The great glory of Celestia’s afternoon sun still radiated over Equestria. It beamed into Canterlot, illuminating the streets and alleys and shining through windows into kitchens and living rooms. The late autumn light was shady gold and orange with accents of ocher, and it was still strong enough to look at the progress of a ball as it bounded over the stoops of whitewashed houses, chased by four earth pony colts almost old enough to be stallions.
Wood Chip passed the ball to Forward Motion, who dodged around Pepper Pot. Forward Motion kicked, and the ball whizzed past Enduring Fire’s head.
“Aw, come on!” squawked Pepper Pot. He was charcoal colored, with lean limbs and a stringy mane that he plucked at when nervous. His head jittered, as it always did, but its motion now was too faint to indicate real irritation. “You just had to lean a little!”
It was banter, but Enduring Fire struck his hoof against the pavement in a wordless and painful gesture of frustration. His hoof ached as he fetched the ball and kicked it back into play. He wanted the game to interest him. He wanted to abandon himself to playing ball, but he could not stop himself from looking at every pony that went by. The next pony he saw was blue. No. Another was green. No. That one was a mare. No. He could not control his compulsion, but when he attempted to picture what he would do if he found a sand-colored stallion with an ivory mane, he saw only a void.
Two days ago, in one of the aging but cleanly swept classrooms of his school, Enduring Fire had realized that he didn’t want to learn what the school had to teach. He was no scholar. His teachers had always, with a murmur about his “difficult home life,” felt obligated to pass him, but this year he had struggled more than usual, and they had warned him he was in danger of failing. His revelation came while his literature teacher droned on about some book Enduring Fire had not even pretended to read. He was yanked out of his daily stupor and into a vision of a prismatic maze of possibilities, an endless labyrinth of forking paths whose gleaming walls were transparent but impassable. The paths where he finished school turned inaccessible, displaced by solid, dull barriers. He saw himself charge haphazardly through the maze, searching for an escape but finding only dead ends.
The vision put him into an introspective daze. For the rest of the day, he couldn’t pay attention to his teachers or even his friends. He heard and understood their words, but they seemed distant and hardly relevant to him. When school was over, he didn’t go home. He spent hours wandering the streets of Canterlot, walking between the pools of light cast by the street lamps. Nopony bothered him. He was medium size and medium build, and, despite his flaming red coat and yellow mane, he appeared so nondescript that he hardly existed.
Doing menial physical labor for the rest of his life would be difficult and would pay badly. A trade could provide a stable future for an earth pony with no particular talent, like him. There were paths where he studied masonry, or plumbing, or blacksmithing, but he didn’t know how to find his way to those paths, and he could not see where they led. Some trades, like carpentry, were too far from his experience for him to even guess. If a particular trade had animated his thoughts, or if he had been enterprising, he might have dropped out of school at once and begun an apprenticeship. But dropping out would be the end of his youth and the beginning of adult responsibility, and the prospect dizzied him. As long as he stayed in school, he could act like a foal and squander his afternoons doing nothing in particular.
He was not conscious of how long he wandered until he returned home in the early hours of the morning. He looked up from the street, past the grayed, flaking whitewash on the apartment building where his family lived, and when he saw dim candlelight in the kitchen, he knew it was his mother. He ascended to the second floor by the unlit stairwell that bisected the building. To release the door’s sticky latch, he pulled up on the doorknob. His mother sat at the kitchen table, slumped with fatigue but pretending to peruse a copy of the day’s newspaper that somepony had discarded and she had picked up. He locked the door behind him and lay on the threadbare couch that was his bed.
There were times when he came home and his mother gave him a look that said she knew what he’d been doing and didn’t like it. The look had no visible sign of disapproval; no frown, no knit eyebrows, no clenched teeth; just a concentrated focus of her eyes during which her unwavering gaze pierced through his self-justifications. He didn’t want to meet that look when he had shoplifted from the grocery store that Pepper Pot’s family owned, nor when he had graffitied the alley behind Wood Chip’s uncle’s wagon repair shop. Even when he hadn’t done anything wrong, the look reminded him of his lack of ambition and nonexistent plans for stallionhood. He spent entire evenings looking deliberately out the window, pretending to be distracted by the nighttime city, just to avoid that look.
From where she sat now, she could have looked at him with a slight lift of her head. But she didn’t respond to his entrance, and moments later, she folded the newspaper as if she had just finished it. As she blew out the stub that remained of the candle, she said only, “Good night,” and her tone was so casual that anypony else would have believed she was simply retiring. But he knew that she had stayed awake for him.
She had long ago stopped commenting on his doings. He had only become aware of her passivity when he was suspended from school one day for starting a fight. He had been on the cusp of puberty, at the age when foals first ache to establish a social sphere separate from their parents but are still subservient enough to deliver home a note from the principal. After his mother had read the note, she looked at him without comment. He bowed his head and tried to appear contrite. She said, “And is that all?”
He hesitated, unsure whether she expected an apology, but eventually said yes. When he raised his head, she still had her piercing look, and he knew that she had not needed his answer. She had been watching him, was still watching him, and would always watch him. But she would watch and judge silently, for her nature would not let her confront him. The punishment he had expected would not come. Neither would guidance he resented.
Sometimes he was angry at her, or frustrated with her, or wanted to escape her. At those times, he wanted to say, “I don’t need you. Leave me alone. Don’t worry about what I do.” But whenever he was tempted to rebuke her, he remembered the few times that he had come back to a dark apartment. A sliver of moonlight came through the window in his parents’ bedroom and illuminated her. She lay in bed, wrapped in a blanket and asleep, seeming to have given up on him, and he had felt lonely and scared, like a young foal who wakes in the night and cries for his mother to tuck him back in.
The night that Enduring Fire abandoned his education, he dreamed that he stood in front of his school watching somepony fly down. The air was clear and moonlit, and the figure was high above him, gliding down in great circles with still and silent wings. Only when the pony was almost next to him could his eyes focus on her. She had a dark, short-haired coat that was dappled black near her crescent moon cutie mark; a shining black peytral with a crescent moon sigil; a glittering black crown resting against her horn; and black eyelashes wreathing her eyes. The delicate way her hooves touched the ground, and the precision with which she folded her wings, gave her landing a quality of courtly refinement.
The mare looked at him and smiled. She touched her horn to his forehead and said, “Look, sweet child. Look at what thou now hast.”
But he did not look, because he could already feel the wings that had sprouted from his back. The sensation was disgusting, like having a fifth hoof ascending from his spine. “I’m not a pegasus,” he said.
“Let us take thee away from this place and into eternal adventure.” She flapped her wings. When she saw that he had not moved, her magic touched his wings. They flapped on their own, and he rose into the air after her. “Come with us. We shall be thy guide. Thou wilt see the beauty of the darkness.”
He shook his head. “I’m just an earth pony.”
“We are in the dream world. Here thou hast freedom! Thou canst be anything! Try thy new wings!”
She spread his wings wide and released her magical grip. The feeling of air blowing around him terrified him, and he snapped his wings shut. As he fell, the mare dove after him. Her hooves caught him, but in his panic, he kicked himself loose. Beneath him, approaching too fast, was the Canterlot pavement. The mare dove again and stretched her hoof to him, but he was falling too fast for her to reach him. She said, “It’s not too late,” and as he slammed into the ground, he awoke.
