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// Chapter 23: June 25 
// Story: The Last Pony on Earth 
// by Starscribe 
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Dear Journal,

She’s awake.

Rest of the day can’t really compare to that, so I’ll stuff it in up here. Went to get the electrified wire for the wall, turn our base into a predator-proof base. Too much crazy stuff going on lately; between crashing airplanes and weird signals we can’t translate, not to mention the packs of feral dogs. Once we get this stuff installed up there, I’m confident we’ll be able to sleep soundly at night, despite being tiny colorful horses. Brought the stuff in from a warehouse stocking farming supplies for shipping to the Midwest; whole system is meant for cattle. I figure anything that will shock a cow should give a wild dog something serious to think about.

We didn’t get to put in any of it though, even though we’d planned on it today. Not with our rescued pony finally conscious again. I was there for the whole thing too, so I don’t have to tell the story second-hand.

It was afternoon, when Sky and I usually clean the pony and replace all her bandages. We were drying her off with a towel when we notice something we hadn’t seen before then: her legs starting to twitch. Naturally we pulled back and tried to get out of her way, as she coughed and spluttered into conscious life.

It would be understating things to say she was shocked, and the first thing she did was try to fight us. She fell over sideways in the bathroom, trying to wiggle to her hooves as though she’d forgotten she needed all four of them to stand.

We got out of her way in a hurry; didn’t take long for the pony to reduce herself to a quivering, pained mass from all her struggling. I think the first real words I understood from her were “I’m hungry.” Can’t tell, they got pretty buried in everything else.

The pony’s name is Moriah Strickland. We learned this once we had carried her back into the bedroom, and replaced her in the bed she’s been resting in these last several days. She was barely coherent, and very little of what she said came through as English words. Still, we’d understood the thing about food. Sky left to prepare an early supper while I tried to calm the mare down.

It worked, eventually. I was glad as she started to seem more and more relaxed, though I was also worried she would go back to sleep or slip back into her coma. Surely her fighting had taken much of her energy, energy she could scarcely afford after subsisting on honey and flour-water for the last several days.

She didn’t sleep though, and once I told her who I was (couldn’t get anything out of her without going first), she explained her situation. No, I’m not sure if I believe it. But she was very convincing. IF she’s an actor, she’s an exceptional one.

According to, Moriah, she was making a night flight around Los Angeles, racking up a few more logged evening hours to bring her closer to her pilot’s license, when she must’ve dozed off at the controls. 

I did my best to remember her exact words for this next part, because they seem so strange and this seems like the sort of thing I should try to remember. What if she slips back into a coma? This doesn’t seem like the sort of information we should risk losing.

“It was like flying through lightning, only I’ve never flown through lightning. Woke up with white all around me, and the whole cockpit shaking. Suddenly I was looking up at the flight controls from below, and my whole body felt like it didn’t fit in the seat.”

She went on to describe finding out she’d been transformed, though she hadn’t been able to get a good look at herself. She was, after all, still flying a plane, soaring down the coast at about four thousand feet with fuel constantly draining.

According to her, she couldn’t radio the tower, and couldn’t do any fine navigation anymore. It was all she could do bouncing between the yoke and the pedals to bring the plane into a gradual descent. The whole coast was pitch black, but she found a single fire and a few tiny electric lights, and she honed in on those.

She said that sand wasn’t the worst thing to use for an emergency landing. She would’ve preferred water if she thought she could’ve swam as a tiny animal. I can only take her word for it, since I don’t know how to use planes.



You can guess where the rest of the story goes from there. The fire she found was ours and we rescued her. I told her all of that, and she seemed relieved. Sky arrived with her food and she started to sip a thin broth while we talked.

Obviously there’s one glaring flaw with this story, I’m sure you’ve noticed it by now. I had to ask Moriah several times to make sure it wasn’t just misspeaking somehow.

Yes, she was describing a flight that had taken place on the night of the 23rd of May. No, she had not been a pony when she took off. No, California hadn’t been experiencing a “power failure” when she took off. Yes, she had been able to use her radio during the flight until then no problem.

When we told her that everybody vanished, she seemed angry, confused, and disbelieving. She continues to refuse to believe us, even though we showed her the dead city out the window. Said she’ll “believe it when she sees it.” If Moriah is acting, she’s damn good at it.

Unfortunately anything that might’ve corroborated her story was lost in the explosion, and the rest was probably washed out to sea by now. Even if tiny planes like that had flight data recorders (they often don’t), it isn’t as though we have any way of tracking it in the bottom of the ocean as tiny horses.

For all that she doesn’t believe us, she’s convincing in other ways. She was as bad at feeding herself as I was on the first day, spilling two bowls and eventually just giving up and slurping it. When I told her her horn had to be amputated, she had just laughed it off and said “guess it won’t block my view of the sky then.”

The heck is wrong with this pony?! How can she be so nonchalant about giving up the magic that makes Joe’s life so much easier? Okay, we didn’t actually tell her about the magic, and Joe was too frightened to come in and visit her. Seriously, he was worse even than the way he is around Sky and me. One of his own kind, and he couldn’t even stop in to say hello. That’s how much her injuries disturb him. She’s not even slightly phased by them.

That’s not even the strangest thing she said. At one point she asked me to hold a mirror behind her, so she could look. I thought she was looking at her butt mark, but her comments made it pretty clear she wasn’t. “Am I female?” she asked. We told her yes. She just went quiet, and we didn’t press her.

We couldn’t interrogate her (as much as I wanted to). She was weak and tired, and after her meal she needed to rest again. We left her to do that, though we also put a walkie-talkie by the bed she can use to get Sky or me if she needs anything during the night.

I look forward to learning more about Moriah, other than that she was trying to do more night flying and that the date she claims to have come from just doesn’t mesh with the reality we know.

She can’t possibly hope we’ll buy a lie that big, right? What is she really hiding? The acting is so good, it must be rehearsed… unless it’s not. Maybe we’ll learn more tomorrow. I hope the poor pony isn’t bedridden for too long. I know I’d go insane. Two days in the hospital was way too much for me.

The rest of us got together to talk about what we thought. They were all pretty reticent, Joseph actually more than Sky for once. Our running theory is that the impact that fractured her horn also caused a severe concussion, and she forgot the events leading up to her takeoff. Small aircraft like that wouldn’t have had a terribly large range. Unfortunately this is California, which means there are probably a dozen or more place she could’ve taken off in range of a tiny plane’s tank.

Only one detail about that theory disturbs me: the first part of her story, about flying at night. That’s obviously a plausible reason to be up in the air in the dark, but that’s just the problem. I’m not a doctor, but this seems like very convenient memory loss if that’s the case. A chunk just the right size that circumstances around it seem to make it fit into memory.

I feel like I’m missing something, something important. Joesph still hasn’t cracked the code, much to our chagrin. He says he’s close, though I’m not sure if he’s really being honest or just telling us what we want to hear.

The code changed again today. I almost didn’t notice, except that I always go upstairs in the evening to see if anyone has noticed my transmission and check on the number station. Its transmission is: “15-17-21-4-6-3-2-15-0-21-4-8-0-20-22-6-12-3-15-26-4-11-6-20-7-17-20-21-4-21-1-20-23-12-23-17-20-21-5-4-0-3-4-20-17-1-22-0-5-4-21-6-8-20-6-16-0-3-22-17”

You’d think that having more and more of this stuff would make it easier and easier on Joe to get this stuff into English. Apparently that isn’t the case, though his explanation as to why went over my head. Tomorrow we will try to get Moriah onto her hooves. Despite having a buttsymbol, she continues to insist that she has no idea how to walk, and even tilting her plane into a landing had been almost impossible. Joseph still hasn’t told her about magic, and neither have any of us. I don’t want to think about how much worse it would be to have magic and lose it than to never have had it at all.

Of course, there also haven’t been any more magic circles that she might be able to use to download things into her brain. Maybe it’s impossible to learn magic without that, I don’t know.

Oh, and one other quick note. You can tell I live in California because this is newsworthy: It rained today. Had to have been less than half an inch, but it was godsend for the plants and even better for the cistern. Too bad we get most of our meager downfall in November and December usually. That's an awful long way to wait. We might not even still be here. Still, felt wonderful. Spent a full hour just running in the rain with Sky. Felt like we could fly out there. Stopped an hour or so after sundown, and lots of it started turning right back to steam. Whatever. Enjoy it while it lasts I guess.

—A