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// The Strange Child Dreams 
// Story: Moments in a Lifetime 
// by Gustauve 
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Ponyville. God Almighty, how he hated Ponyville. It wasn’t a deep personal sort of hate – no – it was the sort of hate that slowly eats at the back of the mind; a hatred born and bred from familiarity and an apathy so deep that it ventured into the realm of disgust. From a very early age Silver Spurs had grown to resent the town of his birth. He could never point to anything definite; it was just something about the town and the people who lived in it.

Mind you, he would be the first to point out that he was far from normal himself; from the start he’d understood that there was something off about his demeanor. He seldom ever partook in the sort of activities the other children did – running around with friends, dancing and singing, having adventures and enjoying the bright sunny days of youth. Such frippery was not for the likes of Silver Spurs.

Instead he’d often keep to himself – skulking amidst the untrodden places, always listening to what was said but never speaking in turn unless absolutely necessary. A frown seemed to perpetually mar his face; his eyes always holding a gleam of cynical skepticism as he surveyed the world around him. As for adventures and the revelry of childhood, well, the young colt was more at peace reading books about distant lands and foreign peoples than he’d ever been while interacting with those around him.

Why was he this way? He didn’t know. Perhaps his dysfunctional household had something to do with it? His parents were far from pleasant – his mother, in particular, was a monstrous tyrant behind closed doors. His father wasn’t much better; the man was a shiftless louse with no higher aspirations and a penchant for hiding within his work to escape his reality. Silver Spurs could openly admit to himself that he held little, if any, affection for his progenitors.

And if he were honest with himself (which he always was), he could clearly see his own strangeness; no normal child would have such dismal thoughts and opinions of the world. Were that it was only he who understood this ultimate truth there would be little issue. Sadly, this was not so. Ponyville has always been a tightknit community where everyone knows everyone, and little remains hidden for long. It was glaringly apparent to a growing number of both children and adult that there was something very wrong about ‘Golden Ledger and Petunia’s boy’.

It never really bothered him that many people saw him as odd or unusual. In fact, he often found that he preferred it when the other children were told to stay away from him. Still, he couldn’t quite snuff out the tiny ember of resentment for the townspeople who whispered about him as he passed by. They thought he couldn’t hear them, or understand what they were saying, but he did. He had become well acquainted with such terms as ‘weirdo’, ‘freak’, ‘monster’ and ‘psychopath’.

His parents were a different matter. Always, it seemed, was he berated for being who he was by his mother. She would accuse him of such petty things as deliberately trying to sabotage her standing within the community, of making her an object of ridicule amongst her peers. At the same time, his father would attempt to have unnecessary and oftentimes awkward conversations to try and understand why he was ‘acting up’. He resented them all the more for it.

The children weren’t much better. Many would taunt him mercilessly for his perceived oddness – often they would try to make him feel excluded and isolated from their ranks. It never bothered him. He found that he could never relate to his peers. To him, the other children were strange creatures who seemed to frolic about in their ignorance, content to simply exist without understanding why things were the way they were. They were loud, opinionated and capricious beings who seemed more and more hollow as time went on.

No, none of these things truly bothered him. None could claim to be the root of his cold, impersonal hatred. Strangely enough, that title ultimately went to a much more esoteric but altogether more impassible concept. What it all came down to was the notion of what it meant to be a pony; a rather complicated abstraction that no child should be attempting to contemplate. Yet contemplate it he did. And the more he partook to understand his self, the more he grew to hate what he was.

After all, what was a pony but a bestial creature that sought entitlement to its lot simply by existing? For time immemorial ponies have followed little else but their own whims, driven in part but a notion that their calling in life was predestined, and that they need not go beyond what they felt made them who they were. Ponies forsook their individuality for the sake of a collective that held no greater aspiration than to simply exist.

And at the top of it all stood the Alicorn, Celestia - a being of near godlike power who ruled over all who would call themselves ponies by right of her own power. Power derived from its own substance – a tyranny without equal that will continue to exist because none question its authority or the authorship thereof. The more he thought of it, the more he hated. He could not comprehend how others could live with such an existence, and so he could never truly be like others of his own kind…


The sun was setting. He’d spent most of the day exploring fringes of the Everfree Forest, lost in his own thoughts. Time had gotten away from him. He knew that his mother would be furious with him for coming home both late and covered in dirt; she would more than likely not allow him to eat dinner for this. This didn’t bother him. He was nothing if not tactful. So it was that, as he made his way from the forest and into the town, he came to a stop outside the local bakery – “Sugar Cube Corner”.

Stepping past the threshold of the establishment, the young colt was met with the familiar smell of baked bread and warm cinnamon that seemed to permeate the very air. The late in the day, there were only a few customers, and most simply chose to ignore him. As he waited in line, he casually observed that the proprietary family’s young son, Carrot Cake, was working the register this evening.

This was advantageous for Silver Spurs. Unlike most people, Carrot Cake did not treat him as a pariah; the older boy seemed to hold a genuine interest his well-being, often times going out of his way to be kind to the child that others seemed to avoid and spur at all costs. Silver Spurs appreciated this on some level; he did not dislike Carrot Cake. However, he could not claim to personally care that much about the older boy either. Ambivalence would be an apt word to describe how he felt.

Still he would be cordial as always to one of the few people who treated him with a modicum of respect. As it stood it was now his turn to place an order. As he stepped forward, Carrot looked up, putting forth a genuine smile upon recognizing the young colt before him. With a wave of his hoof, he happily exclaimed, “Well, hello Silver Spurs, how are you doing this evening?”

With only a light frown, Silver Spurs sternly replied, “I’m well enough, though I appreciate your asking.”

Grinning with delight, Carrot Cake then asked, “I guess you’re here for some food, huh?”

Again, the younger stallion showed little emotion as he answered back, “There will be no dinner for me tonight – so I’ll make do with what I can.”

With a nod of understanding, Carrot went straight to business and asked, “So, what’ll it be?”

Without skipping a beat Silver Spurs evenly replied, “I will take a half a loaf of barley bread, please.”

With a chipper salute, the older boy exclaimed, “A half loaf of barley, coming right up!”

As the young stallion turned away to prepare the order, Silver Spurs absentmindedly noted that a young mare was staring at Carrot Cake from across the room. He objectively understood the look of longing in her eyes to be affection; the dull hatred that gnawed at the back of his mind simply noted it with a cold cynicism. The girl was obviously smitten with the older boy, and if the subtle glances Carrot was sending back to her were any indication, it seemed the feelings were reciprocated.

Still he couldn’t help but feel slightly disgusted by it all. He knew it was a natural process. He understood what lead to it and where it eventually lead to if undisturbed. Still, there was a part of him that found the whole thing to be, well, pointless. All it ever lead to was a continuation of the condition that afflicted all of them. They would not change, they could not change. Still, it was something that could never be stopped, and so he did the next best thing by putting it out of his mind altogether.

From there, he took note of the smell of baking barley. Barley was not his favorite. In fact, he could go so far as to say that he disliked barley bread. However, it was cheap, and in the end it was ultimately a form of sustenance that would keep him going for another day. He wondered once more at the banality of his existence. It truly was staggering how disconnected he felt from it all. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last time, he wondered if maybe he had been born in the wrong time and place.
His thoughts were broken by Carrot Cake's cheerful voice as he exclaimed, “Here you go, Silver Spurs – a half loaf of barley, as requested; that’ll be four bits!”

Casting a despondent glare at the meager bag of currency he possessed, Silver Spurs dejectedly muttered, “I’m afraid all I have are three bits; I’m sorry for wasting your time, Carrot Cake.” He then turned about and headed towards the exit, fully accepting the fact that he would go to bed hungry.

Before he could get very far, however, his attention was drawn once more to Carrot Cake as he said, “Now hold on there – there’s no need to leave! I’m sure I can cut you a deal here!”

Placing a hoof upon his chin, Carrot Cake silently contemplated for a few moments before smiling and pointing at the younger boy, saying, “How about this; I’ll give you the barley for three bits and I’ll put the last bit in from my own pocket – does that sound like a deal?”

With narrowing eyes, Silver Spurs asked in suspicion, “That sounds very good for me, but what do you get out of it?”

With a look of playfulness, Carrot Cake eagerly replied, “Why, the satisfaction of knowing that someone doesn’t go to bed hungry tonight!”

Casting a dubious gaze first at Carrot Cake, and then at the preferred loaf of bread, Silver Spurs took a few seconds to weigh his options before finally responding, “Very well, I’ll agree to that.”

And so, the bits were exchanged for bread, and Silver Spurs left quickly for home, already cramming the barley loaf into his mouth and chewing furiously; there was no sense in letting his mother know that he’d circumvented her impending punishment.

From within the Sugar Cube Corner, the mare who’d been silently watching everything unfold finally approached the counter and candidly spoke with Carrot Cake, saying, “You know, if your dad finds out that you’re giving food at a discount to the kid, he’s gonna be really angry.”

With a slight frown, Carrot Cake responded, “I don’t care, Cup; it’s not right the way people treat him – I’m not about to let him go hungry just because he's a little different from everyone else.”

The mare smiled at that – she had always adored the compassion that Carrot Cake exhibited for all people…


Later that night, Silver Spurs sat awake in his room. His mother had indeed yelled at him for being late. And she had indeed forbidden him from eating. This didn't bother him. At night, he was free to do what he truly loved doing; reading of faraway peoples and faraway places. He had only recently procured a book from the local library, one entitled “History of the Feline Unification Wars”. What he read not only fascinated him, it stirred something deep within his soul.

Out there, beyond the desert wastes of the west, was a land of people who fought and died for what they believed was theirs. A place where a man could chose his own destiny, where one’s life wasn’t set in stone because of some mark on their flank. Out there was a vast wilderness of unknown hardships and dangers – a place where empires clashed and men proved their worth. This land called to him like a siren’s song. And it was this place that he would soon fall into dreams of as he whispered its name before sleep overtook him.

“Vorosh.”