The shrill beat of crushed leaves echoed in the lasting day.
A forest, dark, and splayed open before her like rib's ready to be cracked under a butchers axe.
She stopped, wings trembling, a shriveling snapping pain scattered its aches on the left...
The right, she only stole a fertive glance, hooded eyes slick with tangy sweat.
Found only...
Only...
Her throat was dry and whatever she was leaning on was ribbed, and rubbed it's ridged spikes into her matted fur.
"You can do this, old mare. Your better than, this Luna cursed forest!"
Her sound's played among nattered trees, ounce lush green, the growing dusk fall made even the tallest tree a rude purplish amber. Tapered branches became claws - thin Stygian dagger's made in the second age bled on her flesh.
The ground slacked it's thrist,
Under the...
drip,
drip,
drip over her blood.
Rainbow sighed, wiping her spittle on a mostly green and faintly yellow leaf.
Their too a faint red.
Her body spun about as she lifted her head from the warm bark...inviting bark.
She turned, half-stumbling over half-rotten leaflets and leaned in - her hair still vibrant shown stark against the falling moonlight breaking the dark canopy above.
She breathed, a weeping thing into its brown ridges, bent, and cragged like shattered bulching rock - a faint pale seeped.
Her breat a faint thing blended and fell and...
was welcomed.
Hooves stole ground, she jumped from rotten logs, and as she hooped and half-crawled a purple castle stole through the edge of green.
Who would put a castle...here?
A rattling burned into her mind, such that her chest ached and her breath...
She stumbled, hoove falling over hoove, wing and not...
beat half-minded and broken in moments...
The dirt tasted like something left on the ground.
Nerves raw and bleeding made a moan swell in the very air, her eyes twitched, a bumbling spoke from a suddenly swollen bush.
"ugh. Ugggh."
Knott's, not the tree knott's that stayed so close as if in, lingering ,but, the knott's in her spine that made her clench her muscles and rustle small cherry's from their perch.
The remains of her left wing twitch, her paint gave a helping hoof to hearth's warming. Some spat of awareness pledged. Blood alway's spilled on these days. Those Old days.
The Fourth Rebellion
If her eyes weren't smeared with leaf and blood, leaf and blood, leaves and
brown...
The dead thing shifted, sweat, blood ,and urine among the forest floor.
Her eyes would have lingered, as moon touched her through as the forests keen...or because, her mind, on the boneless, lifeless hooves of the dead pig's guise. Drawn from a face left to rot in the convines of such a wood. Where the only book ,indeed, not burned rest's in a locked chest sealed by the blood of a sun within which words of a sun that had set on a soul forever - thrice. -
Rain began to fall in the wake of ,Rainbows dirt laced cries, if bones...still living ones could have her churning, as she splintered like wood.
What hope...was...
Her mind fled to the only way she could go...
To the past .
The Nightmares Of Lamenting were written by a single hoof by a twice dead ,Sunset , said to have been born a final time. Still dead.
Under a clash of steel and bones creaking she heard the fateful and true words of a dying sunset.
"Mother, Mother, Sun of all but, of me....
Not." Her voice was no voice, only a sour thing, too high for any mere foal mere freshly born.
Out and under amide court ,Sunset's dead eyes turned, its eyes a unknown to even her mother's.
It spoke, limb's so small, stomped, and with how all courters, foppers and nobles all flinched.
Her mother simply stared frozen rigid, shock, body as pale as fresh snow grew cold even as the sun still shined. It was as if her spirit fled and her's were not a gift but, a demon meant to harm...
Sullen word's spoken, being dead for for the third time made one cranky it seemed.
"Your sister and her lover had stolen the woods strengrh.
No word or deed will still the woods that they had rought upon the world away...away.
So...Goodbye, Mother...for the last time."
She would of heard all these thing's and more but, only in true light remember the chilling stilliness of her princess, her light that had guarded ponykind as long as she could remember. Would, and was willing to...
Remember.
She had cradled her baby. Eyes that hung white and caked with wax....
A flash of burning light felled a ream of elder trees down to the root's.
She awoke then, remembering eyes from an old, old mare that seemed never stop aging and sitting it seemed by the princess side for as long as she could remember, as long as she had been born...
The thing so closely held did not but, stare, and stare, silent, under eyes of rimmed gold and pale fleshy fur. She...
Her gaze brighter then the sun that bore her looked,
,and looked...
At her.
Rainbow Dash awoke to the burning stench of pig pork her mind caught, as the bush she had faint memory's of lay in ruin's, burned it seemed to ash by a streak of bold sunlight. A ounce full canopy of dark trees , somber statues that had swayed the night away lay in corpses.
Her eyes, free of some grim ,and dirt by good ,or ill measures saw the truth.
A dead hoove frozen by the thick of her violent storm.
The nightmare it seemed was only so over, so over for most, but for those whom lived it, were living it.
Her hooves were blunt instruments, though she knew as she walked and trotted. This forest could still be her grave...all there graves.
With each step, she hoped as snow, uncalled for, began to fall, the creeping cold reminding rainbow that the cold had already taken one hoove...
What else did such a thing want?
Well...the answer was obvious...
what it was owed.
Only ,Rainbow's, eyes and a mare with a mane the color of cooked pork knew the danger...and the fear that it would come.
Author's Note
