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// ._________________________________________________________________. 
// Story: .until the last pony is ferried. 
// by shortskirtsandexplosions 
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. centuries went by .



. millennia .



. eons .



. i counted them with each boatstroke that i performed .



. one soul after another, i ferried across that dark, dark river .



. i ferried them all .



. the mothers and the murderers .



. the saints and the liars .



. the heroes and the cowards .



. one by one, i carried them to their destination .



. every soul was as pale and colorless as the one before .



. none of them i recognized; very few of them breathed that misty light of tenderness and hope .



. every so often, thousands of souls apart, one might actually have spoken to me .



. it was almost nothing but rambling nonsense and whimpering drivel .



. a few hundred of them actually tried pushing me into the waters .



. only a dozen and a half of them were brave enough to ask if they could take the pole in place of me .



. i refused them; i ferried them all .



. fifty billion souls later, the ponies stopped talking altogether .



. fifty trillion, and the bodies on the shore grew more and more spaced apart .



. a quintillion or more souls into my task, and the riverbank grew desolate .



. i would spend decades and even centuries scouring the pale coast, until finally i found one lone soul or another that had gotten lost, lingering amidst the nothingness, waiting to be dissolved into the breathless void across the waters .



. eon by eon, the search took longer and longer, until i determined that there was nothing left to search for .



. the riverbank grew silent, something quieter than death .



. even the waters grew still, for i had nowhere to row my raft .



. more eons passed, peeling away at the blighted morass .



. the bone shoals grew bitter, breaking way with each passing age, showing nothing but blackness beyond the fissures and cracks .



. the waters evaporated, giving way to a black, smokey mist that drifted past me and my raft .



. and still, i kept my constant vigil, eyes glued upon the shore, even as it grew fainter and fainter with each dwindling epoch .



. and then finally, when so much time had limped by that even the foundations of the afterlife had begun to crumble... .



. i saw her .