Masks

by Lady Spider

Rating: everyone
Tags: Tragedy, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Romance
Length: 1074

Raven Darkstorm knows nothing of her past and has no idea why she's so different. She sets herself on a mission to find out and learns what it really means to be unique on the way.

Raven Darkstorm spent her entire childhood locked away in an asylum. No one told her why she was there or how she got there except that she was a freak and was too abnormal to be in public. Her dragon eyes, which turn red when she's angry just as her clouded moon cutie mark does, are a most unusual phenomenon and her curse-like luck causes pain to those around her. She throws herself into a world that is nothing but a facade. Along the way, Raven finds ponies with bizarre abilities or features that set them as outcasts, worst than adult blank flanks. Together this little band of ponies discover what it means to be unique, why it's good to be special and why friendship is truly magic.

Published 2013-01-20 06:40:01 UTC
Last updated 2013-01-20 06:40:01 UTC

Prologue: Growing Up

Growing Up

Ponies say that when something extremely tragic happens you will always remember exactly where you were and what you were doing at the moment it occurs. Well, it wasn’t tragic but I still remember everything from the night my hooves finally touched the bare ground.

The air had been cold and sharp. The rain had poured down and pounded upon your fur like icicles. The wind threatened to tear the pathetic thin sheets I had tied together. Cliché I know, using bed sheets as rope, but hey, I’m no pegasus and I’m no unicorn so... it worked for me.

My hooves had landed in the muddy ground and I had galloped away as fast as my legs would carry me. Of course they had come after me. Silly ponies, thinking they could find me.

You see, I’m different. I look different. I act different. Therefore I am unique, a freak. I’m an almost black mare with gray dragon eyes that have turned red at my fury. Oh yeah, and I see deaths before they happen. Last I checked, earth ponies had normal eyes and I’ve never heard of anypony with the ability to see death.

Yes, this is probably why I was dumped at that horrid asylum. That’s right. An asylum. I don’t know who my parents are or even when I was given to that dreadful place. All I know is that it’s not acceptable to be different than other ponies.

Every day of my childhood was exactly the same. Here. Let me explain my day to you.
First, my bedroom. Actually, it was my entire room. It was a happy place, a large white room with no windows or furniture except the locked door. Every morning, I was woken from my dreamless slumber on the cold floor by a rough looking unicorn stallion that appeared to depend too much upon alcoholic beverages.

“Get up, loon.” He would snarl at me. I would tremble and stand with shaking legs. If I didn’t move fast enough for him, the stallion would pick me up by his magic and drag me out into the hallway.

The hallways in this building were ridiculously long and everything was white. Doors lined the walls and I could always hear the moaning and cries of the other poor ponies. The worst sound to come from behind a closed door was silence.

The stallion would herd me down the hall into an elevator. We would travel down three floors and into another hallway. At the end of this hallway there was a large room with an operation table and a ton of tools.

Other gruff looking stallions and mares were always waiting for us there. The unicorns would grab a part of me with their magic, denying me any possible ability for escape or fight, and promptly chain me to the operation table.

“Everything will be okay. This will only hurt for a moment.” They told me every time. The torture provided by the electrical shockers and various magical spells always hurt for more than a moment. The pain lasted anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. It hurt my body. It hurt my soul. And it hurt my pride.

The “treatment”, as they called it, lasted for hours. When I would finally be released back to my room, I would barely be conscious. I would lay on my floor and cry until I had no tears left. The rest of the day would pass with no company or sign of anypony else except a guard with food twice before night.

The next morning, it all began again.

I don’t know if it was an ability I was born with, or if I was “treated” so many times my mind broke and created this ability. After a few years at the asylum, I began seeing deaths. I would catch a glimpse of a pony through a locked door’s window and see them, almost like a flash into the future, dying.

Some I would see committing suicide to escape from this prison; others would die on the horrid operating table downstairs. Sometimes I would look into the eyes of the stallions and mares that worked the asylum and see their ends. Most dying of old age or homicides caused by shadowy figures.

By some miracle, or curse, I survived through my fillyhood. I somehow became a full mare. The years had given me too much time to think. I had decided I was going to learn why I couldn’t be me, why I wasn’t wanted, why it was okay to treat me like this.

So I escaped. I ran through the night not knowing where in Equestria I was. The inside of the asylum was all I knew. I had heard of the outside and dreamed of going there. Now I was there. And I had to survive.

The first night was terrifying. The rain made the night even darker. Behind me I could hear the pegasi sounding the alarms and flying out into the air. I was trapped between the asylum and an ocean. I didn’t have the courage to go into the ocean nor the stupidity to return to the asylum. So I had stood there and closed my eyes. In the plain open and willed myself to disappear.
The pegasi had flown right above me. And never saw me. I remember opening my eyes in shock that I had not been discovered. Confused, I had looked around me, needing an explanation.

I had found myself engulfed by shadows. They had swirled around me like the waves in the raging water before me. To the pegasi, I was invisible. They had no vision of the shadows or of the pony inside them.

When the pegasi had flown over again to return to the asylum, I stood stubbornly in front of the ocean and watched them return. I felt I had succeeded in something. Now that I had my own life ahead of me, all I had to do was learn who I was.

I remember stepping bravely into the ocean, ready to let it sweep me to a new land. The last thing I remembered before the storm waves swept me away, was looking down at my tingling flank to see a silver crescent moon behind gray smokey clouds on my flank.

Then the ocean took me to my new life.