• Published 3rd Aug 2012
  • 993 Views, 20 Comments

The Hoofprints in the Snow - Lucky Dreams



A dead foal's desperate quest to be reunited with his mother.

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1: A Puddle of Starlight

— Chapter One —
A Puddle of Starlight


So picture the scene. It’s a cold blustery night in Ponyville—long before the move to Trottingham—and my mum’s in the hospital when the doctor comes in and says to her, “Congratulations, it’s a beautiful baby colt!” Then he shows me to her, and you’d best believe that I was the most adorable earth pony that you ever saw. I had a pale grey coat. I had a bright blue mane and tail which matched my eyes perfectly... and I’m forgetting something, what was it? Oh yeah, I had this winning smile too, much cuter than all the other foals. Quick! What d’you call me? Sunny Days, ‘cos of my smile? Ocean Dreams, ‘cos of my eyes?

If you were my mum then you named me ‘Camera Shutter’, despite not having touched a camera all your life or even knowing anypony remotely interested in photos. Camera. Shutter. Go ahead, say it out loud. Did you shudder? ‘Cos I’m telling you, if you didn’t than you should’ve. Imagine going through school with a name like that!

On the other hoof though, I guess you could say that being called ‘Camera’ is fitting when that’s what your cutie mark happens to be, and especially when the only place you can see me now is in photos. For example, there’s this one of me on my fifth birthday which I really love where I’m blowing out candles—I had it stuck on my wall for the rest of my not-very-long life (I’m nine and a bit years old, thank you kindly). There's others of me and my friends at school or out playing in the street. Out of all of 'em, my favourite’s the one of me and mum at the beach on holiday. There’s this big red sunset. We’re both smiling and our forelegs are wrapped around each other, a hug which’ll last ‘til the end of time.

Camera Shutter’s a silly name but so what? Makes me special. Makes me one of a kind, like mum always knew I’d be...


Look, let’s get one thing straight before I start: this ain't gonna be a happy story. You like sunshine and rainbows? Forget ‘em. Lollipops? Throw them away. You wanna hear stories about cute li’l bunnies? In fairness there is a bunny in this story, but he sure ain't cute in any way, not even a bit. Plus first you’ve gotta know some stuff and it’s about what happens after you die. It ain't what you might think. Nothing is as it seems.

A lot of ponies have this idea that dying is the most painful thing in the world, but that the moment you’re dead an earth pony with a skull for a face pops outta thin air to whisk you off someplace awesome... and all I gotta say to that is, hah! That ain’t what happens at all. Dying, it turns out, is the easy part—doubly so if it’s quick like what happened with me and the cart crash—and then it’s the waiting which is painful, the endless waiting around afterwards and wondering what’s going on, how come nopony can see you? Why are you all see-through? Why are you outside of your body, looking at yourself sleeping on the floor? Ponies crowd around your body trying to save you but it’s too late. You’re already gone.

And then time slows down.

“It’s just a dream,” you whisper to yourself. “This is all a nasty dream. In a minute you’re gonna wake up and mum's gonna be there and everything’ll be alright.”

You keep repeating it. You’ve gotta, ‘cos deep down you know that the moment you stop talking is the moment it becomes real. So you wait there sitting on the edge of the pavement and watching the sun go down behind the buildings. The sun's cold. It's always cold in Trottingham—nopony ever seems to realise how far north it actually is, close to Dundeer and almost on the edge of the Arctic Circle—however at the very least you’d think you’d feel the sunlight on your coat. But nope, not even that. You can't feel the heat. You can't feel the wind on your coat. In fact, apart from the fear in your ghostly belly you can't feel a thing.

You hold a hoof up to your face and you can see the sun through it, and 'cos by then you ain’t thinking straight the first thought that pops into your head is how awesome this is gonna be! For a split second you imagine all the cool stuff you can do now that you’re a ghost. You can pull pranks and nopony would ever know who done 'em. You could wait ‘til it was dark, walk through the wall of the bookshop and read Daring Do novels as long as you pleased, and you wouldn’t even have to put ‘em back on the shelves afterwards. You grin to yourself... that is until the sun drops behind the buildings, then you finally came back to your senses. Pranks? Bookstores?

I was dead. What in Equestria was I thinking?!

As I thought this, the ambulance cart arrived to take away my body. That’s when the real panic set in.


I’m uh... I’m not proud of what I done next, but the fact is that I had a choice: go back home to mum or run away. It should’ve been a no-brainer. I shoulda gone home where I belonged and where I was loved.

But I ran.

Hay! Don’t look at me like that. I knew it was a mistake, but I was scared, alright? Stick me in a room full of manticores and toss away the key. Shove Discord in there. Go get Night Mare Moon riding on the back of a windigo to join him; all of that and it still wouldn’t have made me half as frightened as I was right then. And oh man, you know I’d love to tell you that I had a good reason for staying away from home, like maybe there was demons after me and that if I went home I’d lead them straight to my mum.

There was no demons though, or monsters of any kind. I was running away for no reason other than I was a massive chicken. I wanted to throw up. In my belly I could feel my stomach squirming—or at least I imagined that I could—so I dashed as far as possible and right into the city centre, to the huge expanse of Hampstable Heath.

Aw yes, Hampstable Heath. The green jewel of northern Equestria some called it (usually stuffy boring ol’ ponies who also called Trottingham ‘the Manehatten of the north’ or whatever other rubbish), but in winter that nickname never made sense 'cos the park was anything but green; it was always white with snow and tonight was no exception. I rushed across wide open fields and through thickets of conifer trees, deeper and deeper into the park. It was getting dark. There were no lamps here and the only other lights were from the city, the moon and the stars.

That and my hoofprints, which just so happened to be glowing.

I slowed down and stopped, my mouth dropping ‘cos at first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Yet there were no doubts about it. Wherever I ran I left behind a constellation of hoofprints in the snow, and I say constellation ‘cos that’s what you call a group of stars and that’s kind of what the prints looked like, like I'd been jumping in a puddle made of starlight! Hesitantly, with the memory of my heart pounding against my chest, I pressed a see-through hoof down in the snow and then lifted it up again. Staring back at me was another glowing hoofprint.

A nervous laugh left my mouth and a tiny voice at the back of my mind asked the same questions over and over. I s'pose I'd been thinking about it ever since I realised I was dead, but 'til now I'd been trying my best to ignore 'em.

What did being a ghost feel like? Did ghosts need to drink, need to eat, need to sleep? Were there other ghosts around or was I the only one? Thinking about it, I couldn't have been or else ponies wouldn't even know about ghosts. Did ghosts go to ghost school? Did they all have to live together in big creepy houses? I shuddered. Dead or not, I didn't wanna live in a haunted house.

“Stop it,” I whispered to myself. “There’s better things to worry about then all this.”

What could've been more important I didn't know, but at the same time thinking 'bout all these questions was making me proper nervous. My hooves trembled something fierce as I forced myself to carry on. Finally I came to a halt by the big lake in the middle of the park, and across the ice I could see the gleaming lights of far-a-way towers. I was a small ghost in a big city and I had no idea what to do. How could I? When I'd woken up that morning the worst thing I'd had to worry about was other fillies and colts calling me 'Camera Fluster' or ‘Camera Stutter’ (even though I don’t even have a stutter).

Near a path by the lake, I found this big ol' tree with wild twisted branches. I lay beneath it. I figured that it was a nice quiet spot to go to sleep.


Sleep didn't come easily. As I watched the moon trace it's path along the sky I thought 'bout the mess I was in, and I suddenly realised there was only one other thing in the world that I could think to compare my terror to: this horrid dream I had a few years back. In the dream, I was running through a town filled with old buildings with roofs made out of hay, and... and then there was this big red barn. I kept on running. I was late getting home, and just as I was thinking I wasn’t gonna make it in time I came across a hole hidden next to a little stone bridge with a stream running under it. And you know how in dreams you just know certain things without having to be told ‘em? Well the moment I saw the hole, I knew that it was a shortcut back home. I was sure of it. I’d never been more certain of anything in my entire life.

So I wiggled my way into the hole, pleased with myself that I was going to be on time after all... but it turned out not to be a short-cut at all but a deep black pit which I tumbled into, chilly air rushing past my ears and then whumph. The wind was knocked outta me as I landed smack bang on the floor. With a groan, I looked up and saw the sliver of light that was the entrance to the pit. I couldn’t climb up the walls ‘cos they was all smooth and slippery. There was no other way out.

I was trapped.

I took a deep breath. “Help!” I yelled, but no answer. My mouth tasted like throw-up and I kept thinking of skeletons chained to walls in dungeons. I was going to die in there. I was going to die and turn into a skeleton and then my bones would be white and my mouth would be grinning in that creepy way that skulls always do. Hundreds of years later, ponies would find me and know that I had died in the dark with nopony but myself for company.

My panic turned into outright terror. “HELP! HELP!”

It’s impossible, absolutely impossible to even begin to get across how scared, how petrified I was—anypony who’s ever had a similar experience will agree with me on that one. I ain't talking 'bout some run-of-the-mill nightmare. This was a proper night terror, the sort where you wake up screaming, boiling hot and so delirious that even after you’ve woken up you think you’re still dreaming. “HELP! SOMEPONY HELP ME, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEEEASE!”

And that’s when my mum burst into my bedroom and then the dream was over. “Camera!" she exclaimed. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

I blinked. The walls of the pit transformed into the walls of my room. Mum looked me right in the eyes. “Darling, what’s wrong? Nightmare?”

I blinked, glancing around to reassure myself that it had all been in my head. The sliver of light I had mistaken for the entrance of the pit was actually the moon shining through my bedroom window. It had all been a dream and I wasn’t trapped in the dark. I was safe.

For the rest of that night I stayed in mum’s bed. “My little earth pony,” she whispered as she stroked my mane. “My brave little stallion. Be brave, now. Be brave and don’t let anything get you down.”

My eyelids drooped. Sleepily, I told her about the town in my dream and she said it sounded like Ponyville—my first home. Strictly speaking we still had the house there, however I think that though we didn't live there, mum never had the heart to sell it on. Not grandma's house. Not the place where she'd grown up.

The next morning I woke up with a smile on my face and with mum bringing me up breakfast in bed. It was oats and hay. When I shut my eyes and think hard, I feel like I can still taste ‘em.


Dying’s the easy part. It’s the waiting what’s hard.

The next day I woke up under a tree, and I was ready to rush back home to mum. In my head it was so simple. I’d walk up the street, walk through the front door, head to the living room and then sit down next to her on the couch. It didn’t matter that she wouldn’t actually be able to see or hear me; she’d feel my presence and that would be enough. “You can do this,” I told myself. “There's nothing to it.”

Yet if there was nothing to it then why was it so hard to creep out from under my tree? Every time I did, I looked up to see these great whopping snow clouds being pushed into place by teams of pegasi, and they made me feel tiny and ill, the same feeling I’d had standing next to the lake in the dark. So for the rest of the day I refused to emerge from under my tree, telling myself things like, “Mum’ll be sad and you don’t wanna see that,” or, “The house’ll feel empty, plus she won’t be able to see you anyway.”

Soon enough, day turned into night and the lights of the towers shone in the distance. For the second night in a row, I’m ashamed to say that I lay there worried out of my mind. With a jolt, I realised that I hadn’t eaten in two days but that I wasn’t even hungry; and I dreamed about being buried under snow or trapped inside a dark cave, and I think the reason for that is 'cos... well, have you ever put something super important off? If you have then you’ll know that the longer it goes on for then the harder it gets ‘til the only thing that’s on your mind is the awful feeling in your tummy, as though there’s an imp pushing against the inside of your chest trying to escape. It was shame, I think. I was so full of shame that it’s a wonder I didn't burst... and despite of what mum once told me, I wasn’t a brave pony. Not even a bit.

The second night passed. I was woken up by a pale sun shining through a break in the clouds; another day, another chance. But like Equestria's biggest idiot I went ahead and blew it once again. “She won’t be able to hear you,” I told myself, still afraid to venture out from under my tree. “There ain't no point. Don’t bother, Camera.”

So on it went. The third night started off even worse than the second, ‘cos on top of everything else I hadn’t seen anypony in days, now. Who goes to the park in the middle of winter?

I was gonna be sorry I ever asked. So ridiculously sorry. Everything was about to change.