The snow kept falling, a thousand white dots moving against the black and blue canvas of the cloudy night sky, the lights of the city giving a light orange tinge to the underside of the clouds.
Sunset was tired. The snow would occasionally get in her eyes, forcing her to close them. The cold was starting to get to her legs, each step harder than the last one.
The wind tugged and pulled at the scarf around her neck, threatening to rip it away, and she had to hold it in place.
She was walking through the woods just outside of her school. There was someone she needed to meet there. She knew that was the place. Out in the woods, where she would find the one who was probably her only remaining friend.
The trees stood tall against the darkness of the night, the twirling dance of the white snowflakes around their white barks disorientating, their branches, barren of leaves, ominously pointing to the sky as they twisted and turned, swaying under the force of the wind.
Sunset didn't particularly like the place. Not in that weather, certainly. But she had nowhere else to go, and so she marched onwards through the blizzard, cold fragments of ice biting against her face as they were smashed there by the wind. It was just the type of condition that made her feel the need for warming spells.
That had been a mistake. Thinking about Celestia. It really wasn't the moment to be thinking about her.
Sunset lifted her eyes, searching for a dash of black and green against the white and blue of the world around her.
It was pretty late. On a better day, she would have gone back to her room to sleep the night away. But not that night. Nobody would have been there for her, after all. She needed to go on.
She wondered if they would have started to worry about her. Not for the night, at least. Maybe the next morning, if she didn't come back. Probably late. No one would have noticed her absence until noon at least, possibly after.
She thought about it. Running away, leaving them all to wonder what had happened. Maybe that would make them feel guilty about what they'd done to her. Maybe they would finally understand.
Oh, who was she kidding. They wouldn't. She could almost hear them.
"Girls, Sunset is gone."
"Well it was about time she left us in peace!"
"I know, right?"
"Wanna celebrate with a party?"
She closed her eyes and took another step through the snow, the frozen water almost burning against her ankles. She should have dressed better.
Yeah, she was in no condition to run away, she was smart enough to realise that.
They were the stupid ones, after all.
No. She had to be better than that. Celestia wouldn't have approved that.
And besides, had she really wanted to go away, where could she have gone?
Nowhere, that was the answer. She had nowhere else to go. That school was her whole life, her whole reason to be. She didn't have something else. That was why it hurt so much.
There was ice on her cheeks, and not all of it had come from the sky, no matter how hard she tried to convince herself of that.
She was tired. Really tired.
She let herself fall on the ground, on a small patch of terrain devoid of snow near a tree, and laid there for a few seconds.
She opened her eyes and looked up. "I knew I'd find you here," she said at the black and green blur she saw in her clouded vision.
She made herself more comfortable and sat down, her back against the tree. "Silent as always, huh?" She immediately gave a small chuckle, thinking about the silliness of the question. She leaned back, her head resting against the trunk.
"You're the only one I have left."
Seconds passed in silence.
"I... I know it's silly of me." The little filly hugged her hooves together, bringing her legs closer to her chest to warm herself up. "Being out here, talking to a tree of all things."
The tree didn't answer. A rather unsurprising occurrence, given the fact that it was a tree.
Not any tree, of course. It was the tree Sunset had magically grown when she’d first entered Celestia's school, the one which had served as her entrance test.
But still, as talented of a unicorn as Sunset was, the tree had not gained the ability to speak. It would have been a most impressive phenomenon, since never in the history of Equestria had someone managed to make a normal tree talk. So the tree had been simply relocated in the forest outside Celestia's school, after some of its magical growth had been reduced.
And so the tree stood there, its large green leaves swaying in the wind, still attached despite the season, while its large black trunk stood still against the weather.
Sunset sighed. "I don't know what it is about those ponies. Always so annoyed about things. Always so slow with their homework, and then when they finish it they start asking me to do stupid things like playing with them instead of studying in advance." She let one of her hooves dangle at her side, then stroked the tree's deep black bark. "I know Celestia wants me to be friends with them, but I really can't. No matter how hard I try, it always feels like they have something against me."
The tree kept silently being tree, listening to her.
"But Celestia choose me as her personal student. Me. Maybe they're the stupid ones, after all. Maybe Celestia should stop worrying about making sure they feel included and admit that they're not fit to be her students, and that I don't need to waste my time with them."
Sunset got up, tugging her scarf tighter, and smiled. "Yeah! I'll show them. They can talk behind my back all they want, but one day I'll be somepony, and they’ll be forgotten." She turned around to face the tree. "Well, I wouldn't want to wake up late and miss class tomorrow, and I wouldn't want to risk Celestia noticing something was amiss, so I better go back anon." She chuckled. "I bet half of those idiots don't even know that's a word. Goodbye." She waved goodbye to the tree and walked back to her room.
The tree was still a tree.
Sunset's attitude, over the years, led her into a downwards spiral of egoism and isolation that eventually caused her to disobey Celestia's orders while blinded by her lust for power and leave Equestria as a manipulative schemer bent on revenge.
The tree remained a tree.
