You are Moss Moon.

Your companion’s mangled body lies nearby.  Bloodstained bandages cover the stump of his missing arm.  Your mouth waters involuntarily at the delicious scent.

You stand over him, watching him shiver.  His eyes are dull, unseeing; his face drained of color.

By skill and fortune, he had caught the creature’s lunge on his left side, exposing its underbelly to his sword.  With one stab he had pierced its pulsing heart and spilled its lifeblood on the rock.  He had saved you, at the cost of a limb and probably his life.

You take stock of your surroundings.  Thin trees are all around you, a neon woodland sloping down the mountain, sparse and ancient.

For the first time since you were a filly, you feel an overwhelming sense of helplessness.  It chokes your vision and burns like a coal in the pit of your stomach.

You knew you should’ve left him in Hollow Shades.  He never would’ve gotten hurt if you’d just abandoned him there.  Yet now here he lies dying, bleeding out slowly in the shadow of Foal Mountain.  None of this would’ve happened if you’d just left him behind.

None of this would’ve happened.

You feel your eyes burn, as helplessness turns to rage.  Blinking back tears, you lash out at a tree, making it quiver sturdily from the impact.

This is stupid.  There’s no use feeling sorry for yourself.  You’ve spent your whole life taking care of yourself and correcting your own mistakes.  There’s never been a safety net.  

When things go wrong you’ve always had to find a way to make it right, and crying about your suffering never solved anything.  The day you stop trying is the day you lay down to die.

These are all high-minded and valiant things to think, but you know it is only bravado.  In reality, you are tired, you are weak.  You know that Anon will be dead in a few hours.  As always your prayers to your Goddess go unanswered, even though you know she can hear you.

The moon will be full in two days; the lives of a dozen foals rest on your shoulders, and you don’t even know if you’ll be able to reach the Spring in time.

Your entire body shakes as hot, angry tears come unbidden.  For a good minute you stand there crying, letting the rage wash over you, until you push your mane from your face, take a shaky breath, and start building a harness.

Strange blue-black vines grow wild on this side of the mountain.  You tear them down in long lengths and strip them of thorns with your teeth.

Anon’s shivering has grown erratic, his breathing shallow.  A quick check of his pulse finds it fast and weak.

“You’re going to be fine, Anon,” you say, trying to convince yourself more than anything else.  “I’ll take you to the Lunar Spring, and you’ll get to see it with your own eyes.”

The healing powers of the Spring are strong during a full moon.  You know he has a chance if you can just get him there, but he’s not going to last long in his current state.

Fishing around in your saddlebag, you pull out your precious vial of firewater that you’ve been saving for years since Grandmother gave it to you.  She insists that it’s made of dragon’s blood.

Tipping the vial against Anon’s pallid lips, you coax him to swallow the clear, red, ever-bubbling liquid.

He coughs, but then his cheeks go red, and his heartbeat pounds stronger in his chest.  It’s not much, but it will buy you some time.

You unfasten your cloak and his and swaddle him with both, folding his arm over his chest and propping up his legs so you can tie a vine around him.

To this you tie more vines, before securing the whole thing to your body with a loop around your neck.

The harness complete, you set off into the forest, heading for the nameless mountain on the horizon where the Lunar Spring is hidden.

Adrenaline keeps you going for a little while.  You hardly feel the weight of your companion as you drag him over the mottled floor of the primal wood, a canopy of fluorescent blues and greens waving overhead.

But after a few hours you feel the weariness creeping back into your bones, and you become more and more conscious of the heaviness of your hooves.  Soon your legs are burning with fatigue.

Deprived of food, deprived of sleep, every part of you screams to stop, but you still have so far to go.

Spare woodlands give way to dry prairie as far as the eye can see.  You follow the remains of the ancient road until it erodes into nothing, and you are left only with squat green grass and wildflowers.

Your gaze wanders skyward, looking for anything to distract yourself.  Clouds like spindles of platinum and alabaster sit motionless high above you.  You busy yourself discerning shapes in their forms as the sun slowly rises.

Despite the rising temperature, Anon is shivering again when you stop briefly to eat.  You see that the effects of the firewater are wearing off, as his face is once again pale.  He murmurs something, but when you try to put your hoof in his hand, he doesn’t seem to notice.

“I’m right here, Anon,” you say.  “We’re making good time.  Just stay with me, okay?”

You look out at the mountain in the distance.  You know you’ve gone a long way, but it seems like you’ve made hardly any progress at all.

Just stay with me.

You continue, putting your head down, watching one hoof go in front of the other.  You focus on the monotony, pushing away the exhaustion, knowing that this suffering will not last forever, so long as you do not stop.

Afternoon comes and the sky turns the color of a blood orange.  You are so tired that you are unsteady on your hooves, and periodically you find yourself dozing even as you stumble endlessly onward.

Anon is an anchor at your back.  His cloak rustles through the grass as you drag him.  The vines are cutting into your neck and shoulders, chafing the flesh raw.

You down the rest of your coffee, bitter dregs and all, choking on the lukewarm slurry.  The sun slowly sets, casting purple shadows across the prairie, and the near-full moon rises, darkness bringing with it the chill of night.

There are stars in the sky tonight.  So many stars.

Anon is shivering so violently that you can hear him over the rustle of the grass.  He pants rapidly, struggling to breathe.

You want to stop.  You want to do something, but you have nothing more to give, no medicine, not even a blanket.  All you can do is keep going.

All is silent on the prairie.  No wind is blowing.  Even the insects are quiet.  Anon is shivering.

You begin to sing him a lullaby, like the ones you sometimes sing for the orphans when they come to sleep in the orchards at the Stronghold.  Your voice is rough and untrained; you know it is not beautiful.

But still you sing anyway, of silly bat ponies eating mangoes and playing tricks.

You keep singing well after Anon has gone quiet again, and well after he has stopped moving altogether.

When you finally break off your last quavering notes, your eyes are wet with tears.

Morning finds you bleary and barely conscious.  The mountain is much closer, looming up toward the clouds, but the base is still miles away.  The day will be long.

The grass beneath your hooves is stained slowly from blue to golden as the sun breaches radiant on the horizon.  You feel its heat rising up your body as the morning drags on.  By noon it is beating down upon you, and you can barely see anything for how bright it is.

You’ve run out of water, having lost your own supply when you fell.  Anon’s waterskin is completely dry.  You’d wasted some earlier trying to get him to drink, only to have it dribble from his mouth.

Parched, you continue on in the heat of the day.  Glimmers of heat warp the air in the distance, mocking you with mirages of water.  You feel death dancing around you.  You have a feeling, an irrational sensation, but one that you feel is not wholly wrong; you know that if you stop, you will die.

Your thoughts turn inevitably to the things that you know.  Disconnected images flashing through your mind without coordination.  It’s difficult to think, when you’re dying.

Nightstone, Hex.  All the orphan foals.  In their hooves they hold the bland but nutritious melons that grow all around the Stronghold.  Eating just like you showed them.  You wonder if they’re okay.

Grandmother who still thinks of you as unclean.  Memories of sleeping curled up on the floor of her little house, smelling the strange chemicals that she would brew and the scent of old paper that she used to read before she went blind.  

Hunter Killer, who she cursed.  You imagine him wandering through the forest around Hollow Shades, perpetually lost, hissing with anger at every thorn that finds its way somehow into his hoof, at every angry rash and insect bite that appears seemingly from nowhere.

You think of all the ponies who ever spit on you, and strangely you imagine them eating, all sitting at a banquet, shoveling meat and fruit into their mouths.

Your stomach rumbles at the thought.  You’ve eaten nothing but a few ounces of trail rations over the past three days.  Your muscles and joints are in agony, bones grinding into soft cartilage, tendons inflamed by constant use.  Your eyelids are so very heavy.  You fantasize about lying down on the prairie, curling up beside Anon’s motionless body, and going to sleep.  But then you remind yourself that death is waiting.  Not just for you, but all those depending on you.  So you keep walking.

At first you don’t notice that you’ve reached the mountain.  You blindly follow the path, having covered this route almost a dozen times.  In your mind, it’s just like going home.

When the path takes a sharp turn upward, however, you nearly collapse from the strain.  

Anon’s weight seems to magnify a hundred-fold.  Every step forward is a herculean effort.  You press forward, digging deep with your powerful legs, inclining forward against the load.  Sweat drips down your body, plastering your mane and fur to your skin.

Around and around you go, following the mountain path.  The sun is a blazing red disk in the sky, boring into you with its inescapable heat.  

But despite the torturous heat, despite your exhaustion, you feel a strange lightness entering you, a pleasant numbness.  You’re on the mountain, you realize.  You’ve made it.

You’re going home.

As if renewed by this thought, you lift your head, blinking away the sweat.  This isn’t impossible.  No, it’s very much possible.  You’re here now.  Death might want you, but it’s not going to get you, not you or Anon or any of the foals.

You are strong, and you are going to make it.

Music returns to you as you start to hum some nonsense tune.  Still the mountain path curves up and around, reaching for the summit.  Afternoon begins to fade into twilight, and you are strutting up the mountain, feeling the heat fade as darkness slowly returns.

The sun is setting as the mountain path slowly turns from red to blue.  Crickets here are chirping, and you feel like laughing.  Ancient ruins are visible on each side.  Cracked and weather-beaten stones poke up from the mountainside, but you hardly see them.  You’re focused only on the path ahead, and the feeling of Anon dragging along behind you.

A thousand miles distant, ten thousand miles, a hundred – perhaps the Goddess watches you, a tiny figure alone in this strange land, slowly crawling up the mountain.

Eventually the path levels out, and actually begins to dip down, entering a basin.  Your vision is too narrow to see anything but the enormous black pool waiting still and placid at the bottom.

The sight of it makes you shiver all over, as you realize that you did it, somehow.  You made it to the Lunar Spring.

You drag Anon to the water’s edge and pull him free of the harness.  Gingerly you push him into the shallows, until he is submerged up to his neck.  His face is deathly pale, and he makes neither sound nor movement when you touch him.

As you work, the full moon rises just over a spire of rock, casting its pale light into the basin.

The black water catches the glow, and before your eyes the surface takes on a luminous sheen, as if the Spring itself is filled with moonlight.

Carefully you draw the three surviving bottles of precious salt from your saddlebag.  Your hooves shaking with exhaustion, you tap their contents one by one into empty vials, until each tiny glass ampoule has a few grains in the bottom.

One by one you dip the vials into the pool, smiling as the water comes away glowing, the salted water preserving the Spring’s power.  You cork them and set them aside.  When all is done, a dozen ampoules rest on the shore, each one shedding soft white light. 

Now you drink deep of the spring, taking in greedy mouthfuls, your cracked tongue swelling as you fill your cheeks with water.

Then for a moment you draw away, surveying your work.  The vials are filled; the panacea has been made.  Anon floats in the shallows of the Spring.  You whisper a prayer over him as you idly run your hooves through his hair.   You feel your vision failing, and become curiously aware of your heart beating in your chest.

You think of him last, the strange taciturn fellow who had stuck by you through everything these past few weeks.  The first one in a long time who you could perhaps call “friend.”  Something that never would’ve happened, if you’d simply left him at Hollow Shades.

Please don’t let him die, you think.  You feel yourself fading fast.  You’d let them take your wings again, if it just meant that he could live.

Your eyelids flutter, your eyes unfocusing as you sink to the ground, all your energy gone.

“Rest now, little one,” you hear a voice say, before you faint dead away, into the oblivion of sleep.