//------------------------------//
// Parturition 
// Story: Sweet Nothings 
// by Golden Tassel 
//------------------------------//

A mare is dead, a foal orphaned. This is the price I paid for love.

With the heavy steel door closed behind me, I was left all alone in the pitch darkness of the world outside. I lay down, closed my eyes, and waited for the wasteland to claim me.

I waited to die. But as I would eventually come to understand, I had only just been born.


***


A light came on in the distance. At first it was only a dim glow, but it grew brighter as I watched it. Then suddenly it became a blinding glare. Even when I closed my eyes, I could still see the glow through my eyelids. The light was warm. I felt its glow on my face, and it slowly spread down over me.

I didn't know what it was, if it was some element of the wasteland there to claim me, or if perhaps I had died and not yet realized it. But the warmth of that light made me conscious of the coldness of the stone floor beneath me. I stood up and peered at the light through squinted eyes. Curiously, I began moving toward it.

I was in some kind of corridor—no, the stable had corridors; they were straight and orderly, and they had been constructed with purpose. This floor . . . this ground I walked on was uneven, as were the walls and ceiling above me. I was in a tunnel, a canal that bridged the sealed world of the stable with the open wasteland.

I emerged out into the full light, and as my eyes became adjusted to it, I saw at last what that light was: the sun, cresting over the distant horizon. It was the dawn, the birth of a new day. The sky was awash in brilliant red and orange hues, and below it, before me, was the wasteland.

And all of it was so very empty.

I stood above the wasteland halfway up the side of a mountain, into which the stable, where a dozen generations before me had lived their entire lives and never seen the light of day, had been built. Everything I had ever known, everything I had ever cared about . . . my whole world was behind me. And ahead was an empty, lifeless void where the only movement I could see were small tufts of dust that became swept up in the wind, danced around in the air briefly, and then disintegrated into nothing.

I glanced back at the mouth of the cave that lead down to the stable, and I briefly imagined running back there to pound against the door and beg and plead to be allowed back in. But I knew that would be futile. So I steeled myself with the certainty that the stable was left a better place without me.

My wings bristled and spread out at my sides as I looked ahead at the wide open world. The stable had been constructed to allow sufficient room for pegasi to fly along corridors, or up and down between levels by way of the atrium which ran the entire height of the stable. But I knew in that moment—as I stood there on the side of that mountain with my wings outstretched, feeling the natural breeze under my feathers, feeling how the fine control muscles adapted the shape of my wings all on their own to fit the changing winds—I knew that the stable had not been enough room for a pegasus. I hadn't had any idea of the very simple wonder that I had been deprived of my entire life.

So as I launched myself out into the open air and glided out over the barren, dusty hills, I resolved to leave it all behind me: I would simply forget about it all. Accept that I had lost what I loved most of all, and move on with my life. I had no idea where I was going, only forward.

I could never go back.