happened that day—the wolf, running back home, meeting with Death and making a deal with him—I was exhausted. And fighting my tiredness was useless, because try as I might, nothing I did could prevent my eyelids from drooping, plus you didn’t need to be alive to appreciate how awful comfy that bed was.

In the space of five minutes, I was fast asleep, dreaming about the cottage in Ponyville.

I slept right through the night.

Have you ever had ponies tell you that if something can go wrong, then it will go wrong? ‘Cos there’s times when I feel like that’s the story of my life. Or my death, I suppose.

When I woke up the following morning, it was to the sound of ponies crowded in a train station. Groggily, I looked out the window. Up above me, a steel grid lined with sooty windows. To the side of me, a load of busy, gum-ridden platforms, complete with swarms of ponies dressed in suits and going to work, or reading newspapers whilst sat on benches, or eating daffodil sandwiches from one of the stations’ many cafes. It didn’t matter that I was dead: I still felt my stomach bound into my mouth.

I was in Fairflanks.

... But how?! Was it just that I was tired, and I was mistaking Canterlot Station for Fairflanks’? However the more I looked, the more panicked I became, ‘cos I recognized it all: the peeling black paint on the steel pillars; the long, thin platforms, all ten of ‘em; the grime which coated every last panel of glass. Yep. This was Fairflanks alright, and that meant I was on the wrong train. Later, I’d find out that there’d been some weird mix-up or whatever, and the real night train to Canterlot had been on a different platform. The mistake had been spotted quickly. All the passengers had been swiftly transferred to the right train, all of them that is except for poor me, cursed with a ghostly body nopony could see. And it had happened in my sleep...

Flooded with nerves, I glanced at the clock: one minute to twelve. Having checked the train times last night, I knew, with a lurch in my belly, that the last train to Canterlot and Ponyville would leave at precisely midday. Sure enough, through the window, the train on the opposite side of the platform blew its whistle, and steam shot out of the engine.

As if in slow motion, it started to move.

I didn’t stop to think, didn’t stop for anything. I passed through the window straight onto the platform, and galloped like crazy as the train to Canterlot picked up speed. “WAIT,” I yelled desperately, though even I’d been alive and they’d been able to hear me, there’s no way in Equestria it would’ve stopped.

My last chance to see Mom and it was leaving without me! I dashed, almost flew alone along the platform, but it was always just a tiny bit faster and barely out of reach. I ran straight through other ponies as though they weren’t even there. None of ‘em seemed to notice a panicky little ghost pass through them. “WAIT,” I shouted again, wishing for the first time that I had been born a pegasus. “STOP! PLEASE, CELESTIA, STOP!”

But of course, once more, nopony heard me. I may as well have not existed for all the attention I got.

It was getting faster and faster and faster. The platform was running out, but my tears were just beginning...

But then, a miracle: the train slowed down.

I dunno why—faulty signal perhaps—but who cared?! What mattered was that it was grinding to a halt, and that gut instinct told me that, given a few more seconds, it would came to a complete stop. I didn’t wanna risk it, though. The moment I was close enough, I leapt through the air, my ghostly body passing straight through the wall of the train...

A second later, a whistle blew, and the train picked up speed once again.

I’d made it.

I’d made it.

I’ll tell you what, for the relief I felt then, it almost made the whole ordeal worth it, and though I didn’t know what time we’d arrive in Ponyville, for a shining, precious moment, I couldn’t have cared less. I collapsed on the floor, acting as though I was out of breath, like I’d run a mareathon or something. Course, I didn’t need to being a ghost and all, but it was fun to pretend. Plus I had the carriage to myself again. Good. I didn’t want to be around other ponies.

After a while I got up off the floor, sat on a bed, and stared out the window... then it hit me. All these buildings, all the parks and the trees and the houses...

They were going, going...

Gone, I would never see them again.

The train shot into a tunnel, and everything went dark, and my mind went dark too. Fairflanks was gone forever, snatched away from me, and the relief I’d felt for such a brief moment was snatched away from me in an instant. “Think of Mom,” I whispered, repeating it over and over to myself.

... If only I hadn’t fallen asleep last night and gotten on the right train. I would’ve left in the dark, unable to see Fairflanks; and perhaps the fact I’d never see it again would never have occurred to me.

Mom had moved house, but Death had given me a second chance to find her; I had come this close to missing the last train to Ponyville, yet thanks to determination and dumb luck, I’d made it on-board. For the first time days, I felt good about myself. I was gonna see Mom. And if nothing else, what had happened in the station was all the proof I needed that there wasn’t anything that would stand in my way.

As the train travelled across Equestria, I saw teams of pegasi moving fierce, angry-looking clouds into position for the Hearth’s Warming blizzard, and as the day wore on, after a brief, afternoon pause, the snow began to fall again. A lot of the landscape had already being coated in a sprinkling of snow, but it seemed that weather teams all over the land had much bigger plans up their sleeves. Steadily, the snowfall became heavier and heavier. I swear to everything that as we passed over the Horseshoe Mountains, I saw flakes the size of dinner plates! The snow transformed the mountains into towering, icy sentinels standing guard over Equestria; then after that, we passed forests, and they were blanketed in so much snow that it weighed down the branches. We headed through the great plains of Pennsylmaneia. They had been turned into endless sheets of whiteness which stretched all the way into the distance, far as the eye could see; and the sky was dark and grey. I’d never seen anything so bleak as long as I’d lived, yet nothing half as magical, either. It was beautifully bleak. I could’ve lost myself forever staring out over that sea of snow, and, in a way, knowing that in this landscape the train with all its passengers were every bit as small and alone as I was, I felt a little better about my situation. My loneliness was being shared.

Evening came, and then night, and then the scenery was lost to darkness.

The train carried on.

“Come on, come on, come on,” I said under my breath, too jittery to sit down. The announcer had said that the next stop was Ponyville. He’d forgotten to say when we’d get there.

Five minutes to nine. Four minutes. Three. Two. One...

With one hour left to go, I was stuck on the train, dark thoughts enveloping me. It had taken nine hours to get this far, but what was to say it wouldn’t take another nine hours? Oh sure, I knew roughly where Ponyville was and stuff, I wasn’t dumb. But this was the first time I’d made this trip. How was I supposed to know for sure?

I pressed my face against the glass, careful not to tumble through it, ghost that I was. I squinted my eyes.

Lights!

There, in the distance, and I wasn’t imagining them: a little collection of twinkling yellow lights, shining through the blizzard. The dark thoughts uncoiled themselves as they were overpowered with wild, giddy delight. I smiled, and I’m not talking about a little grin, but a real, proper smile, the kind that seems to reach right across your face. I tapped my hooves together. This was it. The happiness was making me feel lighter than a pegasus’ feathers.

One hour. I had one hour to find Mom and say goodbye. It wasn’t much, but Ponyville was meant to be real small, so it would be enough, I hoped.

“I’m here, Mom. I’m back.”

Ponyville train station couldn’t possibly have been more different from Fairflanks Central. For starters, there was only a single platform. Not only was it out in the open, but it was made out of wood, and it was being kept clear of snow by an old earth pony wearing a blue uniform and holding a broom. He trembled as he brushed—I don’t know if it was ‘cos he was cold, or because of his age—but then again, he was humming to himself as well, and beaming, so he obviously enjoyed what he did. That was yet another change from Central Station. I swear to everything, all the times I was there, the staff never smiled once.

It was quiet here. I liked it at once.

Two other ponies got off with me, then the whistle blew, the engine roared, and then the train was eaten by the night. My last connection to Fairflanks...

“Stop thinking like that,” I told myself. “You’ve gotta find Mom, and quick.”

According to the big clock above the station, it was five past nine. Good. That gave me fifty-five minutes; with Death’s instructions, that should’ve been plenty of time... what was it he had said again? Stay close to the Ever-something? Yeah, that was it, the Everfree Forest, and it’d lead me straight to Mom, he’d said. A forest. I had to find a forest.

As I thought to myself, the other two ponies disappeared, leaving me all alone apart from the old stallion who continued to hum, very happy with himself. I grinned. His joy was catching.

I rushed out of the station and into Ponyville.

What an awesome place this was, and what was more, I recognized from my dreams; walking here was like trotting through a half forgotten memory. There were clusters of homes like gingerbread houses, and the snow was like icing on the roofs. There was nopony else around other than me, and I ran through the streets, drinking everything in: a large circular building that could’ve been a town hall or something, or perhaps it was a theatre; little stone bridges over a frozen river; and you’re gonna have to trust me on this one, but there was even a hollowed out tree which had been turned into a house! Oh man, if only I’d had more time to explore.

The Hearth’s Warming lights as well, they were flat out perfect. Ours—Fairflanks’, I mean —looked like they’d been tossed up in a day, no thought at all, but here in Ponyville they’d obviously spent ages and ages getting everything just right. The buildings looked like they had been lined with stars.

A bell sounded: quarter past nine. If this had been back in Fairflanks, no way would it have been so quiet so early.

I was wasting time. I pressed on.

5: The Hoofprints in the Snow

— Chapter Four —
The Hoofprints in the Snow

“My little earth pony. Be brave, now. Be brave, and don’t let anything get you down...”

Everything had come to this: standing in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time and being struck by the cart; choosing to run away to the park instead of facing my fear and going home; waiting there under the tree; being found by the wolf monster, and escaping from him through a combination of determination and dumb luck; my talk with Death; missing my train; catching the last one right at the last second...

And now I was leaving ghostly hoofprints in the snow in Ponyville, with less an hour left to find my mother.

All the memories of the past few days swirled around in my head, all of them vivid, all of them jostling for attention. It made me feel dizzy. If one single thing had gone wrong... if I’d slept a little longer on the train, or if the second one had been delayed by an hour... it wasn’t worth thinking about. I ran down the main street, hugely aware of each and every second that passed.

Where was the forest?!

Maybe if it had been daytime it would’ve been obvious, but at night, and in snow like this, it was as far from obvious as you could get.

... Wait...

I stopped, forced myself to close my eyes and take a deep breath. In a way, Ponyville was my home. I was born here. I’d seen it in my dreams, not to mention my nightmares. Pictures flashed through my head as I thought furiously: a great red barn; a babbling brook; a row of cottages next to a forest—

I opened my eyes. Just like that, the fear had left me. I knew exactly where I was going.

Retracing my hoofprints, I went back past the tree-house, and to the building which might’ve been the town hall. The wind blew snowflakes into my face. It made the snow dance under the streetlamps, and the flakes were lit up a hundred different colours by those wonderful, wonderful Hearth’s Warming lights.

Walking over a bridge, I followed a row of picture-perfect houses, turned a corner, crossed a little square, and then... result! I was rewarded with trees straight outta my dreams, and a dark, lonely path. Gradually, the streetlamps thinned out. There weren’t many houses out here, and after a short while there were none at all, not even one; just a snow-covered road, too few lamps, and the deepest silence I’d ever experienced. Not the quietest, mind; the deepest, and trust me on this, there’s a whole lot of different between those two. Sometimes, you could sit in your bedroom with the window shut and the curtains are drawn, and you can’t hear a thing... but it could be that you’re bored, or your mind’s racing ‘cos you’re playing a game or something, so even though it’s dead quiet, you don’t even notice, ‘cos your thoughts are all loud and stuff.

This, on the other hoof, wasn’t like that. The wind was howling and the snow was patting on the ground. But I noticed how quiet it was. It dug its way under my coat. It wrapped around me like a blanket, and I was aware of everything: every breath I was taking (but didn’t need to); every beat of my heart (even though I didn’t have one); every twist and sickening turn of my non-existent stomach. In half an hour, a being almost as old as life itself would appear to take me away, but I had no idea where to, and I didn’t know if Mom would ever follow me there...

In half an hour, I would never have a chance to see Mom ever again.

I stopped under a lonely streetlamp. There was the forest stood right in front of me, a great barrier of tress like the entrance to another world. I glanced to the left: darkness. The right looked more promising. Though it was hard to tell in the gloom, and when everything was buried in snow, there seemed to be something that might’ve, might’ve, been a path. By the trees was a mound of snow that I guessed was a failed snowpony, and there was a cottage there too, not even twenty hooves away! One of the downstairs windows was lit. Cheery, yellow light spilled out onto the snow, and I froze, my invisible heart skipping a beat.

It was Mom. It had to be. A cottage by the Everfree Forest, one which I couldn’t miss; it fitted Death’s description perfectly.

It was Mom, and she must have been in the kitchen, making her usual midnight snack.

It was Mom.

What can you say at a moment like that? Knowing that, in a minute, you’d be in a cottage you hadn’t seen since you were two years old, and seeing your mom for the very last time? And though nopony so far had been able to see or hear me, I knew with all my heart that this time, it would be different. Mom would spot me straightaway. She’d wipe away my tears, hold me close, and she wouldn’t let go ‘til Death drew us apart. She’d tell me that she’d see me again... I’d look into her eyes, a silent goodbye...

I dunno how long I stood under the lantern, but it must’ve been a good while, ‘cos all of a sudden, I noticed a pool of ghostly tears by my hooves.

No! I wouldn’t cry. Mom wouldn’t wanna see that.

I made myself trot through the snow towards the cottage, up the path, past the trees and the mound of snow. I bit my lip as I did so.

And that’s when I noticed the hoofprints.

It was a marvel that I did, but they were there alright, and so very, very faint. Whoever had made ‘em had done so a while ago, and they were slowly but surely being erased from existence by the blizzard and the wind. Boring old hoofprints, not interesting in any way whatsoever... apart from one way, that is, and it was this: the hoofprints led up to the mound of snow. There weren’t any leading back...

Once more, I halted, all my attention fixed on the mound. It might’ve been something to do with being a ghost, but I couldn’t believe I hadn’t felt it before: the faintest trace of life, almost like there was another heartbeat in my body. Remember what I said before about the wolf monster? About how I could tell that I wasn’t alone even though I had no reason to think otherwise? Well this was the same thing. Who was buried under the mound, I couldn’t say, but I wasn’t on my own anymore.

I’ve got this theory that, as a ghost, you can sense a pony’s soul, all their emotions and stuff, and their memories and their dreams. Yeah, sounds goofy I know, but, well hear me out, and think of it like this. When you’ve got a body, then you’re constantly focused on that all the time, even when you don’t realise it. Your heart is always beating and your stomach is always churning. When you’re a ghost, though, you’ve got none of that, so there are distractions. Oh sure, I still breathed and stuff like that, but it was purely outta habit, plus it didn’t change the fact that, as certain as I knew that I wouldn’t be around to see the sun rise in the morning, I could sense that there was a pony buried under the mound of snow, and they needed my help.

I must’ve had less than half an hour. If I didn’t see Mom now, I’d miss my chance.

Be brave, my little earth pony.

Be brave.

Clenching my teeth and shut my eyes, a giant scream built up inside of me as I realised that there was no way in heaven or in Equestria I could leave this poor pony, this stupid, awful pony who’d gotten themselves into so much trouble. Why?! Why was this happening to me? How could this happen to me? In sight of Mom’s cottage and everything, and with so little time left, and I was gonna waste it on a pony I didn’t even know! All the curse words in the world weren’t enough to express the boiling anger surging through me. What was she doing there? Had I wandered into the end of some terrible misadventure? Whatever the case, this wasn’t fair. If I’d arrived this morning, this wouldn’t be happening. In what way was this fair?!

Yet like I said, I couldn’t leave ‘em, ‘cos Mom didn’t raise me that way. Ponies are supposed to help one another she used to say. If you knew there was a problem, you had to be brave and face up to it, so, that was that. I couldn’t leave this pony. I couldn’t leave ‘em in the snow to die.

My scream was drowned with the most powerful guilt I’d ever felt, shame so heavy it was as though the weight of the artic was crushing my chest. I almost fell to my knees. I hated myself. How could I feel angry at this pony, whoever they were, when I could feel they were so close to death? What if they had a family? What if they had a sister, or a mother who loved them, or a brother who took care of ‘em? What if they died and they were unlucky enough to run into a spirit beast like the one I’d escaped in the park? ‘Cos if that happened, it’d be because of me; if I ignored ‘em, then I’d spend the rest of forever knowing that I was even worse than the monster by the lake.

I wouldn’t be my mother’s son.

Mom would have to wait, for right now, there was a pony that needed my help. Gathering all my courage, I approached the mound, sensing the pony’s life ebbing away from them like the tide retreating from the shoreline. A big, rotting branch stuck up from the mound. Had the pony been wandering up the path to visit my mom only to have this branch fall on ‘em? With the wind, and seeing how heavy the snow was, it seemed likely.

A red mane poked out of the snow, visible in the light of the nearby lantern. When I looked on the other side of the mound, I found that the pony’s face was exposed, and I gasped: it was a filly. If she wasn’t the same age as me, then she couldn’t have been more than a year older, or a year younger—one of the two. Her eyes were closed. Her coat was pale yellow. She was wearing a big, pink bow which poked outta the snow along with her mane.

In a few minutes, she’d be dead.

“Hello?” I whispered, but she didn’t stir. I was gonna have to try harder than that. “Hello?” I said more forcefully. “Hello? Hello?! Wake up! WAKE UP!”

But the filly’s eyelids didn’t so much as flutter. She just lay there, so much life gone that she was as good as dead. Where the branch was resting on top of her, the snow was red.

Oh man, oh man! The blizzard was getting thicker. If another one were to fall down on her, then—

I didn’t wanna think about it, and it was obvious now that, whether because I was a ghost or because she was almost dead, she couldn’t hear me. I reckon I could’ve gotten a rock band to play a full concert for her for all the good it would’ve done...

Almost as if it was calling to me, I turned around, and my gaze drifted toward Mom’s cottage. The downstairs window was still lit... and well, I’m not even ashamed to admit it, and I don’t care who knows it: right then, I could’ve cried for all Equestria. My heart told me that leaving the filly here all on her own was a horrible thing to do. My head warned me that I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t help her. But Mom could.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I told the filly. “I’ll be back, I promise, I promise on everything!”

With one last, desperate glance at her, I hurried up the path, across a teeny tiny bridge over a frozen brook. With a million different emotions in my chest—fear and panic, and love for Mom—I walked through the snow and up to the cottage; if I’d had more time, I would’ve marvelled at it. It had a big red door with a golden handle. It had these cheery little windows, and if I’d been able to step in the snow settled on the roof, I swear, it would’ve come up past my knees! It made the cottage look a giant cake, a lovely, sweet little hideaway from the rest of the world. Why had we ever moved to Fairflanks when my grandparents had left us a place like this?

After taking a deep breath, I walked through the door, and into the living room.

The light was on, but it was empty.

“Mom?” I said. “Mom! I’m back! I’m home! Mom, where are you?!”

Mom didn’t answer. I remembered my night terror, and falling into the pit. I remembered the cool air rushing past my ears as I tumbled into the darkness, the light of the entrance getting smaller, fainter, and water was dripping from the ceiling, trickling down the walls creating slimy trails. That’s what I felt now, knowing that Mom couldn’t hear me: it was like being back in the pit.

“MOM? It’s me! I’m back!”

As I fought to remain calm, the only response I got was the wind shaking the windows. “It’s alright,” I whispered. “She’s just asleep, that’s all, and she forgot to flick the light off before bed. She’s probably asleep.”

There was a clock on the mantelpiece, and my stomach leapt to my mouth: fifteen minutes left. Fifteen minutes before Death came to find me and take me away... but that wasn’t all. Next to the clock, there was a photo of six ponies I’d never seen, two earth ponies, two pegasi, and two unicorns. Friends of Mom’s? I might’ve been something my grandparents had left behind, except the photo looked brand new. It was the same with the ones on the walls and the bookcase. A chill came over me. I’d never seen any of these ponies, let alone the ones on the fireplace...

“Stop it, Camera. Stop worrying yourself. This is Mom’s cottage, and it’s fine. It’s fine. Everything is fine.”

I would’ve had an easier time believing myself if I hadn’t kept saying ‘fine’ all the time; but this, more than any other, was a time to shove my fear aside and be the brave little stallion Mom had always said I was. The filly was not gonna die, not if I had any say in the matter.

Holding myself tall, I trotted up the stairs to what I guessed was the bedroom, and walked through the door.

The first thing I noticed was how dark it was, even though the curtains weren’t drawn—with the Hearth’s Warming Blizzard ravaging the house, it was plenty dark already, so there wasn’t any need. The rafters were bare, there wasn’t any carpet on the floorboards, and the underside of the roof seemed to be made of sticks and branches; standing in that room was like being in a tree-house. Light from downstairs poured around the edges of the door, just enough so that you could make out the curious little items scattered around the room, on shelves, on the windowsills: books and statues, rocks, vases, plants. My mane stood on end as something stirred in a basket under one of the windows—just a pet bunny rabbit, fast asleep under a chequered blanket (wait, how long had Mom had a rabbit for?). With the storm raging, the room was terrifically creepy, and my heart leapt as I looked at Mom’s bed in between the two windows, the covers rising up and down as she breathed in her sleep.

There was just one problem, however. A little snag. A hiccup.

That wasn’t Mom.

The world stopped turning. I had never seen this pony in my life.

The pony, a mare, had a straight pink mane and a pale yellow coat. But whereas the filly’s coat was dull and earthy, this yellow made you think of lanterns guiding the way through dark places, or of warm afternoons in late spring. It was a color that filled you with joy and hope. From the way the blanket fell over her, I guessed she was a pegasus.

And like the filly outside, I could feel her soul, and it was nothing, nothing I’d ever experienced before—it was so lovely that I wished I could’ve stood there forever, basking in the warmness of it. This pegasus was unbelievably kind. Thoughts of helping others flooded into my head, and all the mare wanted, I knew, was for everypony to be safe and happy, for everypony to feel loved. I didn’t know her name. I’d never heard her voice, had never looked into her eyes. In spite of this, I already knew that this was the single nicest pony I’d ever met, and kindness radiated from her like heat from the sun. If she knew about the filly, she’d come to the rescue at once. All I had to do was wake her up.

But... how? She couldn’t see me. There wasn’t any chance that she’d hear me, and I had less than quarter of an hour remaining. “Think, Camera, thiiink!” I said, tapping my forehead with a hoof.

By now, the filly was weighing on my mind so much that it was almost as though it was me myself out there, being buried under the snow. This bedroom was the pit from my nightmare, and the pegasus was the light pouring through the entrance; I was staring at her right in her sleeping face, but I may as well have been on the moon for how big that gap felt to me.

I paced up and down. No ideas were coming to me. The clock was ticking.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

“Wake up!”

I shouted it right in her ear, but it was useless. The clock on her bedside desk ticked away. Eleven minutes left.

“Wake up! Wake up wake up wake up, oh please Celestia, wake. Up!”

The mare yawned, rolling over in her sleep, and now there were ten minutes left. What to do, what to do? One thing was for sure, and that was that I could kiss my chance to see Mom goodbye, and—

“Keep it together, Camera. Don’t think about it. You’ve gotta wake her up, then you can worry about Mom.”

The dog from the train station entered my mind... that was it! I could’ve kicked myself for not thinking about it sooner, but it was only ponies who couldn’t see me, right? It was only ponies who couldn’t hear me. Like a photo, everything came together in an instant: wake up the rabbit, get him to wake up the pegasus, and when we were set.

Excited, I scrambled over the bed to kneel down next to the basket. Above me, the window rattled—though not as much as I did—and yet the bunny remained fast asleep as though the night wasn’t stormy in the slightest, like it was clear and calm and silent. It was snoring. Its leg twitched. Hadn’t he heard me shouting, I wondered? Did I have the wrong end of the stick here, and I’d only been imaging it when I thought the dog had looked at me? The more I thought about it, the more possible it seemed... maybe the dog had simply been interested in the train, and I’d been looking for things which weren’t really there...

Not having the nerve to shout again, instead, I prodded the rabbit and said, “Psst. Bunny, wake up. I need your help.”

But my hoof went straight through him (it’s hard to tell with rabbits, but I fairly sure it was a boy). My words had no effect. A glance at the clock showed me that it was nine minutes to ten—or nine minutes and fifteen seconds to ten. Time was almost up. The bunny wasn’t waking up. Neither was the pony. The filly, meanwhile, had probably already frozen to death, and I kept on jerking my head to the door, expecting to see her ghost there, crying and frowning, and asking me why didn’t I save her. You only care about yourself, I imaged her saying. You only cared about seeing your mom, otherwise you would’ve tried harder to help me.

Resolve found me. “WAKE UP,” I shouted, screeched, screamed into the rabbit’s ear. “YOU HAVE TO WAKE UP! PLEASE!”

The rabbit woke up.

I’m telling you, it was like catching the train at the last second all over again: to see the bunny jump a foot in the air in fright almost made the torment worth it. Happiness swelled in my chest, the most fantastic, indescribable joy you could imagine, and I wanted to leap up and down myself. The rabbit had heard me! I had a voice.

Eight minutes and forty-three seconds. “Right, listen up,” I told him. “There’s not much time, and this is what we’ve gotta do. We’ve gotta... we’ve... we’ve um...”

I trailed off, any joy I’d felt vanishing as quickly as it had appeared, because the rabbit, after a brief look of terror (it isn’t every night you wake up to find a ghost in your room, so I can hardly blame him for that), stood up in the basket, rustled its fluffy little tail, scowled, and pointed at the door. Surely it wasn’t doing what I thought it was doing? But when it started tapping a foot, I was forced to believe it: it was asking me to leave!

“You, you don’t understand,” I said with a shake of my head. “I ain’t here to hurt you. It’s just that there’s this filly, and she’s all alone, and—”

The rabbit put it paws over its ears, shut its eyes, and stuck its tongue out at me. “This is serious,” I snapped. “If you don’t wake up your owner soon, the filly’s gonna—”

The rabbit hopped out of the basket, and would you believe this? He tried to shove me towards the door! It didn’t work, of course. He just fell through me, landing flat on his face; still, who did it think it was? “Why are you doing this?” I asked, trying and failing to keep the anger out of my voice. “I’m trying to help somepony, why won’t you listen to me?”

The rabbit jabbed a paw at the sleeping mare, then at me, and then it made a slicing motion across its neck. So... it was trying to protect her from me? For a moment, a tinge of sympathy touched my heart. Celestia knows that if I was a rabbit and I’d been woken up by a ghost, I’d be freaking out too. Then again, when I thought about it even more, what did the rabbit expect me to do, exactly? It wasn’t like I could harm her or anything... did the bunny think I was gonna frighten her to death? I was just a cute li’l colt! Even if the pony had been able to see me in the first place, it wasn’t as if I was scary. I wasn’t scary at all!

The rabbit tapped its foot some more, but I paid it no notice. It wasn’t gonna help me? Wasn’t gonna listen? Fine. I’d do this alone.

And I had six minutes.

Suddenly, an idea. Trotting up to the bedside desk, I studied the clock and rubbed my chin. It was a very plain clock. It was circular, made from metal, and had those funny little bells at the top. You know the ones I mean. I always thought they looked like tiny metal ears.

I had to push the clock off the desk, and pray to Celestia that the resulting clatter would be enough to wake up the pegasus. Forget for a moment that since becoming a ghost, the only two things I’d been able to touch without passing through were the wolf monster and the earth beneath my hooves; with six minutes left, I was out of ideas, and so there was no excuse not to at least give it a go.

In the corner of my eye, I spied the rabbit glaring at me. With a huff, I held my head up high and braced myself—for the time being, I was here to stay, and no silly lil’ rabbit was going to change that. I jogged on the spot, my snout right up against the clock so that it filled all my vision. Focus. I needed to focus. I could do this.

With extreme care, I shut my eyes as tight as possible—all the better to pretend that I had a real body—and nudged the clock.

It moved.

A gasp left my mouth. I jerked my head back in surprise. True, I hadn’t felt the clock against my face, but there was no denying it. Using all the effort and determination I had, I’d managed to move it a good inch or two closer to the edge of the desk...

Five minutes left to go! The plan had to work, and on the first attempt as well, ‘cos I wasn’t gonna get another shot at this. I shut my eyes again, my mind focused on the clock, on the metal curves, the black numbers, the bells, the hands, everything. “Work with me here, clock, c’mon,” I said, concentrating harder than at any point in my life. The clock moved again as I pushed it gently with my snout—I was scared to use more force than this just in case it stopped working. Closer... closer... almost there...

It teetered on the edge of the desk, and with one last nudge, it tumbled to the floor as if in slow motion. This was it! Clenching my teeth, I braced myself for the crash.

... It never came.

At the last possible second, the rabbit threw himself under the clock, and it landed on him with a soft flump. The rabbit coughed. All I could do was watch horrified at it rolled the clock off its chest, stood up, and smirked at me in the most awful, infuriating way imaginable.

I didn’t shout at the rabbit, ‘cos what would’ve been the point? I was past the point of tears, so I didn’t even cry. Instead, my face a perfect mask of horror, I looked to the clock, to the sleeping pony’s face, then to the door.

The filly was dead.

Four minutes left.

The filly was dead.

The floorboards seemed to burn my hooves and the walls and ceiling felt they were closing in; I swear to everything, in my head, the room was shrinking. And with me, the rabbit, and the pegasus, it was unbearably crowded, and hot, and stuffy and horrible, and quiet and loud and boiling and freezing, all at the same time. Gasping for breath, I stumbled through the door.

The filly was dead.

6: Timber Wolves

— Chapter Six —
Timber Wolves

I dashed through the living room, out the front door, and the mound had grown in the time I’d spent inside. The blizzard had thickened as well. Drifts of snow piled up against the house. Everywhere you looked, there was snow covering all, hiding secrets, a frozen wonderland.

But there still wasn’t enough space for me out there; or perhaps there was too much space, and I was too small to matter, and I was forgotten by everypony and missed by no-one. I collapsed in the snow. Less than four minutes. That wasn’t enough time to find Mom. Neither was there time to rush back to town and find another pony to lead to the filly. I’d blown it. When Death came to pick me up, he would be coming for two foals, not just me...

Three minutes and fifty-three seconds. Fifty-two. Fifty-one. Fifty.

And that’s when the wolf howled.

It was a wild, fearsome sort of noise, the kind you’d expect when monsters had found their prey and were closing in. When I looked up, a set of yellow eyes stared at me between the trees of the Everfree Forest, and they were glowing like the fires of Hell—was it the same wolf? Had it followed me all the way across Equestria and into Ponyville? More likely it was a distant cousin or something, ‘cos both the wolf and Death had made it clear that creatures like this, ones that normal ponies couldn’t see and which fed on ghosts, were all over the place. The giant wolf stood deadly still, unblinking.

But I didn’t tremble, cry, or do any of that stuff, ‘cos an idea, either brilliance or madness, struck me out of the blue. Dare I run? With only three and a half minutes ‘til Death came for me, I think it would’ve been easy enough to dodge the monster before it could eat me... but, it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do, because this idea I’d had was to do with the filly. If all that stood between her and death was me, a sleeping pegasus and three and a half minutes, then I had no right to run away. Even if the risk involved being eaten and never making it to heaven, I still had to try.

I shot up. Just like that, I was done with moping—perhaps I’d needed to get it outta my system—and wild, reckless energy gripped me. Before the wolf had a chance to strike, I strode through the snow and past the trees, right up to it. “Hey, you!” I shouted.

The wolf blinked.

“That’s right,” I said, memories of teeth and claws and a forked tongue swimming in my head; don’t think about ‘em, I told myself. It’ll just make you scared. “I’m talking to you. I need your help.”

I halted, and suddenly it occurred to me that not only had I trotted up to a gigantic, monstrous wolf without a moments’ hesitation, but that I had shouted at it, pointed at it, and looked it right in the eye. It was hard to decide whether the icy sensation swilling in my belly was pride, or dread in its purest, most devilish form. But it was too late to back out of this. It was all up to the wolf now.

So imagine my surprise when, out of everything it could’ve done—ripped off my head, bite me in two, swallow me whole—it laughed. Its laughter was similar to Deaths; it was deep, and shook snow off the branches, and at last the wolf stepped out of the shadows, into what little light the lantern provided from this distance.

My question was answered immediately: this wasn’t the same one. It wasn’t even close. Apart from its pupiless eyes which seemed to be made out of fire, or hot coals perhaps, the wolf’s body was made out of wood. And I don’t mean that some unicorn had rented a workshop, lovingly crafted this beast and put an enchantment on it or anything like that; I mean, it was made from proper, thick, gnarly wood, bark, twigs, sticks and branches, the whole lot—if it had stood still, it would’ve looked like an ancient, twisted tree that happened to be wolf shaped. It was like a god of the forest, or perhaps it was the forest’s spirit. I’d heard of stuff like that in stories.

It voice was as rough as the bark on it hides. “You’ve got some nerve, spirit. I like that.”

“Y-you can see me?”

“Evidently.”

“Then... then can you help me?”

“No.”

My heart sank as the wolf sat down in the snow, never once tearing those hellish eyes away from me. “Then you’re gonna eat me?” I asked quietly, not really wanting to know the answer. Yet like everything else about this strange beast, its answer, to say the least, was unexpected.

“No,” it said again. “I’m not going to eat you, Camera Shutter.”

The wind rustled the trees. Flakes of snow settled on the wolf’s snout and back. “You know my name?” I whispered. The wolf nodded. “Then... then you know about the filly buried in the snow!”

“I am aware of Apple Bloom’s predicament, yes.”

Apple Bloom. I mouthed the name, rolling it off my tongue and picturing the letters in my head. What an awesome, pretty name. “Then you’ve gotta help me! Please, just dig her out or something; wake up the pony in the cottage.”

“Fluttershy is not meant to wake up. She is not meant to discover the remains of Apple Bloom until the dawn breaks.”

“But you can help!”

“Ponies die. Life goes on.”

I stamped a hoof. “How can you say that? She’s dying, you can help!”

For the first time, a growl entered the wolf’s voice. “It is not for you to decide what timber wolves can and cannot do. The filly is going to die. When she does, we intend to eat her, but, listen closely, spirit.” The wolf knelt down to my height, and lowered its voice to a whisper. “You did all you could and that is to be commended. However, there is nothing you can do for her now.”

“But you—”

“Listen to what I’m saying. Your mother’s house rests ten minutes running past Fluttershy’s cottage, by the woods. And Fluttershy’s clock is fifteen minutes fast.”

In my head, I felt something big and dark probing around, searching through my memories the same way that Death had done: the wolf was inside my mind, searching with those blazing eyes of his. A dark part of me knew that I should’ve been furious at it for this—these were my memories, and they were private--yet as his words settled in my mind, as I turned them over and thought about them, the full significance of what he was telling me sunk in, and my anger faded. It was quarter to ten. If I was quick, I could reach Mom’s house in ten minutes or less...

... But Mom’s voice was my head. Be brave, my little earth pony.

Any choice I’d had in the matter, I realised, had long since passed in the three days I’d spent feeling sorry for myself. Three days sat underneath a tree, too fearful to move. I could’ve gotten up at any time to go home. It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world...

My life didn’t belong to me anymore. As long as I was lingering here, it belonged to the filly, this poor, lost filly who I didn’t even know, and who couldn’t even see me. Was I meant to have died? If I hadn’t gone home when I had, I would be here. If I hadn’t have slept on the train, I would’ve arrived here ten hours ago, and I would never have stumbled across the hoofprints. There were so many little things that so easily could have been different; yet here I was, and she was still alive, if barely.

I shut my eyes and shook my head. “I don’t care if she’s almost dead,” I said firmly. “I’m not leaving her.”

The wolf gazed at me, curiously. “Why?”

He already knew the answer. I guess he wanted to hear me say it, and when I spoke my voice was as fierce as a wolf’s. “’Cos it’s the right thing to do.”

There was a long pause. The whole while, I held my gaze with his, not so much as daring to blink.

Then he spoke. “Spoken like a true wolf. You brave, brave stallion.”

I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but certainly not that. My mouth hung open, dumbfounded. Before I could reply, he got up and bounded into the darkness, past the trees, and I was all alone again.

Or so I thought.

From nowhere, more howling, but it wasn’t like any howling I’d ever heard before, and that included the monster from the park. I cowered. The cry was painful, actually, physically painful, and if, as a ghost, it still managed to make me hurt, I can only imagine what it would’ve been like if I’d had a real body. Whatever was making the sound was clearly in agony... or exceptionally good at pretending it was.

Another wolf took up the call, closer this time, and every bit as loud. A third joined it, then a fourth and a fifth; a whole pack of ‘em! I stopped trembling as the timber wolf re-emerged from the darkness, and I’d never once thought that it was possible for a wolf to grin, but his pack continued to cry out into the night, he did just that. “W-why are you doing this for me?” I asked, hoping that I wasn’t coming across as rude. But I think he understood.

“Ponies have little respect for timber wolves,” it said. “They think us mindless beasts and monsters of the darkness. It has been a long time since I’ve come across a pony I respect.”

I had a feeling he was holding back, but I never got a chance to ask him; right then, the upstairs light in the cottage switched on. The pegasus was awake! And though I couldn’t see the other wolves, they must’ve been close, ‘cos the sight of the light seemed to spur them on, a demonic choir from the depths of Tartarus itself. The pegasus opened one of the windows and peered out of it, scared out of her wits. She was awake! This was my chance.

“You’ll know what to do,” said the timber wolf behind me. Tilting my head, confused, I looked from the cottage to the trees, but the wolf was already gone. The howling stopped. What had he meant, I’d know what to do? What did that mean?

As if I’d known the answer all along, everything fitted into place. I walked out into the garden below the window, and, with my ghostly glowing hoofprints, left a great big message in the snow.

FOLLOW ME

I looked up at the window. The pony, Fluttershy, was staring down at my hoofprints, astonishment all over her face... then she vanished from the window. A moment later, she opened the door, still frightened, but she had more courage than she let on ‘cos she stepped out into the blizzard anyway—I didn’t even wanna think about how cold she must’ve felt.

I led her to the mound.

She understood the problem at once, brushed the snow of Apple Bloom’s face and body, and carefully lifted the branch off of her. Apple Bloom was still breathing. I could feel the faintest, dimmest, smallest sliver of life left within her; but it was there, and that’s what counted.

She was gonna be fine. She was going to live.

Tears had been building up in me like water behind a dam, and now I gave the dam permission to burst. I cried like never before; not even dying had made me cry this much. And ponies say that heaven is meant to be the most wonderful, amazing place you can think of, but I gotta tell ya, if it was a real place, it had nothing on this, knowing that I had saved the life of another filly. True, the cost had been my one chance to see Mom, but there were bigger things going on, more important things.

She was safe.

A few seconds passed, and Fluttershy wasn’t looking at Apple Bloom anymore; she was looking at my hoofprints. I shuddered. It must’ve been odd for her to see the prints, but not being able to see who was making ‘em.

So why, if she was unable to see me, was she looking me in the eyes? Why was her mouth hanging open? When the answer dawned on me, it was so huge that for a moment, I forgot about Apple Bloom, about Mom, about everything other than Fluttershy’s wide, blue eyes, reflecting the light of the lantern.

She could see me.

7: Walking on Clouds made of Gold

— Chapter Seven —
Walking on Clouds made of Gold

Mommy shakes the little photo of us—the camera was one of those fancy ones that prints the picture off straightaway. It’s the most magical thing ever.

“Look, Camera,” she says as she sits on the sand dune, the huge, red sunset blazing behind us. I snuggle up closer to her. “You see this? You know what this is?”

“... A photo?”

She beams at me, and I giggle. “It’s not just a photo,” she says. “It’s a hug which will last until the end of time.”

Picture the scene. I’m standing there gaping as though Celestia herself has greeted me by name or something, and me and Fluttershy are gaping at one another, the both of us not quite able to understand what it is we’re seeing, or how this is happening. Is it any wonder that she can see me? You might call me crazy, but I don’t think so. In fact, I didn’t even question how she even saw my hoofprints in the first place, ‘cos now that cast my mind back, nopony in Fairflanks had reacted to ‘em; that meant that, like me, they’d been completely invisible to everypony. Not to Fluttershy, though. Not tonight. Not after trying so hard to be noticed.

I turned and bolted. “Wait,” I heard her cry, her voice as delicate as the wolf’s was rough. But I didn’t turn back.

I rushed over the snow.

Jumped over the brook.

Ran through the trees.

If I hurried, I could make it, I could still see Mom, and she’d be able to see me. I ran like the wind, and the night was a blur. I was a bullet, shooting across the landscape. I was a cheetah, sprinting for my life.

Gradually, things changed...

It was the trees which I noticed first. One minute they were there, the next, they weren’t, and though I was sure they’d been in the corner of my vision the whole time, I honestly couldn’t tell you where they went. The blizzard was the next thing to go. The wind vanished. The snowflakes stopped falling, and the sky turned the darkest black that you could imagine, a night sky with no moon or stars in it. Then the snow, that transformed as well. It got fluffier, less like snow and more like clouds, and soon the whole landscape was clouds. They were the most magical ones that you ever saw, ‘cos they all seemed to be lit up from underneath by this soft, golden glow. It was as if they were giving off light. I was walking on clouds made of gold.

Then, from nowhere, Death was standing in front of me and blocking the way. “Ten o’clock,” he said. “You didn’t see your mother.”

It wasn’t a question. It took a good minute or so for the words to sink in, but once they had... well, what can I say? The fires erupted inside me, coursing through my body. I glared at Death. I wanted to shout at him. I wanted to kick and bite him, make him feel a little of the pain I was experiencing then, ‘cos I’m telling ya, just a tiny sliver of it would’ve been enough for ten whole lifetimes. You didn’t see your mother. Was that it? After all I’d done and given up, that was all he had to say? Not even a ‘well done’ or something?

You can only imagine my surprise, then, when I opened my mouth to tell him exactly what I was thinking, only for something else to come out instead. “Is she alright?” I caught myself saying in a strangled whisper. “Is she safe?”

“As we speak, Fluttershy has Apple Bloom laid out on the living room sofa, and she is dressing the wound obtained when the branch fell on her. It seems like the filly was looking for adventure, only to encounter an unfortunate ending! However, I promise you, Camera: she’s going to be fine.”

“And if I hadn’t been there?”

“She would’ve frozen to death. Her body would’ve been torn apart by wolves.”

Those words were all I needed to hear. The anger drained away, never to return...

“You are one of the bravest stallions I’ve met in years,” said Death, and where moments before I’d felt rage, now I smiled as I picked up on the undeniable pride in his voice. “Equestria is a poorer place for having lost you.”

“What happens now?”

“Now, you wait, and I’ll show you the doorway.”

Then, he was gone. It was just me alone on the golden clouds, and in his place had appeared a rectangular archway with an old wooden door. A strangely familiar door. Like Ponyville, it was like looking at something from a half remembered dream. I recognized those scratches at the bottom of it, as well as the crayon marks. I knew that worn out, brass handle. I knew this door.

Could it be? Was it possible?

Was this what I thought it was?

Death had left a thick, yellow envelope stuck next to the handle, held in place with a bit of sticky tape. With trembling hooves I opened it, pulled out the parchment. The hoofwriting was thick and rough, and splotchy, and it was all in capitals. ‘FIVE MINUTES’, was all it said. That was all it needed to say...

I let the letter fall from my hooves, and it never seemed to stop falling—time was going by so slowly. My chest heaved as I stared at the door, my head was light. I was giddy. Every worry I had ever had, every fear, every nightmare... they all left me, leaving behind just Mom’s beaming face in my mind.

I placed a hoof on the door, and pushed.

There she was.

The room beyond the doorway was tiny, and again, oddly familiar. Like Fluttershy’s bedroom, the floorboards were bare, but unlike that lovely cottage, the boards also looked rough; the wood was dark, and there were specks of paint here and there from where somepony hadn’t bothered to put down sheets before repainting the room. The rafters were exposed. Thick red curtains covered were drawn over the window, and the wallpaper was old and peeling, and the lamp on the bedside desk was ancient; Mom had forgotten to turn it off before bed. A lot of ponies might’ve said that the room was in dire need of decorating, but not me, not me at all. I loved it. It was cosy.

Mom was sleeping on the bed, on top of the covers, her pale blue coat and dark mane clashing with the navy blanket. It was Mom. She was really there, and I wasn’t dreaming this. I crawled up on the bed, put my hoof around her, and closed my eyes, relishing the moment, and wanting it to last forever. “I came back,” I whispered. “I came back...

“I’m home.”

3: Conversation with Death

— Chapter Three —
Conversation with Death

It had been three days since I’d last seen Mom. Three. Whole. Days. I don’t care what anypony says: you could live ‘til you were eighty, but those eighty years wouldn’t feel half as long as those three days did to me. Man, even if you lived until a hundred and eighty I’d tell ya the same thing. For some reason I kept thinking of that one photo of the sunset. I thought of the pink clouds and of the grass on the sand-dunes, waving in the late summer’s breeze; of the smell of the ocean, the crashing of the sea. To be sure, you can’t catch those last two things on camera, but that didn’t stop me from remembering them. If you could hear a photograph, looking at that one, you would’ve heard waves.

Anyway, I totted out of the park, shaken, and I walked through the streets of Fairflanks, leaving glowing hoofprints in the snow behind me; nopony seemed to notice, so I guess that meant I was the only one who could see them. The Hearth’s Warming lights had been put up. They were wrapped around trees, street-lamps, and stung between all the buildings in town. There were tons of families out. They were eating roasted chestnuts and singing carols, or riding on the Ferris wheel, or skating on the big ice rink which was set up every year.

... In my bedroom back home, there was a photo, one which I’d taken myself. It was of all my friends lined up in a row on the ice rink. They were all beaming ‘cos of how happy we were to be there...

Looking at the ice rink made me feel ill, so I ran the rest of the way home, the buildings of Fairflanks peering down at me, judging me for having abandoned Mom. The windows were like a thousand eyes. How dare you run away, I imagined the houses saying to me.

“No!” I shouted back. “It’s not my fault, I—”

Nopony made you run away, so it is entirely your own fault. You should’ve been there for your mother. She was devastated, yet you were nowhere to be seen.

It was too much; I had to stop for a moment to wipe ghostly glowing tears from my eyes. Big ol’ townhouses rose above me, and I swear that the snow was thicker than it was before, and all the flakes were caught in the light of the streetlamps, looking like stars drifting down towards the ground...

Once I’d wiped my tears I picked up the pace again, and in no time at all, there was my house in that weird part of Fairflanks that wasn’t quite city but wasn’t quite countryside and wilderness wither. It was two stories tall. It had a porch and a garden, through which a path led up to the front door. There was my bedroom window next to the tallest branches of the tree. There was the hedge. There was the fence and the swing and the garden bench. I was home at last. The memory of the last time I was here played in my head so vividly that I felt I was living it again.

“Now Camera, promise me you’ll be back from Star Light’s house no later than ten.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“I mean it this time, Camera. You know I worry about you someti—”

“Mom, I heard ya the first time! I’ll be safe. I promise.”

Mom had given me a weak smile which I’d returned. She’d shut the door...

As I stood on the doorstep, my breathing became heavy (not that I needed to breathe, but, you know, force of habit). A chill which had nothing to do with the cold crept through my ghostly body, from my head down to my flank and right to the tips of my hooves, and I imagined my heart pounding against my chest like a drum, and I shut my eyes. “Just do it,” I whispered. “Walk through the door. Get it over with.”

Taking the deepest breath I could muster, I opened my eyes, and before I could change my mind, I walked through the door and into the hallway to look for my mom; what I found instead was Death waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. “Camera Shutter, at last,” said Death with a voice that would’ve been more suited to an Ice Giant rather than a pony.

His appearance was so unexpected that it took me a few seconds to register what I was looking at, but I got there in the end.

It was Death.

In my house.

And in the same way your heart pumps blood without having to be told, or the way you breathe without having to be taught, I just knew who this pony was, and that it was Death. Call it instinct.

Now, I said his voice sounded like it belonged to a giant, but that isn’t to say he was lacking for size himself—I’m amazed he managed to fit inside the house. For some reason, wherever he walked, it as though he was in a pool of moonlight, and he was taller than the statue of Princess Celestia in Manehatten Square. Where he should’ve had a cutie mark, he had a load of deep, sickening scars, like his mark had been scratched off by a lion or something. He was very thin. His ancient, grey skin had lost all of its hair, and it hung loosely from his bones. He had a jagged horn as big as a sword jutting out of his forehead, and his eyes were sewn shut, although I hoped whoever had done that to him didn’t have a cutie mark for stitching ‘cos it obviously wasn’t their talent. The sight of those stitches made me feel a rush of horror like I’d never known. I wanted to run. I wanted to run away from this beast as fast as my legs would let me; but it was as though my hooves were frozen to the floor. I couldn’t move, couldn’t even scream. He looked at me with those sewn up eyes of his, peering into my soul.

Then he unfolded his wings, and halfway along each wing, on the rim, was a great big eye. At least I think they were eyes. Neither of them had pupils, and they were so amazingly white that they seemed to shine in the gloom. They blinked, making this awful squelching sound which went right through me.

I thought about the wolf, about the horror in its eyes as it searched the skies for something I couldn’t see, and then I stared transfixed at the wings. Suddenly, things made a lot more sense to me.

He spoke again.“You are wondering why it took me so long to find you?”

I don’t know what I’d been expecting but it hadn’t been this. Now that I was starting to get over his appearance (or rather, I was trying to tell myself that I was), it occurred to me that he was being really... well, polite, was the word. As loud as he was, you could tell he was making an effort to keep his voice down as much as he could. He had hung his big, black cloak on one of the coat pegs, and had taken off his boots and put them against the wall. Sweet Celestia, those boots! They were huge and tough, boots made to trudge to the plains of Hell and back.

Anyway, the point is, all this caught me so off-guard that some of the terror in my chest died away. He was Death. He was supposed to be a monster, a fiend, a demon! He was supposed to come galloping after me, lightning flashing around him as he left a trail of fire in his wake; he wasn’t meant to take off his boots and hang up his coat. I noticed an unfamiliar saddlebag next to the boots. There was a knitting magazine poking out of it...

Gulping, I tore my gaze away from the bag, and turned his question over in my mind. Hesitantly, I nodded.

“Then my apologies,” said Death, nodding back. “Ponies die every single day, but I can only talk to them one at a time. Consider yourself lucky. Sometimes it can take me months or even years to get around to talking to a pony.”

I titled my head, confused. “You w-want to talk? But I thought you did something with a scythe.”

“Fairy tale nonsense. I simply show ponies the doorway. It is up to them to walk through it.”

Glancing around, half expecting to see a new doorway made out of gold perhaps, or mist, or maybe even silver. But there was nothing. Death continued. What he said next was the next big shock of the night, every bit as unexpected as his appearance here...

“You came here to see your mother, however you left it too late, and she is no longer here. It is time to let her go. It is time to move on.”

There was a long pause. Outside, the wind was picking up. It battered the doorway, and I heard the windows in the living room shaking.

Just ‘cos I heard the words, it didn’t mean I accepted them.

The shock of talking to Death finally wore thin. In its place came dread like I had never known before, a storm of fear brewing inside my belly. My legs quaked. I almost collapsed, and the words swam around in my mind, and the more I thought about them, the louder they seemed ‘til eventually it was as though they were being bellowed, making fun of me. You’re too late. You’re too late. Too late.

I stamped a hoof. “It’s not true,” I said fiercely. “It’s only been three days. Mom wouldn’t leave!”

“It is the truth, and you knew it from the moment you saw the lights were switched off.”

“Liar,” I shouted, my eyes blurry from tears. Mom wouldn’t leave at a time like this. This was our fortress! It was our secret base, our castle, our mansion. It was where we played together, where we ate and where we slept. Every room was stuffed with memories... and I know that’s not the sort of thing most nine year olds care about, but my memories were all I had left. I rushed into the living room, remembering the time that me and Mom built a pillow fort in there. In the kitchen, I could almost smell her cooking. I remembered her singing to herself as she did the washing up, and the way she’d get me to dry the plates and sing along with her.

Rushing upstairs, the first thing I did was go to my room. There, the Daring Do posters plastered over the walls, along with the ones of the Wonderbolts; and all the photos I’d ever taken were up there too, all over the place. The model airships were still hanging from the ceiling. The globe hadn’t been touched. The covers on my bed were exactly the way I’d left them from the last time I was here...

Dying is easy. It’s what happens afterwards that’s the hard part.

Slowly, oh so slowly, I walked back down the stairs. I’d never felt anything like what I did then: tons of different emotions, any single one of them so strong that just on their own, they would’ve been overwhelming; so to get ‘em them at the same time was almost more than I could handle. First, there was anger, sheer, burning anger. How dare this creature come into my house to tell me I was wasting my time! What gave him that right? Nothing as far as I could see, and right about then I couldn’t have cared less that one of the oldest, most powerful beings in the world was standing in my corridor. Oh man, I had half a mind to kick him out into the snow.

Though at the same time, fear lingered at the bottom of my belly, a cold, hateful little feeling. Then there was the terror that I’d never ever see Mom again, and the shame of knowing that, if I had come a day or two earlier, this wouldn’t have happened. Something wet was falling down my face—more ghostly glowing tears, like tiny stars trickling down my cheeks. I wiped them away. I didn’t wanna cry in front of Death.

“When she dies, will I see her again?” I asked, my voice unsteady, although I couldn’t figure out if it was from anger or nerves. The answer made me want to curl up on the floor.

“I have never died, so I have never made that journey.”

“But you’re Death! You’ve gotta know, you’ve just got to!”

He didn’t say a word. He carried on studying me with those sewn up eyes of his.

My fear vanished; my terror dimmed. All my feelings, so strong a moment ago, were being replaced with steely resolve, tougher than a mountain. Death kept talking about a doorway, however I was adamant that I couldn’t go through it. Not yet. Not ‘til I’d seen Mom one last time to say goodbye. I stood up as tall as I could. It was so important to say what I had to say before my nerves failed me.

“I’m sorry, but... but you’ll have to come back for me another time. I have to find my Mom. Then you can do whatever you want.” I flinched under the look he gave me, so I added, “I’m, I’m really sorry.”

My apology seemed to hang in the air, the most pathetic thing in the world. Had I honestly just said that? No, I couldn’t have done, ‘cos surely I had more sense than that...

Apparently not.

I jumped as Death started to... he started to laugh! But I don’t mean giggled, or that he gave a chuckle as though I was being silly. No, I mean that he well and truly laughed, almost keeling over as he struggled to control himself, and it was the iciest sound I’d ever heard. Despite the fact I was already dead, at the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder if there were worse things than dying, and would he be able to do them to me if he felt insulted? Finally, though, he stood up. He leaned in close to my ear. Though I couldn’t smell things no more, it didn’t take much to imagine the decay coming off him, the stench of his eyeballs rotting inside of the sockets.

“You would still look for your mother even after you encounter with the spirit beast? It’s a dangerous world out there, for a ghost, and that wolf was merely the start. If you were eaten, you would be beyond my help.; knowing this, you would still search for your mother?”

I didn’t even hesitate. “Yes,” I said.

“And do you have any idea how many ponies speak to me like this, colt?”

My heart sank. “L-lots?”

“Almost none,” he replied, barely contained glee in his voice. “The waiting usually gives ponies time to say their goodbyes—if they want to, that is. Some ponies couldn’t care less about saying it. Others take one look at me and are too scared to ask for more time. Oh, I can sense that they want to, but my job is to lead them through the doorway whether they’re ready for it or not.”

“And, a-and the ones who do ask?”

“If you don’t ask, you don’t get. I value boldness, Camera. It’s a rare delight to meet a colt as bold as you.”

I was shaking something terrible, and then I yelled in fright, ‘cos there was something huge invading my mind, some enormous being which couldn’t be stopped. Whatever it was, it was made out of eyes, eyes which didn’t blink. They stared and stared and stared, seeing everything there was to know about me: my memories, my darkest secrets, and how guilty I felt about staying away from home for no good reason...

Then the thing, whatever it had been, was gone. I gave into my fear. I collapsed on the floor.

Death laughed again. “You are a good colt,” he said, “and you recognize that letting fear dictate you was the biggest, most senseless mistake you’ve ever made. You deserve a second chance.”

Like a beam of sunlight shining through the gap between curtains, a sliver of hope appeared in my mind, teasing me. My ears perked up. I hardly dared to believe what I was hearing. “I, I do?” I whispered.

“Your mother lives at number one Blossom Street in Ponyville, right near the edge of the Everfree Forest, so as long as you stick close to the forest, it will be easy enough to find. You know this place, though you don’t remember it; it was your grandparents cottage, and the one refuge remaining to your mother, a place where she can be properly alone without anypony knocking on the door. The time now is exactly ten o’clock. You have precisely one day before I come for you, whether you’ve seen her or not.”

My joy vanished as quickly as it came. “P-Ponyville?!” I spluttered.

“Ponyville,” Death confirmed simply. This would do.

“It takes a day just to get there! I need more time. Please. Pleeease.”

Death shook his head. “One day is more than enough, so use it wisely. Godspeed, my little pony.”

And then he was gone, though I couldn’t remember him walking out the door, but neither did he vanish into thin air. It was like... one moment he had always been there, the next, he had never been there. That’s the best I can describe it.

I looked at the clock on the wall—already five past ten. Less than a day remained...

How strange it was, knowing that this was the last time I’d step hoof in my house. My scooter was still propped up against the wall, next to where Death’s boots had been. Wandering around, I entered the kitchen for the final time, then the living room, and I stroked the chairs, tapped the window, nudged the sofa... I dunno what I was trying to achieve but... but knowing that I wouldn’t see any of this stuff again, or feel it and touch it... if I’d had trouble before accepting I was a spirit, then I think that little trot around the house was finally the thing that convinced me, once and for all, beyond any shadow of any sort of doubt or hope, that I was truly gone...

It was too much to bear. Taking a deep breath, I ran out the door and into the snow.