They were all gone. The impregnable silence was an ellipsis to everything that had led up to this point. In the blank slate between creation and manifestation. Exactly where I wanted to be. I released my grip from reality, and the door that had left me here closed permanently.
And then it was over. To make any kind of sense of it, I needed to go back to the morning. Back to the day the madness started.
PART 1: The Equestria I Remember
I should have known something was wrong the moment the sun rose. It was brilliant, cresting the lower cloud layer like a fiery angel, vengeance writhing into summer contours. But unlike Celestia’s sunrise, there was grace behind the rise. Red, orange, and purple. Vivid as gems and blended by an aesthetic painter. My eyes did not need to be open for more than a minute to see they were all wrong.
The hangover put itself at my mind’s forefront soon afterwards. The buzzing in my ears and the metaphorical knife in my gut reminded me of last night’s drinking. I was a corpse, legs splayed out over the bed’s edges. Having the sun shine ten times brighter than usual remedied nothing. It was practically life or death as I rolled off the bed, landing from a cloud bed to a cloud floor.
My whole apartment had been built around the soft material, an appreciated crutch when mornings invited painful recollections about yesterdays. But to install a window facing east, I must have been through half a dozen drinks when I made that decision. Routine was all that got me off the floor. It was routine that drove ponies to get ready for work with lethal levels of alcohol in their systems. Routine made us wake up, every day, in the face of a merciless sun and an empty two-pony bed.
It made us act strong for the ones we love; it was how I managed to compose myself into a mother for Lightning Bolt. A real sleeping beauty, she could never see me in the state I was in now–– a pitiful mare who still lived in the past, who piled her sorrows at the bottom of a beer.
Stumbling into the kitchen corner, I instinctively smacked the phone receiver and played the voice mail. It beeped incessantly, but the sounds might as well have been another world away. The first one was from my boss in the Cloudsdale Police Department: “Fleetfoot? Are you going to show up at the office? You’ve been missing for quite a while now…” The voice was barely audible, muffled by the ramblings of the coffee maker and a hoof striking wood. “Fleetfoot? Hey! You okay in there?”
The buzzing must have been messing with my hearing. The boss’s voice was much more male than the one on the receiver. My hoof went to examine the receiver. It found the kitchen counter instead, feeling for that familiar metal. There was no receiver. Suddenly, my hangover had worsened significantly; not even routine could keep me from collapsing to the floor in surprise. In front of my blurred eyes, the apartment transformed.
Shadows scraped themselves off the furniture, washed out by a nauseating brightness and saturation. The battered walls were replaced by spotless, navy blue culumus; pictures I had never placed up materialized among other indiscernible things. None of this could have been real… that much I could be certain of. From what little my blurry eyes could recognize, it seemed I was inside the cloud manor I had owned back when I was a Wonderbolt. I had woken up in a stranger’s home.
The beeping ceased, replaced by someone’s knocking at the door. “Fleetfoot! I heard a crash. Is everything alright in there?” I trotted to the door, using the voice as my lifeline in a turbulent sea of scrambled thoughts. I tried to shove what I saw along the way––what I had seen now––toward the back of my mind, but there was no denying what just happened. There had been a receiver there, in my kitchen, now someone else’s kitchen and someone else’s house. My mind was meandering, falling through questions and cracks in the delicate foundation of logic.
Where was I? What was I doing? I was trotting to the door, meeting the pony who was not my boss in the CPD. The door pulled back.
A pale pink mare with a similarly pale mane was on the other side of the threshold. In the lighting of the hallway… no, that was not right either. In the lighting of the outside world, she appeared like a desert apparition, impossible to concentrate on and accept as real. But without a doubt, it was your neighborhood friendly delivery mare.
“Jetstream?” My voice had the personality of a dry straw. “What–– what are you doing. Here?”
Jetstream raised an eyebrow. “Have you lost your memory, Fleetfoot? You always wake at sunrise, stretch your wings outside the manor, fly a quick circuit around the layer, and return just as I drop the mail into your box. You’re an hour behind all of that.” Without leaving me room for questions, she brought her blue eyes to my face, scrutinizing every square inch. “For the love of–– how much did you drink last night?”
A question I finally had an answer to. “Maybe half a dozen… listen, what––”
“You never drink the night before practice! What made you go to Star Hunter’s?”
“Who in Tartarus is Star Hunter? Ah, forget it. Jetstream, what do you mean by practice?”
“It wasn’t cancelled, you know. You have a show in a week! You said so yourself yesterday, quote, ‘The Wonderbolts have to be in tip-top shape for the ceremony at Fillydelphia,’ end quote. You look like you just learned about this now!” Jetstream was spewing nonsense, fuming like a minotaur in a maze. So, it was nothing to be worried about. This Wonderbolt business, though, left me wanting for a painkiller.
“Jetstream, I haven’t been in the Wonderbolts for seven years.”
The delivery mare looked through me as though I was the one with no connection to the present. She flicked her tail and blinked. “You really did lose your memory, huh? Either that, or you’re a changeling. A very inept changeling.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Nothing. Just thinking out loud.” She paused and looked off to the horizon. The hiccupped chirping of a northern cardinal offset the quiet. She flipped back to attention and added, “Meet me at Star Hunter’s. One hour. I’ll need a cider for this.” Without her usual goodbye, Jetstream unfolded her wings and jumped off, soaring out of sight beneath the layer.
One bizarre happening after another. The voice in my head told me to go to the bathroom and swallow some painkillers. Nothing would make sense until this haze in my brain was cleared. Walking back into my old house invited snapshots of days when life was good and a snuff film of the night when the pain started.
I passed by Lightning Bolt’s room on the way. Needing some sort of assurance that I was still awake, I opened the door a crack and peered inside. Sunlight flooded in behind me and created a bridge to an empty bed, pristine and unshaken. She was gone.
Just when you start to begin grasping the madness around you, the dream takes a sudden genre shift and mutates into a nightmare.