Misty Seeker. An outstanding student, at the top of her classes. After the deaths of her parents, she became motivated by death and began her studies on the afterlife. She was always fascinated by death, but also by life, too.
Though she was a star student, she was never the best with potions, an oversight that would prove to be ruinous…
As the moon shone over Ponyville, casting its soft glow upon the town, Fire Bolt emerged from a fluffy patch of mist she’d chosen to keep watch from. She stretched her wings before stepping from the cloud and languidly gliding across the sky, her eyes scanning the disarray below. Under the unending darkness of the night sky, nopony could tell when shops were open or closed, so scattered drifters tended to wander through the streets at any given time. As Bolt watched them, she couldn’t help but feel like they looked like zombies.
She flapped her wings, soaring above the town with slow but pointed elegance. Her powerful wings carried her through the shadowed streets of Ponyville as she squinted to look for anything suspicious. Cottages looked disheveled; their chipped paint walls painted a stark contrast against the inky sky, and the soft glow of lanterns guided the few ponies who creeped out into the eerie darkness for whichever purpose.
As Bolt landed near the middle of town, her eyes scanned the bleak scene before her that had become all too familiar. The once vibrant and lively heart of Ponyville now lay abandoned and desolate. The shops that had once bustled with activity were quiet ghosts of what they used to be – even the ones that hosted ponies selling their goods regardless of the crisis looked uncanny – and the park, once filled with the supposedly all-healing sound of children’s laughter, stood empty and silent. For the most part, the townsponies remained hidden within the safety of their cottages, constantly seeming to fear a great monster ripping apart the eerily neverending night sky and snatching everypony up – but that’s what Bolt was for. She’d chosen to ease the minds of as many ponies that cared by keeping a diligent watch on the town and its residents, a job that she was somehow the first and only to take on in Ponyville. It wasn’t the most consistent effort, as it was difficult to hold herself accountable to ‘shifts’ without the shining sun in the sky, but it comforted the red pegasus to have eyes on every corner of the town.
Fire Bolt tracked her time. Everypony knew her to be punctual, but in this bizarre instance, she kept very, very careful track of her time. By her methods, starting with just a metronome attached to a very meticulously suspended bit of chalk and most recently coming to a contraption made of a clock and a weighted scale that had to be reset every seven days, a ritual she tracked in a notebook with sharp attention, it had been a total of 1,221 days since the Nightfall began. Three years, four months, and six days… and so little order had been established in the time since. Thankfully, Ponyville had yet to have a hierarchy explode from the chaos, unlike Cloudsdale, which was bordering on unsalvageable from the quick rise and fall of a series of tyrants that resulted in the complete destruction of normal life to most pegasi. Ponyville was almost too peaceful – nopony robbed, stole, shorthooved, or hurt each other, but they also didn’t do much at all, either. Fire Bolt assumed it was from both the scarce population and the ice-cold terror that gripped each and every remaining pony with a painful force. To combat this, most Ponyville residents would gather in the big Apple barn for a candlelit celebration every few weeks; an attempted escape from the horrors that lurked in the Nightfall. For the most part, it did help lift spirits, but after the first three, Bolt opted out from the occasion. It was a bittersweet occasion for her, and something about gathering the entire population into a single barn made her uneasy.
By this time, it was supposed to be early afternoon, and Bolt gently pulled her coin purse from her saddlebags to drop a few bits on the dusty counter of a shop that developed in the first few months of the Nightfall. It was a wooden stand on a dirt path that clearly wasn’t meant to last as long as it had, but the years passing brought slow upgrades to the booth. She gave a soft smile to the mare a bit younger than herself before quietly requesting two loaves of bread and a strawberry danish wrapped in paper, noticing how the pegasus, Swift Breeze, had begun to wear her mane freely again instead of its usual tight bun. The last time her mane was down was long before the Nightfall even began, and Fire Bolt couldn’t help but mentally note the beautiful shimmering yellow streaks in her blonde curls that she hadn’t noticed in several years.
She thanked Swift Breeze for the food and packed them into her saddlebag gently, careful not to crush to pastry under the weight of her coin bag and the dagger she kept on her as much as she could remember to grab it on her way out. Bolt tightened the strap to her old sun-bleached bags, using her teeth to yank on the piece of fabric that always seemed to need a good tug to stay in place these days, and decided to trot for some of the way home.
She couldn’t deny that it was, to an extent, peaceful. Nopony was outside very much anymore, mostly akin to a normal night, and the weather always stayed at a warm summer night with a light cool breeze. It touseled her orange and yellow mane as she walked, slowly breathing in the fresh air in a way that she never got to when she flew – flying required a different kind of breath control, and Bolt often realized that she wasn’t getting enough walking time in her routine. Her steps echoed against the cobblestone path as She got fed up with the slow pace pretty swiftly, though, and took a few running steps before taking flight into the darkness again.
When she returned to the cottage, Sonar Moonshadow was awake and resting on the couch, sipping his jasmine tea carefully. His unseeing eyes wandered toward the direction of the door when Fire Bolt closed it behind her, and he knowingly smiled at her presence. “Did you get some more bread? I wanted some toast and jam but it seemed like we’re cleaned out of grains…” Moonshadow used his magic to pull the bread from her bag before she could even answer, placing it on the counter. His intuition and sixth sense were always miles ahead of Bolt’s own five, often able to tell who was around him without any cues despite his blinded vision. It was impressive, and most chalked it up to his unfortunate nature.
A batpony-unicorn amalgamation at birth, Moonshadow’s wings were amputated as just a youngling, as they began to sprout in a deformed manner. His parents being a progressive batpony and an experimental unicorn seemed to be the stem of a lot of his interesting features – he was born intersex with a strangely formed horn, later choosing to present between masculine and androgynous despite his strikingly beautiful but traditionally feminine facial structure. He specialized in echolocation, a fitting profession for his nature. Speckles of lightened fur washed across the lower half of his legs as well as his nose and lower back in a pattern that Fire Bolt found to be breathtaking. He had pierced one of his ears, twice, in an experiment to gauge his intuitive abilities, and the piercing fit quite well with his complexion, a badge of pride he wore nicely, but he’d removed the jewelry after a few months of the crisis. Moonshadow also let Fire Bolt cut his hair when it started to get out of hoof, usually keeping his two longer strands around his ears away from the shears, because although he could easily do it himself despite his inability to see his mane, he liked the time they shared on the cool tile of the bathroom floor on a monthly basis. Lately, his mane had started to become less and less of a priority in their routine.
“Two loaves. Swift Breeze is wearing her mane down again, it looks like…” Fire Bolt trailed off, attempting to conjure an appropriate description. “It looks like caramel ice cream. She looks really nice.” She finished plainly, feeling a bit awkward at the lack of their usually loaded conversations and unloading her saddlebags by the door. She gently placed the danish on the coffee table next to the spot on the couch that was occupied by her partner and turned back around, putting her other findings and trinkets from the day in their respective places.
“That sounds nice. I hope she’s doing well.” Sonar Moonshadow sounded slightly off, Bolt noted, almost like he was hesitant to tell her something. She didn’t reply, waiting for the tension to draw out the words that seemed to sit behind his teeth expectantly, and it worked in minutes. She heard him open his mouth and close it before finally sheepishly spitting out, “Have you heard the news?”
The “news” was delivered to each known remaining occupied cottage in Ponyville, and it was a hoof-written letter depicting the various bits of information received from the surrounding areas. It wasn’t entirely reliable in Bolt’s opinion, but it worked well enough when reading it without acknowledging the buzzwords strung between each sentence to make each droning week seem more exciting.
“No, what’s the deal?” She kept her back faced to Moonshadow as she continued to mindlessly organize and shelve the various items scattered around the kitchen, expecting the usual news to be some kind of a misconstrued bit of drama about a pony killer, a beast, or a cause for the Nightfall. What he actually said next froze her in her tracks, sending shivers down her spine.
“They found Princess Celestia. She’s… Celestia was found dead.”