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// They Don't Have a Soul 
// Story: Wearing Midnight 
// by Owlor 
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Trixie sighed, so much for getting a good nights sleep. If the two fillies decided to call on a guard, she'd have their copper armour hovering over her until the morning. They'd never find her, of course, but it would be a hassle. The only thing delaying her departure from the Everfree was the fish bale, which still leaked water like an over-saturated sponge.

“If I could somehow squeeze this, it would go a lot faster,” she muttered to herself. 

Images of toga-clad pegasi discussing physics in ancient Pegasopolis filled her mind. Give me a something something and a place to stand and I will move the world, One of them said to the others. She looked around, there was still plenty of wood littering the ground, even after her fireplace, and plenty of rocks to use as a counterweight. A light bulb formed over her head. 

Some woods-mare engineering later and she had a makeshift press consisting of a branch with one end fixed to the ground y a large rock. She leaned all her weight on the branch and let gravity do the rest. Some of the water squirted out, and the bale began to wiggle.

Turns out that some of the fish wasn't as dead as she had assumed, and the top layer struggled underneath her weight. Trixie let go of the branch and nearly fell backwards for the third time this night. After picking herself up, she went back to to studying the texture of tree bark. When she returned, the bale had completely stopped moving.

Trixie went up to the bundled sheet with uneasy steps. She gave it a poke, then detracted her hoof as if she thought the bale would bite. The fishes however, remained perfectly still, even as she levitated the bale into her wagon.

“It's okay, fish don't have a soul,” she muttered to herself like a mantra. But somehow, this thought still failed to comfort her.




“Then again, I'm not sure all ponies have souls...” she mused to herself while dragging her wagon across the bumpy trail of the forest. 

Along the way out of the Everfree she kept her eyes on the side of the trail, hoping for some of those tasty mushrooms, but to no avail. If there ever was any mushrooms here, they had already been picked by the two fillies. Eventually, it became less about satisfying her hunger and more about keeping her mind occupied to silence the sound of the dead fish squishing at each bump and turn. 

Finally, she learned to tune it out. Or rather, she simply became too tired to care...


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