Twilight Sparkle was annoyed. Not at her dire situation, or the perpetual soreness in her muscles, or the agitating dryness in her throat that left her constantly coughing and scratching at it. She was not annoyed at the rocky floor of the cave that had been her home for the last few days, nor was she annoyed by the unflinchingly hostile heat that beat down on the desert every time she had the audacity to peak outside.
All of that was bad, yes. But no, the source of her ire was something far more personal.
“Why do all of the survival books make it look so easy?!” she groaned from the back of her cave before devolving into a series of coughs.
Twilight had always been a studious sort, delving into whatever tomes she could get her literarily greedy hooves on. A fair few of them had been about ponies surviving in dangerous environments for prolonged periods of time. As such, with her main bulk of survival experience coming from family camping trips in the woods, she had called on what she remembered of those to act as her guiding compass.
There were a few problems, though. First off, the ponies in those books were physically much stronger than she was. Secondly, the authors had often seen fit to cover their mistakes in greater detail than their triumphs, to up the drama on every page. Narratively, it was a sound move to keep a reader hooked, but utterly useless for a pony actually trying to get some life-saving information from them, especially when pulled up from the dregs of one’s memory and not the page itself.
Third, most of the survival stories she had read had taken place on islands, or in forests, or frozen tundras. The general principles still applied, of course. Find food, safe drinking water, and shelter. The minutia of those principles was radically different in the blazing desert of the badlands.
For example, Twilight had put it together exceedingly quickly after her first foray to bring supplies back from the shattered wagon that going out while the sun was out was a terrible, terrible idea. She had only done so one other time since then before it occurred to her that it would be far safer to move at night. The heat of the daytime sun sapped her strength like a leech on the jugular, and left her dehydrated and sweating profusely.
Another mistake she had made was leaving the cave door completely uncovered. Sunlight still seeped through, especially in the evenings, and the way it reflected around inside heated up the rocks to the point that Twilight had been forced to retreat into the very back of the cave and huddle up in the corner by the pool.
If nothing else, she had water, and a lot of it. She had sent a few small orbs of magic light into the pool to check its depth, and had discovered that it was at least six feet deep. But more than that, she had discovered a hole in the back wall of the pool that she could only assume led into some kind of large, underground pond or lake. So as far as water was concerned, she was set in terms of quantity. Enough to last for weeks, if not months.
The question then became whether or not it was safe to drink from.
The pool was far from clear, a surefire sign that less-than-desirable things dwelled within. But without something to boil it in to purify it, she was left with few other options. The water flask she had salvaged from the wreckage had proven less than workable in this situation, being a flimsy and, more importantly, flammable container. Putting it over an open flame to try and boil the water would simply leave her without a container.
So, she had resorted to drinking from the pool. She did so sparingly and only took as much water as she felt she needed, hoping to minimize her risk of contracting anything dangerous. A flimsy hope, she acknowledged, but it gave her some small comfort all the same.
She let out a snort of breath and went over her situation in her head, conjuring up a makeshift checklist in her mind’s eye to help her visualize what she had to do.
“Shelter, check. Water… eeh, let’s put an asterisk next to it. Food… not checked.”
Her stomach audibly grumbled at the reminder that she had failed to put anything substantial inside of it for several days. Her hoof lifted up to rub at her tummy while an uncomfortable groan slid past her dry lips.
“I need food.”
Stifling another groan and trying to ignore the riot of her stomach, she turned her eyes up to look at the cave mouth, gauging the time. The sun was starting to set, painting the world in shades of deep, deep crimson. A small amount of relief came over Twilight, and she slowly rose to her hooves. “Finally!”
With traveling during the day no longer being the preferred option, she had to scrounge for food at night. She hadn’t ventured out of her cave yet, though, if only out of fear of the unknown. But, over the days since she raided the busted wagon, she had observed the Badlands from the relative safety of her cave, trying to get an idea of what kinds of wildlife called the desert their home at night.
Birds and small rodents had been all that stood out to her. Owls, night buzzards, and a family of mice whose ghostly squeaks staked claim to the sands for miles around.
For such small lungs, their voices flew remarkably far.
Twilight took a deep breath as the last light of the sun disappeared beneath the horizon, plunging the world into her namesake. “Okay… no more stalling…”
She briefly stalled to take one more sip of water from her pool, praying to Luna that it was safe, and then set out from the cave to search the badlands for any sign of food.
“The ponies in the survival novels always seemed to find what they needed,” Twilight thought irritably to herself almost an hour later, her eyes searching the open expanse of cold dirt ahead of her for any sign of edible plant matter. She would go for moss at this point! “Maybe I’m just not desperate enough yet?”
A nice thought, but no. She knew this wasn’t some survival novel where she would, at the last minute of desperate need, find exactly the thing she needed. This was real life. Either she found what she needed and lived, or she didn’t, and she died. There was no hoof guiding her to keep her alive. She was alone…
Alone. Truly alone. Not even Spike was with her.
Twilight’s eyes fell at that thought. She had never truly been totally and completely alone before, she now realized. Her heart fell heavy with the realization, and her hoof wandered up to her heart while her mind drifted back to her friends.
What were they thinking right now? Did they even know what had happened, yet? Had the expedition team made good on their return? It was hard to tell, but she figured the answer was no. If her friends knew her fate, Spike would have sent her a letter by now, a frantically scribbled note demanding that she let him know she was fine and how he could find her.
But what about the others? What would Rainbow Dash, or Pinkie Pie, or Fluttershy think? What of Rarity, or Applejack?
Twilight’s eyes began to mist over as she predicted their responses to the news that she was missing and possibly dead in her head, one at a time. “Heh… Rainbow would p-probably be the most eager to come after me, right along with Pinkie and Applejack. Although, she wouldn’t have their patience about it. Fluttershy and Rarity would be worried sick…”
She closed her eyes and wiped a hoof over her face, sniffling and fighting to regain a hold of herself.
“The survival novels never really talked about the emotional part of this, either…”
Sighing wearily, Twilight slowly dragged herself down the slope and into the pit below, her eyes wandering over the terrain.
Dead dirt. There was no plant life to be had anywhere in sight.
A single tear that fell from Twilight’s cheek was the first moisture this soil had soaked up in days.
Twilight spent several hours scrounging around for food, and all she was able to find was a scraping of thin moss under a loose stone in one of those trenches. She brought it back to the cave when she found nothing else, stopping on the way to pick up a large sheet of fabric from the wreckage of the wagon. It had a few holes in it, but it would serve her purposes for now.
Upon her return, she started up a small flame with a few of the pieces of wood she harvested from the wagon, and held the stone over the fire in her magic. The moss she wound up peeling off and eating was dry, crunchy, and beyond disgusting on her tongue. It flaked and powdered in her mouth like crystal sprinkles on an old cupcake, reminding her almost of sandpaper, while the taste was that of poorly cooked seaweed dipped in a jar of pickle juice. Edible, but unenjoyable.
Feeling defeated, Twilight dragged herself over to the mouth of the cave again, her eyes staring up at the moon. The pristine white surface, marred by only a few small craters, still felt alien to her, even with how long it had been since the pattern of the Mare in The Moon ceased to exist.
In a way, some small part of her wished those craters would return, that the haunting, exaggerated silhouette of Nightmare Moon herself was there to look back down at her in contempt and resentment.
“At least then, I would have somepony to look at…”
With a heavy sigh, Twilight began the final part of her chores for the night before she would head inside to sleep through the first half of the day. She knew that the search parties wouldn’t be coming for her yet, but she still had to do it. To feel like she was doing something if nothing else.
With the world as still and as quiet as it was, and with the sky shrouded in the darkness of the night, the spell stood out incredibly. With her eyes closed, Twilight gathered power on her horn, then pointed it up to the sky. With a grimace and a quiet grunt of strain, she fired off a lone, flickering sphere of magic high into the air.
She opened her eyes and watched as it arced up and up, flickering and fading just slightly as if it were about to wink out. Then, with a muffled and barely audible pop and boom, the sphere exploded out like a firework, sending several smaller sparks of lavender light flying in all directions. They hovered there for a moment and then began to drift back down to earth, leaving thin trails of quickly dissipating smoke in their wake.
The light soon faded, and Twilight’s heart plummeted. The empty moon stared back at her as the smoke blew away, and Twilight’s rapidly-mounting loneliness began to swallow her whole. Shuddering, she screwed her eyes shut and fired off the spell a second time.
“Please, somepony see me,” she thought to herself when the pop reached her ears. “Somepony… anypony… Help me.”
She fired off the spell one more time before she was spent. And despite her efforts, her silent plea went unanswered…
It did not, however, go unseen.
Several miles away, Thorax trotted sluggishly through the halls of the Hive with his eyes downturned, and his lips pulled tightly into an exhausted grimace. As punishment for fleeing from combat without the orders of his commander, Thorax had been sentenced with three days without food, and a whole week of night patrol added on top of his regular duties in the Hive. Had he not saved Pharynx, odds are his punishment would have been infinitely worse.
The Hive shifted and warped around him, permitting him to pass between chamber without having to look up from his hooves. He knew exactly where he was going at all times. He had his destination, and the walls and the floors twisted to guide him there effortlessly.
“Interior clear,” he thought to himself in a monotone. “Better check the outside. Don’t wanna come off as lazy.”
Turning on his hooves, he marched for the nearest wall. A perfectly circular hole opened before him, spreading out with the sound of stone grinding on stone. He stepped through and into a tall, vertical chamber. To his left was a circular wall, while to his right was open air, with numerous open tunnels burrowed into the distant wall, each one glowing a soft green from the organic lights his kind made extensive use of. Directly in front of him was a sheer drop that would take him down dozens, if not hundreds, of meters.
He stepped forward.
More stone emerged from the wall to his left, pushing forth like a hoof through a thin sheen of mucus, providing him a walkway. He kept moving without slowing down, and soon enough, his path brought him to the far wall of the chamber. Again, the wall in front of him opened, and the comparatively chilly air of the Badlands at night washed over him.
Stepping out onto a jagged, natural balcony, Thorax swept his eyes from left to right, taking in the terrain and scanning for intruders. Nothing stood out to him. Just the emptiness of the badlands. The constant, yawning emptiness… and the loneliness that came with it.
He briefly mused over the paradoxical nature of that notion but was quick to dismiss it. He wasn’t like the other changelings. Or rather, they weren’t like him. And so he did not belong with them. He was always going to be the cowardly, sniveling wimp that the rest of the drones would relentlessly mock and torture and bully. Even his own brother, who protected him from others, treated him like garbage.
He didn’t belong here… but where else could he go? Out there into the world?
He snorted at himself. What a hilariously stupid idea. Leaving the Hive was certain death. As much of an outcast as he was here, he would be shunned as a freakish monster out there. Not to mention what the queen would do to him if she ever caught him after running away…
Thorax sighed, setting his chin on the rail that conveniently rose up from the edge of the balcony.
And then something caught his eye. Curious, Thorax shifted to his left.
His eyes widened. There, far in the distance, he could see a sphere of tiny lavender stars shimmering in the sky. They were tiny, and so far away that he was honestly amazed he had seen them at all. They hung there for a moment, then drifted back down and faded from view. Then, another burst came, and another.
The color of that light looked familiar, and slowly, his mind wandered back to a strange creature he had stumbled on in a cave a few days ago… that ‘pony.’
“...Is she still out there?” he thought to himself. “Am I… really alone?”
As if hoping for an answer, he continued to watch the horizon, desperate for one more repeat of the magical light.
It did not come again.