The Rainbow Plague
I raise my head from where I had laid it down to rest. I look and see that the pony who I had spent the night watching over has succumbed to this accursed plague as well. I get up, but do not shed any tears. I take the body and place it in a pile of others. Now I am the last one from my village.
All of the ponies I knew are now dead. Friends, family, enemies. All consumed by this disease. I look around and breath in the morning air. I taste the death and feel myself grow sick.
I bend over and hold myself steady, dry heaving. A trickle of bile dribbles out of my mouth. I stand up straight again, wiping it away. Then I think of what it is that I will do.
I know that my time is short, for even if I am the last survivor I know that the sickness will claim my life too. I contemplate going to warn the other villages in the area, but quickly decide this is not the best, for it is the very same thing that had brought the plague.
A messenger wracked with it visited us to deliver a warning, and was soon dead. We did not take long to figure out that it was his visit that had brought this hammer of colorful death down on us.
No, I must not visit the other villages. They too will die. Then, I know what I must do. I pack a few belongings and some food in a saddle bag. Then I set off into the forest surrounding us, me, and canter in a straight line, stumbling over every fallen branch and every root that sticks out in my path.
But I take no notice of these, and only continue on. I stop occasionally to rest and eat. However, I am soon up and back to walking.
As I go on, I grow weaker with each passing moment. My breathe begins to rattle as it had done the others. My hooves and legs do not feel as if they can hold me up. I am suddenly seized a few times by a cold that makes me shiver, even in the sun. And when I look at my pelt, I see the marks that had appeared on the others. A wide array of colorful spots each one a different shade. Some of them itch and a few ache. But I know what they mean. My time is short.
I had hoped the wild animals would try to eat me, but they are avoiding me and the parcel of death I carry. Soon, a branch or root trips me, I do not know which, and places me flat on my face. I am now too weak to get up, or even move.
I just lay there, slowly fading, drifting in and out of consciousness. One time I wake up and see my family, friends, and many other ponies that I did not know gesturing from a light for me to come to them. They are all seated around a large table laid out with the best foods I had ever seen, many of them causing my mouth to water. But when I try to move towards them, I pass out again.
This repeats several times, and each time I try and move to them, losing consciousness again and again. It is a cruel pattern, one I hope that ends soon. It soon does so when a mare with a white pelt comes forward from the light and holds out her hoof to me.
"It is time," she says. I somehow find the strength to nod and reach out my own hoof to hers.
She takes it, grasping it firmly in her own, strong hoof, and lifts me up. I look at myself and see what the death had done to me, eating at me and making me feel so much pain and suffering. Then I look at the mare and know that both of these are over. She smiles, then leads me into the light, where I am again joined with those I love.