Dawn.

Wispy chromatic clouds filled the sky as the sun rose. Even though it happened five to fifteen times a day, each one filled her with a sense of awe, but this one was different… terrible. The sun simply hung there. It didn't move. Not up or down, nor even side to side, it was completely lifeless. The filly tilted her head up to further inspect the clouds. As she looked past irregular grooves in her horn she saw something that filled her with dread: their colors had faded. She feared the world was dying.

She turned her eyes to the earth and scanned the area. The same patchwork quilt of silk and satin lay beneath her hooves, and it stretched on to the edge of the floating island. Though it was not the ideal place to raise offspring, mother had many children here that could feed the hungry filly. She sniffed at the ground to catch her cousins’ scent. She wanted to run home to her mother to crawl into her comforting embrace and watch the sky cry itself to death… but she was just too hungry to make the journey.

In her short life here she had learned better than to eat from the leaves of things that sprung from the gossamer beneath her, and instead lowered her horn to dig in the dirt for something deeper. After several minutes of rooting around her horn poked something that poked back. It was a prickle-berry vine. She knew how much mother hated them and was happy to eat them for her family. The filly coiled low and ripped the dirt out from around her prey then sprang on it. Her teeth latched to the vine as she violently tore it from the earth. A long line of tuber came with it and a battle ensued for their very lives.

The filly could see mother standing tall in the distance watching over her precious baby as the filly was wrapped root fibers. The plant was trying to drain the blood from her body while the filly stomped, bit, and jabbed it. In the distance she could feel her mother’s disappointed gaze on her. She closed her eyes and tried to remember how she felt the day that her mother first taught her to use magic. Amidst the razor-sharp thorn-slashes on her pelt she could feel the tingling in her skin that meant she was in the presence of powerful magic. She reached out to it, far outside herself, and drew it in before passing it along to the weed.

The vine withered in agony as patches of bark grew on its surface. The wicked rope was transmuted into a patchwork of plants, its thorns grew into soft kernels of yellow, and it crashed to the ground. After a few moments of being still as the sun the filly had concluded that it too could no longer sustain its own abominable life.

The march home to mother was a long one as the filly drug the still not-quite-dead meal with anaconda proportions home. It was the first she had seen in days, having spent the whole time tracking her quarry, and she knew that there weren't many left to find. Mother was sick, and the filly knew that she needed to eat too. She reached the surly hollow oak where she lived just as color returned to the clouds, and the sun started to dance once again. She sighed in relief as she nestled up against the bark and looked dotingly into her mother’s branches. Her leaves had long since blown away in the wind. Insects infested the wound from where the filly burst forth from her and chewed at her scabs.

Tearing a piece from the still writhing vine caused the filly’s gums to bleed as she whipped the tiny squadron to death, and those who tried to flee only got so far as to earn the treatment of her small hooves. Free of the pests the tree’s child turned her horn to till the soil at her mother’s roots. Tearing the many transmuted thorns from the vine, she gently placed them in small holes so that mother could feed off of their nutrients. Her mother swayed in a breeze as she did so and clattered out a gentle reprise with her branches to soothe the ache of her daughter’s work-weary head.

The rocky soil added more grooves to her horn and scratches to her scalp as she overturned the dirt but they weren't her only ones. When living on the plains there is only one rule: eat or be eaten. The cool night air caused her wounds to sting as she labored over her mother’s well-being, but she feared it was too late. The tones of mother’s bark had been fading for a while and, over the last several weeks, her bark grew brittle and chipped away. Each rest the filly woke several times to find the tiny army trying to kill her for food in her sleep because mother had nothing left to give them.

She hated them, the tiny red ones, but the black ones were ok. They often fought outside her home, infesting small scraps of land, and waging war with each other. She watched them frequently and intently as the swarms of six legged minions used mandibles that tore each other apart. In a way they were kind of like her mom, hard on the outside, soft on the inside, not like her at all. In fact, the only trait she shared with her mother was the color of their leaves before her mother’s dried up and blew away. They weren't even the same type, her mother’s being broad and flat, and hers grew in short thin bristles. The more she thought about it, the more different they seemed. She bled red; mother bled gold, though she had a similar gilt to the base of her fur that could be seen when the wind blew. Mother was tall and she was short. Mother only stood but she could dance like the clouds and the sun. Mother was quiet, she was loud, and mother was never ever sad.

The filly smiled and nuzzled the tree’s bark. Her mother’s skin was rough on her own but for all their differences they had each other. She peeled her face off her mother’s trunk to look back to her own. When her mother had passed her wisdom onto her, her image had become carved in at the base of the filly’s trunk near her roots. She flexed as to make the image dance across her own bark. Her face and horn, as well as her mane, could be seen in her mother’s visage. They capped the tree with the long lost leaves in the artistic rendering of their love. The image depicted how she drew strength from the ground around her, as her mother does, and projects that strength onto others.

Her reminiscent gaze turned back to her mother’s trunk to find something that made her heart sink. The gentle press of her face to her mother had cracked her bark, and as she reached out to push it back into place she saw something truly frightening. What she witnessed behind the seam caused her stomach to turn inside out– pouring its contents onto the ground just as her mother did when she was born. She skittered backward, stepping over the red and black armies that were squabbling even at that moment, as a third army erupted from the wood. Its many yellow forms flooded down onto the battlefield and, for once, red and black set aside their differences to take on this new challenger.

A war waged between them over who would get to claim the tree’s broken husk, and it did not take long for the filly to realize that there was nothing left of her mother. The armies that fought outside her every day had distracted her from the ones that had snuck in. Knowing that she could not protect her mother changed something deep inside her. The law was true even here; her mother could not eat, and was eaten. She had to get away. Right now.

Skittering backward in horror of the onslaught she turned tail and ran as the sun danced in the sky.

This must just be how the world worked.