Songs of Innocence

Chapter 64: Pale Moon

Sun and Death Drive sat on the train to Canterlot as the sky grew darker and darker. Death Drive stared at the land outside, lost in thought about something Sun couldn't even begin to guess the subject of. She didn't want to snap Death Drive out of her brooding, but there was a question Sun thought was worth asking her right now.

"You do know we left Cozy back at Mount Aris, right?" she asked.

"She's with your friends. She'll be fine." Death Drive said, sounding like she'd been prepared to reply with that.

Sun chose not to say anything more, and simply wait to talk again once they got to Canterlot. Seeing as the train car they sat in was empty besides themselves, Sun decided to use this time to take a look at the mysterious scroll that Laguna had given her. She pulled it out of her bag, and although she suddenly felt herself hesitant to unfurl it, she still ended up doing it. But she felt no less filled with terrible anxiousness as she saw the scroll's contents - she could feel her breaths growing labored and heavy as she caught even a glimpse of what it contained.

There was an illustration of a thing. It could only be described as a thing, because it was so utterly alien, so foreign to Sun's mind. It was writhing, with eyes Tartarean and piercing with their individual glares. Sun could not begin to understand what the illustration depicted, because it overtook her with a fear only comparable to the kind felt in a horrific childhood nightmare.

But suddenly, Death Drive woke Sun back up, using her magic to close the scroll for Sun. Sun breathed a sigh of relief, and Death Drive sighed in response. "For Celestia's sake, Sun! I thought you were having a panic attack. You made me actually worry about you for a second. Put that creepy scroll away. We're almost in Canterlot, anyways."

Sun nodded, and swiftly put the scroll back in her bag, trying to avoid the very thought of the abomination she'd glimpsed. "G-got it. By the way, where're we going?"

"My home." Death Drive answered.

Sun raised an eyebrow. "What? But isn't your house in Ponyville? And you said your sister kicked you out."

"No, I'm talking about my childhood home. My sister was the one who paid for my house in Ponyville, and she stopped paying the instant she found out about... you know."

The two got off the train, and walked through the moody, silent streets of the sleeping city, until they came to a house that looked much more like a castle tower than a place a regular pony would live in. Although, Sun chalked that up to the extravagantness and glamor Canterlot ponies lived in being foreign to a pony like her.

The second they entered, Death Drive was brought back to her childhood. But there weren't many happy memories to recall, only feelings of vague nostalgia. Beyond the threshold, the twisting spiral staircase ascended upwards to a view from which all of Ponyville could be seen from afar, should one look out the open window. That room in which that view could be taken was the living room of the house, but it wasn't welcoming in the slightest. It was cold and empty, simply a room between the entrance and the other rooms that lay beyond it. 

Death Drive could remember times she looked out the open window in the living room on late autumn nights, feeling the growing cold on her hooves as she watched the ponies in the streets below. She remembered imagining what their lives could be like, based on the brief glimpses into their lives she was given. She imagined some living happy and fulfilling lives like something out of a fairy tale, while others became unknowing inspiration for tragedies and melodramatic tales. She had such a drive to weave these stories of lives she would never live because she knew she could never live them.

She couldn't remember when exactly it happened, but at a young age, she was struck with an illness. She was one of few ponies who were vulnerable to it, along with her father. She never really understand what the disease did to her, but she knew that it made her too weak to leave the house until she was cured of it almost one year ago. She grew up isolated, with parents that were barely ever at home, and a sister who took care of her, but saw her as a burden. The filly named Pale Moon had a childhood, but never once got to experience it.