Bat Ponies · 3:48am Nov 2nd, 2016
Music. I love music. Want to earn my ire? Don’t let me listen to my music. I swear at my car radio when it doesn't start up for me after a cold night. My iPod decided that playing music was overrated, so I threw it on the ground.
Yeah, it's a brick now. Not my brightest moment.
Many years ago, when I was pretty new in the fandom, I discovered some pony music. Rainbow Factory was the first song I really found. I even started writing some music. It was pretty sweet. I thought at the time, anyway. Let’s just say there’s a reason I exclusively write now.
A little bit later (mid-season 2, I’d say), I was alone in my apartment. Everyone else had moved out; and, since that included the guy with the wireless router, I had to lean against my bed, laptop on my lap, with the ethernet cable plugged into the wall, if I wanted internet. And I found more pony music. “Lost on the Moon” had just come out. It’s been about four years, and there’s still no song with as many plays in my iTunes. I listened to it all day. It prompted quite a bit of Luna’s Existential Crisis, and really made me feel like Princess Luna had some depth to her. And it still rankles me a bit that I could never finish that museum scene… It also made me pretty happy that I wasn't the only one who headcanons that Nightmare Moon was actually up there running around on the moon, training for a thousand years for that next showdown with Celestia. What? That's still just me? Darn… .
Recently, I was trying to enter three contests at once. I finished one, got partially through the second, but had no idea what to do for the third.
And then, one day while driving, Soldiers of the Night came on my iPhone. I’d always liked the song; but this time, it really spoke to me. The first verse seemed to have some extra inspiration behind it, one that fit better in words than images. Bat ponies were, for lack of a better term, victims of circumstance; innocents caught in the crossfire of everything. It wasn’t their fault. It really wasn’t.
And so I present Soldiers of the Night, my entry for the second writing contest for this group.
