“I kill myself mentally a hundred times while I watch everyone else pretend to live.”
Standing on the edge, she looked down. The sky was a mix of deep red and neon green, the wide branches of colors glazing silently over the wide expanse.
The world below was vibrant and beating, but it was faking it. That much she knew. That much she had been and always will be able to tell. It wasn’t worth being in now, and likely never would be.
So, she looked over the edge one more time before turning a bit, and twisting, before taking a large fall backwards, a great spiral to the ground below.
It was a hard decision to make, but in the end she realized that’s what she needed to do. It was all that could be done, and all that was needed to be done. It was her decision and her choice, together and apart, yet not nearly both at the same time.
It hurt her mind to think of it that way, and yet... it was the only way to describe what was going on. It was the only way to put words to it, the only way to breath life into her mind.
The world she lived in was terribly depressing. Something happened to her, but she couldn’t remember what. Something happened to the town as well, but no one ever talked about that. The sun never rose after a fateful day in the summer, and she had nearly forgotten what it had even felt to experience the sun.
Then it happened. In a brief moment, reality seemed to shift, and the sky was filled with pain, like a thousand burst souls swimming towards the living. She tried to think of a less creepy analogy, but it was really the only possible thing she could think of.
One by one, her friends began to die.
It was a rather painful experience, because they did not die like one would expect. They slowly began to drift off, ignore her, and find other things to do. In no way was it intentional, they just found other ponies they wanted to be with instead of her. She didn’t blame them of course, but it hurt as she watched her friends slip away into their own dithering reality.
The sky was bright and beautiful, yet the surrealism of it all scared her and some deep level. It was unsettling, and she often kept glancing at the ground to avoid ever acknowledging to it that she was afraid. She didn’t want to live in it’s shadow, she didn’t want the sky to know she feared it.
But it knew. Of course it knew, it always had a way of finding out. It knew her friends had slowly drifted away from her, beyond her grasp, backdrifting and backsliding away. She had never even made an attempt to grab them and bring them back into her arms and hooves, her orange coat never again to be graced by their varying other colored ones.
The sky laughed at her, and she cursed it for doing this to her. She spat at it in anger and pain, but most of all, fear. Her reaction to the fear was what one it over, what allowed it to grin and slide into her mind and wish it all would stop.
That was the day she decided she had to do this.
She prepared for this day like no other. She worked tirelessly to ensure that all of her emotional ties were good and gone. She stopped speaking to the others, and they stopped speaking to her. They had no time for her silly mind games after all, and that made her job all the easier.
It finally became the day for her to carry out her simple mission. She left her home on the morning, the sky filled with the same colors that occupied it every morning, every day, and every night. They never changed fully, sometime shifting hues slightly, but never a full change.
On her climb to the top of the ridge, she was visited by a doubt. It snuck into her mind, eating at her, messing with her psyche.
“Is this really what you want to do? What if you change your mind?”
“I won’t,” she reassured herself. “It’s my only choice.”
“But why?” It asked her as she put one hoof in front of the other. “But why must you do this? Do not lie to yourself, you have no idea why you’re choosing to take this path on.”
She refused to answer it, that was a part of a doubt’s power. If you didn’t answer it, it would fade away, fade out, and slink elsewhere.
She stood at the top of the ridge, looking out at the color stained sky, blinking at the bright contrast between the two prevailing hues.
She couldn’t help but feel somewhat disheartened again. Everypony down below had no idea what she was facing.
The world below was vibrant and beating, but it was faking it. That much she knew. That much she had been and always will be able to tell. It wasn’t worth being in now, and likely never would be.
So, she looked over the edge one more time before turning a bit, and twisting, before taking a large fall backwards, a great spiral to the ground below.
The wind rushed all around her, her purple hair swept up in the little swirls and vortexes of air that passed by so incredibly quickly. Her orange wings flapped uselessly in the air from the force of her falling. She was not moving them at all, in fact, she herself had gone limp.
A few stars shot across her vision, and the colors in the sky shifted quite suddenly to orange and pink— but only for the most fleeting of fleeting moments. Then they switched back to the green and red she never had dreamed to anticipate of changing.
Yellow and white danced across her vision, and the tears that left her eyes were caught by the updraft as she fell. She watched them fall upwards as she sank downwards so incredibly quickly.
She would wake up the instant she hit the ground, she knew it. She had to, it would only make sense if she did.
The ground rushed up to grasp her and make it one of its own, and for a moment, the sky grinned an evil grin, knowing that on some level, it had won.
But at the end, it was Scootaloo who grinned, for she knew that on all the other levels she was won.
Crunch!
“Wake up! We can’t ring the bells loud enough!”
She jerked awake, blinking the dreary sleep from her eyes. She was not laying on the sharpened blades of grass that her fall had ended on. Rather, she was in a large room, ceiling optional, the floor covered in a checkerboard of black and white. It stretched out in too many directions for her to imagine, and every now and then a large marble column which towered up towards the possible rooftop broke the checker pattern of the floor.
“Well, we haven’t got all sunrise! Hurry up, hurry up!”
“Is it you again?” Her voice cracked as it had ages ago, back when the points weren’t made up and the game still mattered. She had already been visited by a doubt. Would she be visited by... it?
“Hurry hurry hurry! Later, we can worry! Now, we must run, WE ARE LATE!”
She turned her head, and found to her dismay that she had indeed been visited b the sallow skinned and twitchy form of anxiety. The poor creature gnawed on its hooves and tugged at its tail, the large saucer eyes bloodshot with the baggage of one thousand nights’ insomnia.
“Where do we need to go, anyway?” She shrugged, her orange coat such a contrast from the lackluster laundry-grey coat Anxiety possessed.
“Does it matter? WE. WILL. BE. LATE! Oh, and if we’re late, we’ll never get there on time!”
“You’re not making any sense.” As if you ever did... This she thought to herself, however. Merely moments into her misadventure, she didn’t want to ruin it just yet. The entry room she stood in was going to be just the beginning of her journey.
“I’m not making any sense? Oh no, I knew I wouldn’t be. I don’t make sense when I’ve got somewhere to be. Oh, will you hurry up and stop dodging the issue? WE WILL BE VERY LATE IF WE DON’T LEAVE NOW!”
“Shut up,” she told Anxiety. “I don’t have time for this right now. Just take me to wherever we’re going so I can progress in this crazy place.”
“Ah! Right! We can get going. We’ll still be late, probably. Oh, I hope you didn’t make us late.” Anxiety scurried off in a manner quite meekish, stumbling a few times and muttering to itself about lost time. She followed the harried emotion, grinning to herself slightly. Anxiety had been the easier of her foes that she had to conquer.
The hooves of the two clopped along the checked tiles, the patterned floors nearly hypnotizing. Anxiety paid these no mind, too caught up in its own worries to care about such frivolous things as enjoying the path to a destination.
She, however, was quite fine with enjoying the somewhat entrancing floor patterns. Black then white then black then white, seemingly forever and endless. Smiling, she let herself get lost as she trotted faster. Bumping her lowered head into flank of Anxiety, the emotion yelped, and stumbled sideways. She smiled as Anxiety gave a sort of feverish frown, then continued to run off in the previous destination.
The two passed a large marble pillar, and her eyes drank in the great craftsmanship. In her youth, she never payed attention to such dull things, but now she understood that such little nuances needed to be taken in whenever available. It made the sport all the more enjoyable.
“Well,” Anxiety said rather unexpectedly, gnashing its teeth quickly. “We’re here. I guess my usefulness it over. Oh, we better not be late...”
She had not noticed that they had come to a door. The door stood in a wall, a rather featureless wall at that. In fact, the only notable feature of the wall seemed to be that it contained a door built into it. The wall held many un-notable features, but nopony had time to notice those. Nopony ever did, nor should they.
She entered the door, leaving the cringing emotion behind her. Her new surroundings were one of a simple, dark cell. The door closed behind her, eliminating all light that would attempt to illuminate her way.
She stood in silence, letting the room swallow her in the encompassing darkness. Her heart began to beat faster than normal, and her breathing became heavier. She sighed, trying to calm her nerves, but then an annoyance that she thought had long been banished crept up on her again.
“Helloooo... agaiiin...” the voice rasped in a whisper. “Weeeere you follllowed? That would not be good for ussssss...”
She clenched her teeth. “Hello, Fear.”
“Do you plannn on finishing me offff... alone, then? Is that.... it?”
“No, Fear.”
“Then why are you here?” The voice was no longer stretching out, it was drawn back, quick and frightened. “Why are you here, then? Go back through your door! Go back, you assassin! Go back, you horrible demon of a creature! You undeserving, horrifying monster...”
She closed her eyes, although it made no difference in the pitch black, it calmed her ever so slightly. “Fear, I need you to turn on the light.”
There was a silence, a silence so dead that it made it hard for her to breath. Finally, after what seemed like eons of dead space, the skittering emotion spoke again.
“I’m scarred.”
“Of course you’re scared, you are fear after all. Now, really. I don’t have time for this. Turn on the light!”
A think hiss of air that turned into a cough very quickly soon followed. “No! The light will attract evil beings, beings far more evil than yourself, and they will come and hunt us both down! Is that what you want? I didn’t think so! I don’t want it either, so there you have it.”
This was followed by a chattering noise, implying that Fear’s teeth were clattering together in horror. She sighed, and took her first step out into the darkness. The floor was smooth and cold, and for whatever reason, that struck a chord of terror into her heart. She kept moving forward, holding her hoof out, trying to see if she could feel the creature that had kept her in conversation so far.
“Don’t touch me! You’ll corrupt me, ruin my complexion, make me more hideous than I already am...” Fear screeched horribly. She ignored this, and felt the thing before her. It was furry like a pony’s coat, except cold and devoid of life, yet it didn’t feel dead. It just felt... empty.
She moved her hooves upward, feeling the face of the creature. “AAAAH! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? YOU’LL RUIN EVERYTHING!”
Ignoring this, she felt the mane of Fear. It was soft and silky, feeling... quite nice. And that scared her. It scared her to think that something this nice was worn by something so horrible and dreadful, something so unwilling to help others out of... well, fear.
She moved her hooves away from the mane, and down to the cheeks of the emotion. She pressed her hooves down softly onto Fear’s face, imagining that she were gazing into its eyes.
“WHAT... WHA... what is thissss?” The drawl that she had been approached by earlier returned. “What arrrrre you doiiinnng? You’ll get ussss both killled...”
“Fear, I am only going to ask you one more time,” her voice was tembling slightly, the cold race of the darkness and the emotion beginning to rush over her. Fear’s little encampment was very capable of living up to its name.
“But... I... I can’t... they’ll find ussss...”
“TURN ON THE DAMNED LIGHT!” Her voice echoed horribly in the room, hurting both of their ears. Fear hissed, and fell backwards, away from her hooves. There was the sound of scrambling on the cold stone floors, and a light burst into existence in the form of a candle.
The emotion was quivering, its eyes filled with a loathing that could only descend upon one so terrified of everything in the world. Its mane was pure white, lying lanky around its head, the cold blue coat that covered its body flat and smooth. It took erratic breaths, casting bizarre shadows about the dimly lit room.
“I... you...” It gasped. The new candlelight of the room lit up a corner of the room that she had not seen when first looking into the room. There was a small runged ladder which would take anypony who traversed it to a trapdoor in the ceiling.
Scootaloo ignored the quivering emotion, and took to the ladder. She had places to be.
