A lonely pick dot stood amongst a seemingly endless ocean of browns and grays.
Starlight Glimmer found herself staring out across a barren wasteland, the sand dunes shifting soundlessly around her as an ill wind spiraled through. She stood there, her entire body shivering violently in the knowledge that the grim reaper who had wrought this grand expanse of emptiness was her and her alone.
A memory burned white-hot in the back of the unicorn's brain.
With the taste of revenge sickly-sweet on her tongue and Father Time's magic forged as her scythe, she had so thoughtlessly cleaved. A manic smile full of fangs stretched from ear to ear as the pink mare of the future watched her work unfold before her. Equestria's hourglass shattered and its contents spilled forth. From it, a dusty avalanche of never-woulds and could-have-beens suffocated the land; everything that once was vanishing from sight, buried beneath a sandy tomb.
There was nothing. Nothing but dead silence.
A voice that Starlight only barely registered as her own whispered inside her head, "It's gone. It's all gone."
Her knees buckled and she fell, no longer capable of carrying the weight of her sins. Hot tears scalded her cheeks like droplets of molten iron, each one containing a vivid memory of the world she once knew. Equestria had been a land of love and loyal kinship, and in her selfish quest for vengeance she had destroyed it.
"Did it feel good? Did it? Was that one moment of victory worth all of this?" came that same, whispering voice.
The bile in her stomach boiled as her mind plucked the proper, painful answer.
It felt awful. Nothing was worth this.
Starlight had taken the snowglobe that was the world, shaken it just to see it suffer, then thrown it against her wall. Each shard of glass that fell as the orb exploded had a face that she recalled and a name that she would one day come to cherish. Now though, they merely littered her floor like discarded bits of trash that threatened razor pain if she dared to step too close.
She didn't dare.
Starlight looked up from her seat in the sand and craned her neck. She spied a cliff that she knew to stretch out and over a roiling black sea. The waters there were turbulent and crashed against the cliffside with such ferocity, unrelenting in their efforts to erode the stubborn rock and lay claim to the debris. Attempting to swim that sea would be pure insanity.
"Only an madmare would even dare to try. Do you, Starlight? Do you dare?"
A knot formed in the unicorn's throat. Try as she might, she couldn't swallow it.
Yes, she dared.
After all, it would only take one jump. Just a little hop, skip, and a jump, and she could have peace from this damning purgatory. The sand would no longer itch and grate against the skin beneath her coat, the wind would stop clawing at her eyes, and the desert silence would fade as the ocean's roaring calamity carried her off towards realms unknown.
"Then go, Starlight. Go and fly."
Starlight wearily took to her hooves, just as she always did, and made her way towards the cliff. At the edge, she sat herself down, her empty gaze drifting out into dark waters. The unicorn's mind swam, just as her exhausted body longed to do, adrift with conflicting thoughts and feelings that she wished she could simply drown.
Starlight shook her head, resigned. There was only one means of escape.
One final whisper, "Fly."
Along the edge of a quiet desert, as the sea spat against resisting stone, a single mare kissed the sky and begged forgiveness from every pony she ever had the honor of knowing.
~ w ~
Starlight jolted awake as though she had been physically struck, ragged breaths escaping her chest as the adrenaline that had fueled her sudden start only then began to fade. Baggy eyes, moist from sobbing, scanned her bedroom inside Twilight Sparkle's crystal castle. On her nightstand rested the bodies of three dead soldiers, two empty wine bottles and one empty bottle of gin.
Leaping out of her bed, she galloped from her room like a pony possessed, her destination a balcony perfectly positioned to lovingly embrace the view of the tiny town surrounding it. Her chest hit the protective guardrail hard enough to crack a rib, though if she did then she certainly didn't notice. Her gaze was transfixed, looking out across Ponyville; her home and the home of her seven closest friends.
It was still there.
As in her dream, Starlight fell to her knees, her eyes watering over once again. She felt sand that wasn't there scratch at her skin and seep deep inside her body, the sensation picking at her bones like a gang of hungry vultures. Her ears picked up the sounds of nighttime Ponyville, owls hooting and crickets chirping; each echoing just loudly enough to grant some solace from the barren, ominous quiet that plagued her heart.
It was still there.
But as Starlight knew all too well, in a future averted, it wasn't.
Starlight heaved her head over the rail just in time to spare the poor balcony, violent spasms rippling through her belly as it voided itself and she lost her lunch. A stream of bile and the half-digested remains of three daisy sandwiches from earlier that afternoon splattered unceremoniously against the ground far below. The scent of high-proof, low-shelf alcohol assaulted her nose and made her head spin as though she'd only just seconds ago chugged another bottle.
Her mind a chaotic torrent of emotions that the rest of ponykind would likely never be privy to, Starlight wiped away any vile vomit still lingering on her chin once she felt that the tremors deep in her gut had finally subsided. Trembling on unsteady hooves, she then laid herself down and openly wept.
Though they lived and breathed in the present, blissfully unaware, the sobbing unicorn knew that at one point in time she had still killed them all. The blood on her hooves was enough to fill the black sea that she had so willingly thrown herself into and no amount of scrubbing could ever rid her of it.
Her hooves were red. Her coat, mane, and tail were all blood red.
Her soul was stained scarlet and Starlight plead to the starry sky above for something powerful enough to cleanse it.
No answer came.