"I was fifteen years old when I put on the armor.
I wish I remembered less about it, that I could say the moments were hazy. But they aren't. I can feel them like they were just yesterday.
It was cold. No one tells you how cold the desert gets, at night. It's like ice, pressing against every vein of your body, and you can't escape it. The sand only held so much heat before I had to run, just to stay moving, just to stay alive.
Do you know what it's like, to run like that? It's to have every breath rip itself from your lungs. It's to feel every muscle scream, and keep going. It's to be on the edge of something terrible and dark and endless, and the only thing that you know is real is how alive the pain makes you feel.
And if I stopped for too long, I could hear them. I still don't know what they were, but I knew that they were hunting me. The things in the night. I could feel their eyes on the back of my neck and knew that if I stopped I would never move again.
So I kept moving. My hooves bled, and my throat burned, and I remember feeling the wind, flowing through the fur on my back and across my skin. It was cold, and biting, but I remember it even now.
I would have died, that first night, or that first week, if I hadn't found the oasis.
I found some maps, later, that told me it was called South Palm, and that it was so far from where I had started. Farther than I should have been able to go. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have made it, but I did.
There was a wagon. I should have seen it, there was a sky full of stars and enough light to see the shapes and outlines that filled the desert, but I didn't. I tripped over it, and something in my hoof gave way. I couldn't push myself to run any farther, after that.
But I didn't give up.
I used my horn. I hated it, I hated how it felt, I hated everything it stood for, everything it took from me, but I used it.
I made enough light to see, see the half-buried wagons and their broken wheels and their empty reigns. Six of them, all in a line. Abandoned, like I was.
And then I could feel them.
They were looking at me. They were coming for me. They were hunting me, and I knew it and I couldn't give up.
So I dug.
My hoof hurt. I found out later that it had fractured, but I didn't know that then. I just dug, and the tears were just there, like the stars were there, and like the wagon was there, and like the danger was there.
I found an entrance to the closest wagon a few feet underneath the sand. I bucked the door open, and I remember screaming, and pulling myself inside, and the smell of sand and sweat and blood and salt being thick overpowering and everywhere. I pushed something heavy in front of the door and fell.
And then they howled. It was a sound like a wolf, but so empty. So hollow. Like a sandstorm ripping through the leaves of a palm. I don't know how many there were, but they were there. I could hear them, walking across the sand, snapping at the wagon, throwing themselves against the wood.
I was so alone. So powerless. So afraid.
I remember that night, still. Sometimes I wake up and think I'm still there. In the wagon, alone in the desert, with the things outside trying so hard to break inside and kill me.
When I lit up my horn, I saw that the thing I had thrown in front of the door was the armor.
I lived there for nine days. The wagons had food, things like pickles and onions and jerky. The oasis had water I could drink. Inside the wagons it was cool for the day and warm for the night. There were books, treatises on government and merchant logs and a few foal's tales. A Daring Do book, but only the second one. Some letters, mostly from,
Family. The families of the ponies of the caravan.
I only read one. I couldn't bear to look at the rest. I put them back in the bag in the third wagon and never opened it again.
I don't know what happened to the ponies of the caravan. I think they got away, most of them. Except Sterling Quill.
I found his body in the last wagon. What was left of it. I wish I hadn't. It was just a skeleton, by then, but I still wish I had never seen it. He was fallen by a cot, and I saw where the crate nearby had broken his skull.
His name was on the letter he was writing, you see. That's how I knew it was him.
I... Moved the bag of mail to the last wagon, and put it by him. And then I burned it. I don't know why I did that, but I did. And I just, watched, as that last wagon smoldered and crumpled and caved under the sand and that was the last of it. I didn't walk by that spot again.
At night, I went back into that first wagon. I don't know why I kept going back, it was broken and horrible and it reminded me of that first night. But I did, and every night I slept as best as I could.
The monsters never came back, but I put the armor in front of the door just in case they did.
I lived like this. From day to day, trying not to think about the life I had left behind, or the things from the first night, or the letters, or Sterling Quill. I didn't think about tomorrow, I just thought about today.
And when the food ran low, I knew I had to leave. I had a map, and knew that the closest town was only a day's walk away. That's where I would go. I'd figure out the plan from there.
Then I put the armor on. Just like that.
It, wasn't special, then. It was just big, and heavy, and a thing that I believed could keep me safe. So I took it with me, and never looked back.
