Flashes Of Eventide

by SilverNotes

Ashes (Sad, Death, Zecora)

The dzilla are heavy around Zecora's neck when she makes her way through the forest.

She remembers when she'd welcomed the weight with joy. She remembers family and friends dancing, and leaning up to nuzzle her new spouse, so much taller than she was. She remembers the individual weight of each ring, representing the commitment she'd made to another creature, and the promise to keep it so long as both drew breath.

She steps around the blue flowers, cautious of their mischievous magic. She'd recognized the Poison Joke a bit too late when first encountering them, and brewing the cure while her stripes rapidfire flashed in every colour of the rainbow and then some had proven a challenge. Still, it was something she'd been up to the challenge of, and she's thankful for her copy of Super Naturals in her library for its wisdom.

She'd learned to read Equestrian before learning to speak it, and she's keenly aware of the thickness of her Farasian accent. Reciting poems and singing songs had helped her learn, and even now her voice still rises and falls with the bounces of rhyme.

Her love had always enjoyed it when she sung...

She's nearing the edge of the forest, and she always hesitates at that threshold. She's still a bit skittish, each visit to town making her both long for one of the ponies to venture out and meet her, and dread it. Ponies are curious creatures, so like a zebra in some ways and yet so alien in others, and she's not sure what she would even have to talk about.

The sun on her flanks offers one potential answer, but very few have ever known what it truly means. It's rude to ask, among zebras, much like trotting up to a stranger and questioning who's recently been in their bed. Her family knows, her once-closest friends...

None of them have written her letters. It is up to her to choose when to reach out to them, with all accepting that that choice may be to never speak to them again.

Such is her right, within the tradition of the Widow's Roam. A life with plans cut short is burned to ash, and rebuilt somewhere wholly new.

But no one had expected her to choose Equestria to rebuild. Ponies are such loud, bright creatures, like foals given their weight in sugar and doused in paint, and somewhere a Creator is laughing at the fact that they'd seen fit to give a third of them wings, so they can take their antics into the sky.

As Zecora crosses over and takes the path into town, she feels she knows what will happen. After all, it's what always happens. Houses quiet, stores shut down in the middle of the day, and not a single pony in the street. Her silently calling out for guidance in the town square with digging hooves and being silently shunned.

Hope keeps her going out to them. Bitterness coats her tongue on every return to her home.

She doesn't know yet that this is the day when somepony will follow.

Comments

[Moproblems Moharmoney]

I love this depiction of Zecora, isolated both internally and externally. Her interpretation of ponies is fantastic as well, both the show and many creators are overly focused on Equestria as a centre of culture when it is very much an outlier.

[FanOfMostEverything]

Outstanding glimpses both. Looking forward to similar snippets.