Trixie Shall Become The Greatest Wizard The World Has Ever Seen (Trixie II)

She hadn't taken a hit. She wasn't stumbling. Breathing wasn't hard. She didn't need to take a rest.

"Where's that brat?" She didn't hear the voice behind her. She didn't hear because there was nopony there, because she had outrun those ponies.

Somehow she knew that wasn't the truth. She stumbled forward, through the darkness, alone, her hat with more holes in it than stars on it, her cape dirty and ragged. The left leg on her front was hurting every time she put pressure on it. She had looked down once and even though she couldn't see, she could feel that from hoof to knee it had been colored red. She didn't even really feel anything anymore. She felt half asleep as she nearly lost her balance. That and she didn't even know for how long she had been running. The only thing that stuck with her was that she had bumped into a wall once in a while and went around another corner. Up until this point, there had been no dead ends and the other ponies hadn't given up on finding her. She still heard one voice, not the one with accent, luckily, and not the sarge who hadn't hesitated to shoot her twice. She kinda hoped they had gone lost in this mess of a labyrinth.

Trixie knew she wouldn't find her own way back .There was always a faint hope that around the next corner her friends would wait and she kept the tears down just because of that. Somewhere deep down she knew, what it meant to run away from those things she wanted to cherish and protect. She had turned away from those things again and had just moved into the darkness.

That was when she stopped walking. In the middle of the blackness and tried to take it in. She felt the liquid dripping from her leg, she felt her eyes getting heavier and pain moving through her body. Such pain and she still wasn't able to cry. Trixie couldn't turn back, Trixie couldn't walk forward. In both cases she knew that she would find nothing. The end of her path was as black as the beginning. She understood that she had taken the wrong turn when she had decided to play the hero and she still wasn't able to cry. Instead the filly took one deep breath and moved onwards. Now, she was just one filly in the dark .

She didn't quite know whether she had gone blind or if it really was total blackness that ruled here. Maybe the filly should have been scared but she wasn't. Not really. The entire world but her drowned in the gloom, and an unending road she couldn't even see stretched out before her. Nothing more. The hunters, her friends, they were all gone now and the snows were falling once more.

"Tell me, what happened to your home?" The question of the filly rang through her head.

Her parents had been called Great Stars and Powerful Echo and they had been stage magicians. Everypony had said they had been bad but Trixie had seen their shows and they had always made her smile. The little filly remembered sitting there, grass blowing in the wind, the tower by the cliffs before her and her parents performing tricks for her. She had been amazed and bewildered, she had laughed and she had cried.

She remembered sitting beside her mother's bed and looking in her eyes, crying and saying that she shouldn't go. The mare smiled at her little daughter and told her: "I should be sorry for all those things I said to you. You have more talent in magic than both me and your father. You still have a life worth living and you still have something to fight for."

She remembered the sun vanishing beyond the horizon and her father sitting beside her. He put the cloak around Trixie and put the hat on her head. "Don't ever stop, daughter. You need to find the right path," he told her and went up the stairs. They creaked beneath each and every of his steps and Trixie looked at her mother.

"You need to wake up," she said. "He's going to hurt himself again if you leave now."

The creaking didn't stop and tears were running down Trixie's cheeks. "Trixie promises to be good," she said, saying her name to reassure her mother, "she'll be the best daughter you ever had, she'll be a great magician and everypony will like her shows and they will point and say that she is your daughter and, and..."

A door opened and then closed, and then Trixie remembered sitting alone in the room. She remembered sleeping, she remembered going to the bathroom a few times, but she would always go back and sit by the bed where her mother was. She stayed until the sun went up again and then vanished again. As it did, Trixie repeated the same words she had said last night. Certain spells only worked at certain times, her mother had told her. So she stayed for the same time again, finishing with the same words. Again and then again. On the sixth day she heard another door open and ponies entering.

Then, the summer snows were falling above Canterlot and she was in the orphanage with the filly by her side, the generous pony who had lent her her own new blanket, while she didn't even fuss about the cold. "You don't need to tell me," she said.

Trixie turned around and looked into those cyan eyes, "Who are you?" she asked.

"Why are you stopping, Trixie? You ran away for a reason, didn't you. Once when you realized that they would take you from the tower. The second time from the orphanage and the third time from the parents they chose for you. You ran away and then stayed somewhere else. Only you know why and you need to find the reason why. Trixe: Do not stop! Under no circumstance must you stop, ever! You are important, you are as important as everypony else on this journey and you might just be the one who does it. Stand up. . . I said, Stand. Up."

Trixe opened her eyes. She was lying on the ground and she felt the liquid on her leg. She didn't have much more time. The tiny piebald filly lifted herself up, slowly, as steadily as possible, which wasn't really that steady and then stumbled forwards once more.

She only closed her eyes for what she thought a split-second, but suddenly she saw lights, like stars, all around her, in the distance. Thousands of them. She turned around herself, trying grasp where she was, only seeing a million lights and not knowing where exactly she was. Then she stumbled forward again, her eyes looking down only once.

Her leg had turned blue beneath the red and all the other extremeties felt as if they belonged to another pony entirely. Still, her eyes shifted as she spotted on what she was walking. A small bridge in the middle of a starry sky, leading across some deep hole, where she was happy she couldn't grasp how deep down it went. The filly simply walked on, hoping that she would find something on the other side. A cliff, a tower, a bed with her mother in it, her father saying that she was his daughter. A friend would have been nice, too. A little pony whose parents ran an orphanage and who was called Rarity.

Crack, Crack, Crack!

"Hey, brat," she heard behind her and turned her head. The staff smacked her across face and she felt some teeth flying out of it. With the hit, her hat fell off and then slowly went down into the blackness. She just watched it and suddenly she was crying. He didn't care, instead knocking her down with the blunt part of his weapon. As she looked up again she could see who it was. Before her stood the tall and lanky pony and she could hardly make out an expression. The only thing she saw were his eyes, and they made him appear as scary as he was scared himself.

"I don't know why those things are down here, but they've already gotten Sarge and Apple. I'll kill you and any other brats I'll find on my way out and then I've got to tell both of their families," he said, panting. His uniform was torn and he looked wounded. "Aw, whatever, they're all probably dead and the two of them were bastards anyway. Well," he said and Trixie could swear he was smiling, "I'm going to enjoy this, at least. Any last words, little filly?" She could make out that he was pointing the gun at her.

She had told herself to run because she had a life worth living for, a life of her own that nopony else could control. It was given to her by her parents, alongside the hat and the cloak. They all belonged to her and she lived the life they never had managed to attain.

She groaned. The pain was sharp, but she wasn't going to break. Between sobs and tears, the pain and the sadness, the fear and the anger she was answering him and Rarity and herself. She answered them the one question, the one that was important to her, the one singular most important question that she had known until this moment and the one she had never known the answer for.

The question why she was still running.

"Trixie shall become the greatest wizard the world has ever seen!"

She yelled it out and assembled all her strength. With one swift motion she jumped to the side, to where the darkness awaited and then she rolled off the edge. She heard the shot, maybe felt it. Maybe it was nothing but a scratch, maybe she was already dead. Still, she was feeling the wind as she fell. Down and down and deeper down, still. She couldn't find the strength to blink or to move as she took a dive head first into the blackness. She went past her hat, which had now so many holes in it it was barely recognizable. Above her, the outcry of the soldier shattered the silence as the nightmarish beasts descended upon him. Trixie wasn't content with it. Instead she had already hoped that he would make it out of here. Not that it mattered now. She suddenly felt a sharp pain going through her body as she hit the ground and everything turned black.