Before Equestria...

Hills, Hills Everywhere

Hills.

That's all that could be seen for miles to come. It looked dead and uninhabited, except for the green color that contrasted against the grey background behind it. The pony scaling these deserted mountains name was Safari. His coat was green, and his mane was a darker green and was blue at the tips of the hairs. His flank held the image of a compass, which stood for his love of exploration and adventure. This was why he was usually in the group of ponies who had to go scavenging for food. He stood at the end of a cliff.

His horn glowed blue as he levitated a rock up to eye level. "I'm really getting tired of seeing these damn rocks all the time," he mumbled to himself. He threw the rock down to the pebbles underneath him. The ground shook violently. Safari tried to run back to sturdy part of the mountain, but he was too slow. The cliff collapsed. His body rolled and skidded down the mountain like a ragdoll. His body finally hit the ground. And it hit hard. He rolled around the gravel miserably and tried with all his might not to scream in pain. It all just came out as just a few grunts and wheezes. Weakly, he got up.

His eyes spotted a green shape. He walked over to the shape, and what he saw made him smile. It was a bush. Not just a bush, it had blue little dots sprawled all over. It was a berry bush. He picked one and held it up to his nose. Doesn't smell poisonous. He put it in his mouth and chewed. Hm. Sweet. He opened up his satchel and began to pick the berries one by one and drop them in the satchel. Food was scarce in these times, and finding such an abundance of berries was incredibly rare. This is great he thought. Berries mean seeds, and seeds mean more berries and soon- He stopped himself in mid sentence and remembered nopony could plant crops because all had to stay hidden always. Once he had picked all the berries from the bush, he decided to head back to camp; it was dangerous enough to come this far, why continue injured?

He heard a cracking noise, like that of gravel being stepped on. He quickly hid behind a nearby boulder. Peeking behind the boulder he saw one of them. One of the things that required ponies to hide in caves. Not much was known about these creatures, but they're fast, they're big, they have sharp teeth, and they serve the Lord of Chaos. They have the basic shape of a pony, but they come in many different colors and patterns. Some are pink, some are striped, some are plaid, and some are just a mash of many patterns. He hated them. He truly hated them. The day he got his cutie mark was not only a day of importance because of that reason, but it was also the day his father got caught. He could remember it like it was only yesterday, his father struggling to get one of the creatures off of him as others ran to maul him while he was on the ground. He could hear the screams of his father and hear the echoes of his father yelling, "run Safari, run!"

But he stayed hidden. Rather he wait for the thing to wander off on its own than attack it and have it call more of its friends. The thing bared its teeth while it took a whiff of the air to try to catch the scent of fresh pony meat. But there where precautions for going scavenging. Everypony must be rubbed with a special mixture that blocked out the scent of ponies.

Mud. It was mud.

Eventually the thing wandered off and Safari silently ran the path he had taken back to camp. He stopped at a peculiar stone. He stomped his hoof on the ground around the stone in a pattern. Tap tap taptaptap tap. He stepped back and the ground around the stone rose, revealing to be a stone tablet covering a large hole in the ground. There was a large orange pony holding up the tablet. Safari jumped into the hole and the orange pony carefully slid the tablet back into its original position.

"Morning, Rocky."

The large orange pony, apparently named Rocky, nodded. Safari walked through the tunnel which was decorated with torches to light up the way to an even greater light. Safari reached where the tunnel had ended. He saw the rows of makeshift huts and the ponies carrying supplies to their families. He walked through the small town, noticing there were less ponies outside their houses. He stopped at a specific hut with yellow flowers decorated on the shelves of the windows. Opening the door he was greeted with a familiar sight.

There were three beds on one of the sides, and there was a table on the other. A filly sat on the rug in the middle of the hut, playing with a dirty, old ragdoll. Safari leaned down and ruffled his hoof through her purple mane, making it messy. "Hi Petunia." She smiled.

There was a mare standing at the far end of the room in front of a stove. She turned around to see her son, and in doing so, you could see she was making a pot of tea.

"Hi mom."

"Sweetie! You're home!"

She hugged her son, but pulled away to inspect him further. She saw the bruises on him from when he fell down the cliff. "What happened to you?" she asked worried. "That's not important right now," he opened his satchel, "look what I found." He showed his mother the great mass of berries he had found. She hugged him and kissed him in delight.

"Sweetie! This is great! You should give some to the neighbors, you just have so much!"

"Uh, sure. Why not?" He dug through his satchel and found four small pouches. He proceeded to fill them all up with berries. He gave one to his mother and left the house. He looked around him, wondering who to give the pouches to.

"Well, Clover should probably get the first pouch. We're good friends, it'd be wrong not to." He walked over to Clover's house. Clover was a good friend of Safari since they were toddlers. He did bug Safari at times however. His cutie mark was a four-leafed clover, which stood for luck and prosperity. This made Clover unnaturally lucky, and he and his family earned things they really didn't do any work for. You would expect him to be snobby, but he really was a good guy.

When Safari's father was killed, Safari mourned for days; and Clover mourned with him. Clover always spread his earnings with the townsfolk and the poor. He was a good man, despite only being seventeen. He walked up to Clovers house. It was in a fairly better condition than all the other houses, the wood seemed brighter and more sturdy. He knocked on the door, and a green colt answered.

"Oh, hey Safari. What do you need?"

"Just wanted to stop by and give you something I found." He took out one of the pouches and handed it to him.

Clover thanked him greatly. However, a certain tone in his voice gave off the fact that he knew this really wasn't that much. Safari expected this, what with Clover's success. But to not give him a pouch would of course be rude, even with that thought in mind.

Clover opened the pouch, took out a single berry, and dropped it his mouth. "Mmm, where'd you find em?" he asked, savoring the berry.

"I was out scavenging. Took around two hours to get to there probably."

"Cool."

Safari nodded. "So, see you later."

"Yeah man." He closed the door. Safari thought about who to give the next pouch to. He thought about Rocky. He was still by the entrance, and since the guards to the entrance aren't allowed to leave their posts, he's probably hungry. So he started to make his way back to the entrance. He passed two or three huts before stopping in his tracks. At a distance was a pony he had observed from a distance for a few years now.

He stared at her. Gazing at her mane and thinking how totally pretty it would be if there was some wind down here. Did he admire her? Yes. Did he want to approach her? Probably. Did he want to spend the rest of his life as the only stallion in her life? Well that's debatable. Even if he did, he'd never admit it. Not even to himself, most likely.

Her name was

She stopped and looked at him, an eyebrow cocked up, wondering why this dunce was looking at her. She took a few steps forward in his direction. But sadly and frustratingly, he didn't notice she was walking in his direction until he heard a sigh, and a couple of words in a very bored tone.

"Ugh, what're you looking at, Safari?"

He snapped back into reality, his words getting twisted up as his brain fought with itself to find a valid excuse for his "peeking." He stuttered, he slurred, hell some of the things that the boy said weren't even words.

In his struggle to... speak like a normal pony, he brought his fruity findings into his rubbernecking save and said he'd been thinking on how to approach her to give her a pouch of the berries he'd found. His hoof trembling, as he was hesitant and cursing himself internally for his stupid words, he gave a pouch to her.

She thanked him, slightly more animated than she had spoken before, and started to walk away. Then, as of on cue, an all too familiar rainbow mane came into view. Well, I guess you could say it was a little more than that.