And I fell, towards the rushing Rubicon.
The ground dragged me with it into the river, and I fell on my back into the running waters. I was unprepared for the fall, so I sank and sank as the dark once again embraced me and I quickly grew unconscious. After some time, perhaps a few seconds or a few hours, I felt the muddy bottom of the river against my back. I was completely submerged.
“Broken Horn... I need your help still...”
Her siren's song reached all the way to me at my nadir.
My lungs filled with water as I lay in pain, ready to surrender to the final sleep, unable to overcome the blackness of the water. In a last effort to survive, my eyes half-opened in the muddy waters.
To this day, I'm not sure if what I saw then was real or some kind of feverish hallucination, but the glowing figure of a pristine white sea serpent, a yellow mass of hair and two roses encircled me before I finally lost consciousness.
And out of these icy depths—
After some unknowable timespan, I woke up on the shore, coughing water, my glasses seemingly lost. With my lungs refilling themselves once again with air, I settled down, savoring the smell of the forest.
Whether I had dreamt it or whether she had somehow saved my life, I could not be more sure of anything than the overwhelming certainty that I had to help Yellowstar.
—I rose again with a debt.
On that fateful night, as I tossed and turned,
It was a clear midsummer late night, and the faint moonlight shone through the window. As I lay in bed, uneasy from the events of the day, unable to sleep, I tried thinking of the breeze and the sound of the crickets outside. After some time, mind and body relaxed in unison as I drifted into dreams.
All of a sudden, I was galloping through the marshes, speeding away from... something. I tried to look back as I ran so far away, but I couldn’t discern the vague dark figure that chased me. I turned my head back forward just in time to see that I had left the marshes and was galloping straight into a canyon. I stopped dead in my tracks and slipped through the dirt, decelerating to a full stop a hair’s width away from the edge. I took a second to catch my breath and allow my heart to stop racing, and I ventured a look. The vastness of the bottomless dark seemed to stare back in defiance.
her voice rang through my troubled turbulent dreams,
I did not want to jump, I knew I didn’t, but my legs acted of their own accord, as if seduced by the lifeless void. In the struggle against myself, I slipped over the edge, and I fell into the darkness. And I fell. And fell.
“Broken Horn!”
The penumbra gave way to total obscurity, as I kept falling and falling further than it seemed possible. I could no longer see anything; I could feel the blackness on my fur as it flowed around me in my descent, after gravity had ceased to exist. If black is the absence of color, the color of the void indicated the absence of matter itself.
“Please wake up!”
At that moment, there was a faint suggestion of light: a sliver of white flowed from the bowels of the earth and spread through my vision, and engulfed me. The void was now the color of everything. My ears felt the deafening sound of the wind at terminal velocity. I opened my eyes just as I saw the ground about to crush me.
and although I don’t know why she came to me—
It was late at night, and the faint moonlight shone through the window. I stood up in my bed, confused over the previous events. I wondered for a second if any of it had been real.
Then, I saw her figure. She stood next to the end of the bed, her golden mane swishing with the breeze. Her characteristic ruby pendant was missing, but the two red roses pinned on her mane were unmistakable.
“Yellowstar?” I asked in a daze. “Why are you in my house? What’s going on?” I telekinetically grabbed my glasses and put them on.
“Help me,” she implored, “please!” My eyes adjusted to the lens only to see the tears roll down her face.
I wish she never had.
She walked away from the bed onto the window and placed her front hooves on the frame, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. “I must give chase, but I cannot recover my mother’s pendant alone.”
She turned her head. “Please!” she implored. I looked on in confusion, wondering if I was still dreaming.
The blame rests on my shoulders alone—
Instantly, she jumped out of the window. My bedroom was on the upper floor, and the worry that she might have sprained her legs jumped to my mind, but I didn’t have time to warn her. I rushed to the window to assess how much harm she had suffered before calling the doctors, but all I saw was the mare gracefully standing up after landing perfectly and silently on the ground.
She faced me from below. She yelled out, “The trail is still hot!” and ran off.
—I could have stayed at home, not gotten involved.
If this was fate, then surely the stars on that flank—
I galloped as fast as I could, but I could barely keep up with her. It took us nearly half an hour before we reached the forest.
—are the same that shone upon my cursed birth.
She stopped at the entrance of the forest, seemingly in perfect condition. I walked over as I approached, winding down from the journey exhausted and gasping for air.
Before I could finish catching my breath, she said, “They fled into the forest...”
I inquired, trying to make sense of the situation, “What happened, Yellowstar? Why would they ever steal your pendant?”
She then began to tell me of the theft of the pendant as we entered the forest.
“I had a dream that I was in Canterlot's tallest tower. I looked up and there were stormy clouds above! I felt my ruby around my neck—it slipped right off of my neck, floating towards the clouds! I tried to reach it—” She stumbled over her words. I looked in the bushes. “But instead I tumbled over the bannister—and just before I would hit the ground, a bolt of lightning struck the tower, jolting me awake!”
She was evidently quite distraight. “Lightning struck the Canterlot tower?” I pressed on.
“Yes, and when I woke up, the thief was in my bedroom, clutching the ruby pendant!”
Ah-hah! So that was it.
“That's an ill omen if I ever heard one! Dreams hold real power, even over the waking world—” As I peered over the bushes that flanked the river, I saw a figure. “Wait—hold up!” I whispered, “I see someone up ahead. If we keep it down, we might be able to take them unawares!”
I waited for a few moments while observing the unclear figure of the pony holding a shining object. “Look, they're crossing the creek on that log—and that looks like your pendant! I'm surprised they didn't hear us chasing them, we weren't exactly quiet.” I looked to my side, trying to find a way to reach the floating log. “Wait, they're picking up spee—” I couldn't finish my sentence, because the mare I was talking to was floating away on a log of her own some distance away.
I leaned over the bushes and called out, “Wait for me! Don't go it alone!” As I stepped down on the ground again, the ground ceded under my weight and the dirt shifted under my hooves into the river.
“Oh no! The dirt edge is loose!”
