The Burden of Hope

by Mykola

Prologue: Rise

His eyes opened.

It was only then when he recognised the cold which permeated through the gambeson and armour that he wore, even through his grey fur. The snow settled on his prone and weak body, and with incredible effort he attempted to lift his head from out of the thick mantle of snow that covered him almost like a full-body cast. His eyes seemed odd to him?

One saw only white. The second only black.

He blinked a few times in desperation. But it didn’t change a thing, and within a while half of his head throbbed with intense pain. The stallion closed his eyes and attempted to wrestle himself from out of the snow and realised that when he closed his eyes, the pain subsided almost immediately… something he didn’t quite understand, was it because he had not seen the light for what possibly could have been days?

He didn’t know.

Opening both of his eyes, pain immediately set within his head once more. The pony thought for only a moment, before he tried opening one eye at once. His right eye surged with pain as the stallion stifled a sharp breath and slowly opened his left.

No pain.

He didn’t understand.

The stallion kept his left eye open and his right eye shut as he drew in slow, paced breaths. He then quickly focused his attention to the snow mound that trapped him, and tried to move his legs. The stallion quickly determined that they could not move, which he figured was because of the snow. He frantically attempted to break free at this point, each movement and attempt yielding no result. The stallion pulled whatever strength he could as he continued to struggle, knowing very well that if he remained trapped, he would die there. Suddenly a creeping and cold sensation ran up his legs and through his body, and crawled up through his chest as the stallion gasped in fear.

There was a bright flash of a colour that the stallion could not yet describe, all the snow that had trapped him disappeared. He was standing, though his legs trembled with fright. The stallion pulled in desperate breaths and breathed out fear, as he glanced around the scene. The stallion looked down at his body before his eye made out that he had been wearing a heavy and warm coat: battered and rusted from what looked to be years of weathering and abuse.

Years? If he had been there for years, he would have been dead.

The stallion corrected his thoughts: he needed to focus on his injured eye. Then he needed to figure out where he was and find somewhere better to be.

Reaching with his mouth, the stallion tore off a line from off the coat before he used his hooves to tie the makeshift eye patch over his right eye. When his hooves approached his head, the temperature around his head seemed to drop drastically before he had to drop them back to the snow, and he stared down… and noticed a ‘vapour’ rising from the bottom of his hoof that was purplish in colour. It immediately startled him, the stallion believing that it was something he was standing on and jumped back. The vapour followed him as it swirled and tightened around his legs, the stallion calling out in shock and tried to shake off the strange thing to no avail. Eventually, the shaking and startled pony looked at his legs and hooves before he gathered enough courage to lift them off the ground to look at the bottoms.

He saw the stars and the infinite. The stallion didn’t understand, this made no sense. Why would the stars be painted on the bottom of his hooves?

The stallion stared at the strange energy that gathered and swirled around his hooves. Had he walked upon the night sky?

The stallion shook his head, he couldn’t be thinking about that now. He turned his head, and saw a magnificent spire of light that dominated the northern sky. The stallion felt an urge to immediately step toward the light: the stars that danced in the sky above the spire that appeared to him to be some cosmic tree.

Stay…

The stallion jumped in fright from the rasp though commanding voice that echoed through his ears, it’s dangerous allure drawing his attention to the southern skies. What he saw was nothing more than the black depths: lacking the light. It seemed like the bottoms of the deepest ocean: unknown.

There is nothing for you there…

The stallion shook his head, before he swung his head back to the north and made his first steps in the way of the light. He wouldn’t listen to the voice that was demanding he turn and fall into the black. He needed to know what this cosmic tree was, he needed to find freedom from a prison he felt but did not understand.

Author's Note:

Grammatically corrected (2019 Sept. 22)