Nothing existed for Littlepip but the thought of her movement through space. She felt her hooves hitting the ground one by one, the blurred walls nothing but a measure of her speed through the hallways, the ground under her toes nothing but a firm barrier against which to push herself. The air against her clothes, her tail, and her mane were the enemy, drag. Her feet and the floor were her only allies, means of propulsion.
Where I’m going is only my secondary concern, she thought. It will be important later. What’s important now is that I move. Don’t think. Only watch for obstacles and move.
She did not notice the length of the hallway. It had no time to close around her as she ran through it.
The steel doors sat at the end. They looked like two raised hoofs, ordering her to slow down and stop. She bared her teeth and continued her charge.
Still on her own inertia, she grasped the handle and slammed herself against the door on the right. The door hit her back; its cold metal felt like a punch. She fell backward. The back of her head hit the ground, rattling her teeth against one another.
She did not feel the pain. Instead, she stood up without hesitation, grasped the handle with one hoof, leaned on it with all her might, and banged on the door repeatedly with her other hoof.
The door was firmly locked. There was no response. Even with her entire weight on it, the door handle did not even creak.
When her strength failed her, she collapsed back in exhaustion and dragged herself toward the other door. She raised a shaky hoof from the ground to reach the handle. When she felt it on the verge of yielding, she sprang to her feet as if electrified, pushed the handle down, and hit her shoulder against the door with the last of the fury that remained of her charge.
She tumbled into the room and brought herself to her feet as quickly as she had fallen. There was nopony there. There were a few microphones standing tall with nopony to sing to them, a few run-down chairs against which there was nopony to support himself and his instruments; and, on the floor, a few electrical boxes with various switches, dials, and buttons, with nopony to operate.
And, as if to mock them, as if these objects had eyes, a long mirror spanned the entire right wall of the room, reflecting the loneliness as a cruel joke, showing them that they’d stand there forever, that there was nopony to help them, that they were doomed to be silent, waiting for a talent that would never come to deliver them.
Littlepip looked at herself in this mirror. The pony facing her looked exactly like her—but there was no manifestation of her soul in this figure in front of her. She thought that she would look tired; the pony’s cheeks and eyelids were gaunt, pulled straight. She thought that she would see water in red eyes; the pony’s eyes were white and clear. When she felt an anxiety bubble up from her chest, she expected the pony’s lips to quiver; when they did not, when the anxiety turned to panic, when she felt the air in the room thinning, when she felt her heart palpitating, when she began to notice the pain of the absence of sound pressing on her eardrums, she expected the pony to turn white; but the pony stared back at her as she had when Littlepip had first entered the room: with a blank, vacant, unplaceable stare, one that was not angry or happy, one that was not sad or jovial—just a face and an expression with nothing on it, an entity that held no anchor to anything she knew, a canvas that refused to hold the paint of its artist.
She watched in horror as the pony’s horn began to glow, as one of the boxes in the corner lifted itself from the ground. The box was heavy, but there was no strain in the pony’s body. The pony directed it toward her own face, and the face broke with a frightening sound. Littlepip did not feel the glass settling itself into her hair and clothes; nor had she flinched at the impact, which had irrevocably shattered not only the mirror but, with it, the silence of the room. The only thing on her mind was the last expression of the pony before she had splintered: the indifferent expression of one who is performing a routine task, the stare of a well rested pony looking at herself in the mirror.
Glass crunched under Littlepip’s hooves as she rocked back and forth. The adjoining room was empty. It had the same sterility as every other room in the stable—more so, for this room was completely bare. There were no boxes, no wires, no breadboards, nothing that she remembered. A fluorescent lightbulb had been installed in the socket on the roof.
The thermometer was gone.
She nodded as she understood. It was perfectly logical: the mirror had shown nothing because it had been protecting nothing.