I'm not sure I've done a poetry writeoff here before, but I'm in.

>>MrNumbers

The author might have meant to use the second one and failed at it. I personally don't see it though.

If that was the point you were trying to make, then yes, I did miss it. I'm not sure how I was supposed to get that from your first post, but you have now clearly stated it, and I acknowledge it as valid.

(I didn't think I was being that unreasonable in assuming that a term with a well-known definition in regards to literature was being used that way by a piece of literature discussing the happenings within itself, but I'll acknowledge I'm not the best judge of my own reasonableness or lack thereof.)

You're arguing someone, somewhere might have issue with taking the stance that Twilight is a mortal for the purposes of this story, when you're the only one listing it as a problem.

First of all, I'm not the only one — >>Caliaponia also commented on it, and added another, better reason why the sentence I was talking about doesn't quite work in context.

Second, the issue is not that aliTwi is mortal. I'm not actually quite sure what's bugging me, but I'm pretty sure it's something related to the presentation of the fact, rather than the fact itself. Maybe I'd have been fine if it was indicated earlier in the story, or if there had been some kind of handwave justification for why she's still mortal, or maybe it doesn't need to be there at all and there's some better way to fit in the line "Because mortals are not to meddle with immortals" that avoids the question of aliTwi's mortality entirely — because I do like that line, and I don't want to see it just cut.

I think maybe it comes down to managing reader expectations (which is kinda the core of my other complaint as well). I was not expecting "mortal aliTwi" to get dropped where it was, and then it wasn't followed up on or expanded on, which left me unsatisfied. If it worked for you, then good for you; it didn't work for me.

>>MrNumbers
I get and agree with your general point that misidentifying problems leads to suggesting the wrong solutions, and usually I'm better about saying things like "it seems to me that X, and if that's the case..."

That said,

Tragedy, one feels, is about to happen.

seems to me to be a pretty clear signpost of authorial intent, particularly in combination with the first line. Seeing it at word 5, and then again before we even get into the story's main body, really primes me to expect it, and that expectation makes it hard for me to see what else could really have been meant. If they didn't intend to write a tragedy, and they don't want the audience to think they intended to write a tragedy, then it might behoove them to remove or change the things that might lead the audience to think they intended to write a tragedy.

(Also, that first sentence is still objectively incorrect, in a way that I am not willing to extend poetic license to cover. "Childbirth is enough to kill a mother" is sad, and I have never argued otherwise, but it is not tragic without additional conditions, and those conditions are not obviously present.)

Also, Twilight being immortal isn't canon.

No, and I never said it was — but I'd still be hesitant about just taking the opposite as a given, either, which the quoted line from the text reads to me as doing. As you note, that WoG could mean any of a number of things, and the only alicorns about whose mortality we actually know anything quasi-definite are Celestia and Luna, who I think it's reasonably well-established are immortal. So, sure, "is alicorn, therefore is immortal" is a generalization, but if the only real point that might be against it is an ambiguous WoG, I don't think it's an unreasonable one. It's certainly not uncommon.

And you know that if it goes live on FIMFic, someone's going to complain that it's VIOLATING THEIR HEADCANON—

Look, the point is, those are waters into which I would not want to wade without at least some sort of defense, and it might be cleaner and less distracting just to sidestep the argument entirely if it's not directly part of your premise.

Retrospective

As many of you no doubt guessed, this was my entry this round — I think it's safe to say that this piece could only have been written by a musician, and nobody else here advertises themselves as such.

I came up with the title before I figured out anything about the story. The double bar, as >>QuillScratch noted briefly in the podcast, is the musical symbol for the end of a piece, and I spent a bit of time debating whether to go with that or "Coda", before deciding that not every piece has a coda. Then I had to work out what kind of place the Double Bar would be.

Well, obviously, it would be a bar.

...Actually, it would be two bars, wouldn't it?

And it kinda went from there. (I briefly considered also having every drink served in either half of the bar be a double before deciding that no, that's stupid.)

Those of you who identified it as attempting to be a story about the bar (>>Lamplighter sort of, >>Baal Bunny, >>Not_A_Hat, >>CoffeeMinion) are correct that that was the intent, and I appreciate your suggestions in the vein of how to improve it in that direction.

Those of you who felt the conflict needed a bit more meat to it (>>Trick_Question, >>Not_A_Hat, >>Zaid Val'Roa, >>CoffeeMinion)... well, yes, Octavia having a bit of trouble writing a piece of music isn't a conflict that's going to carry very far. The intended Part B of that, which clearly I didn't play up anywhere near as much as I should have, is that she's not just trying to write music, she's trying to write music that Princess Luna will enjoy, and she's worried about what might happen if Luna doesn't like it — still maybe not super-high stakes, but it would at least be something that doesn't get resolved until the final scene.

The Quartet for the End of Time that got name-dropped is a real-world piece, for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. I have no idea what circumstances might have led to the composer writing Equestria's version, but I think it's safe to say that they wouldn't be the same as they were in our world (namely, it was written in a concentration camp in WWII).

The theme and variations is a fairly standard and fairly self-explanatory musical form: you play a melody (the theme), and then you mess around with it, usually making it more complicated (the variations). Here is one of the classic examples, which does a lot of the normal things one might see in a piece of that form, and pretty much all the ones I explicitly used (also, it's Mozart, so you should listen to it anyway).

On to individual responses:

>>Lamplighter

I can't say that I know enough about how music works to be able to audibiilze what the music might sound like, but this is simply a restriction on writing about music in a story.

Sure, that's a thing that I knew going in I'd have to be aware of. I tried to write it so that you didn't need to be able to hear the music in your head to get a sense of what was going on (because otherwise that cuts out a huge chunk of the potential readers), but that it might add a bit if you could.

(That said, if you're looking for a good auditory reference, about 0:52-1:08 in this video is kinda the sound I had in mind.)

>>Trick_Question

Learning to write fiction has taught me how much it shares with nonfiction: you have to do your homework. Your research definitely shows in this piece, and the result is outstanding.

I agree with the general point, but I'll note that it helps when you're already very familiar with the subject matter.

I was a bit concerned about whether or not the musibabble was going to get in the way; it certainly wasn't as much as when I did Setting the Beat, but that story had a lot of it. From the sound of your review, it looks like there wasn't too much musibabble in that scene, just not enough anything else. Which is a problem with a different solution.

>>Baal Bunny
That's an intriguing suggestion, and I'm not opposed to it except to the extent that it would mean I have to come up with more names (there are fewer terms that work for both music and alcohol than you might think). I'll see what I can do with it.

>>Not_A_Hat
You mentioned the first sentence during the podcast; I didn't respond at the time, because I didn't trust myself not to break anonymity. I'll say now that I described the sign the way I did because I was trying to avoid actually using the phrase "double bar" until I got to the end of the segment, where I named the place. From your comment, it sounds like you'd be fine with that in theory and it was just a failure in execution; I'll play around with your suggested alternative phrasing and see what shakes out.

The point of having every scene be in the bar was, indeed, to try to strengthen the setting-as-character idea. Thank you for picking up on that.

>>Zaid Val'Roa
Thanks for your time and your suggestion. I'm unlikely to go for this one, because most of the composition would likely be done away from the bar, which... see above.

>>CoffeeMinion
Absolutely, this piece needs expansion to be what it wants to be. I'm generally of the opinion that perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove — but with this one, yeah, there's stuff that needs to be added.

Thanks, all of you, for your time and your comments.

>>WillowWren
Go for it.

You've got a few scattered typos, but that happens in first drafts and this isn't a story where you have no room for those kinds of errors, so they're forgivable.

Luna helping ponies come to terms with their regrets so they can die in peace is an uncommon extension of her dreamwalking abilities, but I suppose it works. The question of whether she should be in disguise or not is one I'm divided on — on the one hand, having her disguised does make it about the recipient, which is good; on the other hand, there are some people who really kinda need to know who this person that's spending time with the end-of-life patients is (certain members of the hospital staff spring to mind).

I like what you've done with Summer Breeze. We get to see what she most regrets, but not through being there with her when it happens, just in the form of what she thought she'd moved on from, and you did that quite well.

My mother worked for NASA for twenty-five years, so I've got a soft spot for stories about space programs.

Unfortunately, that also means I had a "hold on a minute, that's not how that works..." moment towards the end, when Twilight twists the ignition knob herself at roughly T-0 seconds. I recognize that a fictional space program doesn't necessarily have to work the same way as Earth space programs, and I recognize that most people don't know the timing of a launch — but on the other hand, that's publicly available information, and it's a sign that the author hasn't quite done their research and/or thought through all the things that need to happen. Honestly, it's a minor point, but it's irritating.

(If anyone is curious, here's NASA's official page detailing the Space Shuttle countdown sequence. The relevant entry is that the auto-launch sequencer kicks in at T-31 seconds, after which time the crew doesn't have to do anything — presumably, they can call for a halt if they see something that worries them, but there is nothing else they're required to do to make the launch happen.)

Now that that's out of the way:

The first part of the story was some good Twilestia — the setup of "they used to be in a relationship, then that stopped, and now Twilight's come back to see Celestia for the first time in a long time" reminded me of The Lessons of Eternity, which is a solid story, but not one I'd want to see you just rewrite. But you took it in a different direction, which was good to see.

The second part is also decent, but more as a start to something. I agree with >>Zaid Val'Roa that that countdown is very slow; one trick for writing scenes like that, where you've got events happening around other events, is to actually act out the scene yourself and see if the things you have happening actually fit into the time you've given them. Step away from the keyboard if you have to. Still, that and the ignition thing above are relatively minor details, and I liked Star Chaser's characterization.

The connection between them is... tenuous. Like, I can easily see how they could occur on consecutive days, but it doesn't feel as if either of them needs the other. You've got two good scenes that aren't necessarily part of the same story.

Still, I'd be interested to see where this goes after the writeoff is done.

>>Fenton
If there's still space, I'd be happy to join the Radio WriteOff crew this time around.

Formatting note: When writing online, you usually want a blank line between each paragraph to make it more readable. My eyes glazed over a bit looking at that wall of text.

In addition to agreeing with most of >>2Merr and >>Zaid Val'Roa , I've got some notes of my own.

This story seems like it ends too early. We get the canon-imposed deus ex machina and then... nothing. Literally nothing. Since it seems Scarlet survives, a scene after he regains consciousness and can react to the victory would be good. (If you meant for him to die, that would be fine, but then say he dies, don't say he loses consciousness.)

Regarding characterization, I'll add that not only do your characters not feel consistent (and it throws me for a bit of a loop whenever I see ponies using real-world swears like "damn", especially when they're mixed with ponified swears like "buck"), many of the details we get about them feel like they're only present because you think they have to be but couldn't find a more organic way to integrate them into the narrative. The most obvious example is that Midnight is mentioned as being trans, but this has literally no bearing on the story — so why have it?

Appearance descriptions can be worked in more smoothly, too: something like "Scarlet recognized the navy-blue form of Midnight Star standing atop the pile of corpses" is not only cleaner integration, but suggests that Scarlet recognized Midnight because he saw the color of his coat, which gives the detail a reason to be there instead of just adding words.

There's certainly the potential for a good story here, but it'll take some work to draw it out.

Well, this is shooting right up to the top of my slate.

I grumbled a bit on (The Flesh Is) Weak that it didn't really seem tragic to me. This is a better example. It really sucks for the conspirators (great word to end your first sentence with, by the way, immediately hooks the reader) that they chose the wrong person to be loyal to, but they made that choice and stuck with it too long, and it got two of them killed and the other two arrested (or possibly one and three, depending on what actually happened to Lazulite).

There's a nice bit of doublethink from Compass regarding Shining and Cadance — he thinks of them as the "usurper prince and princess", perhaps forgetting that Sombra was a usurper himself (at least, going by the snippets of history presented here).

I'm with the other commenters in feeling that getting to know the characters a bit more might have been good, but I can see how you might not have been able to fit it into this draft, you're up against the wordcount limit as is. Something to expand for later, maybe.

I'll go ahead and add my voice to the chorus saying that this is well done for what it is, but there are ways you could make it more interesting. We've all read this story dozens of times, and while there's nothing wrong with that (and it's seasonally appropriate), it does mean you have to do a bit more to stand out from the pack, and you haven't really done that.

Still, for what it is, it's solid. You can take pride in that.

On a first read, I liked this. You did a good job of delivering just enough detail to keep us interested and wanting to know more, and you handled Celestia's emotions as they related to Discord and Fluttershy well.

On contemplation, however, there are a few things that don't quite hold up as well as you might have intended.

The first of these: You're trying to make this story a tragedy, but you haven't quite done the work to establish it. It's sad, but it's not tragic.

The thing that defines a tragedy, as opposed to a sad story, is that in a tragedy, the bad things that happen are the result of the characters' own mistakes, and they make those mistakes because of their particular flaws. Pride is a common flaw for tragic characters, but far from universal; the one you seem to have gone for is impulsiveness, which works for Discord — but I'm not sure I buy it as much from Fluttershy, and you need both to really make it work. (I might accept passivity for Fluttershy, except that doesn't quite square with her being the first one to say "I love you". Which means I'm not clear on her flaw. And she was part of the decision to have sex, so she has to have had one.)

With that in mind, "Childbirth is enough to kill a mother" isn't tragic, unless they should have known ahead of time that it would happen, and you haven't indicated that they did. It's a dark form of situational irony, in that the act of bringing life into the world can also take it out, but that's not the same thing.

Another problem comes from the line, "Because mortals are not to meddle with immortals." It's a good line on its own, but it doesn't fit the specific context you're putting it in: You've set your story after Twilight's ascension, so you're implying that being an alicorn is not a sufficient condition for immortality. This is an uncommon position to take, and there's not really any evidence to support it (certainly less than the alternative).

The line would work better in reference to Celestia and just about anypony else, even pre-ascension Twilight (though that runs into a different problem, namely, fitting it into the timeline — Fluttershy and Discord's relationship isn't that far along by the time Twilight gets her wings). As is, though, it's not a good justification for why Celestia won't reciprocate Twilight's desires. If you want Twilight to still be mortal after becoming an alicorn, make that clearer.

I still like this, and it'll likely be towards the top of my slate, but I think there are ways to make it closer to what you intended.

>>Posh
It does not.

Twilight's never been good at pretending nothing's wrong, has she?

I like the slow hints from the very beginning that something's gone horribly off the rails. The first time I took a look at the first paragraph, I actually missed the "took a pill, waited fifteen minutes", but then I had to step away and do something else, and I took another look when I came back. That's a detail that gets referenced again later on, but never quite explained, and it's nagging at me a bit — I think maybe the idea is that she's trying to fortify either her mental stability or her magical reserves, but that's far from clear to me.

That said, I thought the revelation at the end was well executed, and the story overall left me feeling like it did what it set out to do.

>>Kitcat36
I'm not sure where you're getting "five sisters" from. The "five good friends" are either her memories of the other Element bearers or Celestia, Luna, Cadance, Flurry Heart and Discord, but nowhere in the story does it say anything about five sisters.

Author, if there was one story where you could get away with a rash of spelling errors, it was this one. If the spelling had been consistently bad until, say, the [hr] tag, I could have excused that as a stylistic decision. But having just two, and having them in each of the first two paragraphs, means I'm expecting to see them more frequently — and then disappointed that that's not the direction you chose to take it.

A related complaint is that you never want your prose to accidentally get in the way of your story, and there are a few spots I think you've done that here. For example, "sanguineous": I get that you're trying to tie back to your previous description of the paper as "bloodied", but not only is it a redundant image, it also comes off a bit as trying to show off your vocabulary by forcing a big word into a spot where it's unnecessary. Something like "the heavily-marked essay" would have made the same point, been different enough to not seem repetitive, and not made your audience stop and think about the word you're using.

If this seems nit-picky, I apologize, but if you're writing about writing, you really can't afford any unintended mistakes in spelling, grammar, punctuation, or word usage. (They aren't exactly desirable the rest of the time, either, but they're also less likely to be misread as a deliberate choice.)

More positive news: I like that Midnight is learning to be a bit more tactful, but that it's still something she needs to think about. Major personality shifts like that don't just happen, they take a lot of time and effort, and it's good that you're showing her as still having a ways to go. And having Fluttershy be the one to teach her to be kinder is... really, who else would you choose? Social decorum is more up Rarity's alley, but kindness is definitely Fluttershy.

I'm inclined to agree with >>Zaid Val'Roa that having something more than the two scenes you've got would help.

>>Kitcat36
Nothing wrong with character pieces. If that's what you come up with, that's fine.

This feels like a couple of the writeoff stories I've done, in that it's more an event or series thereof than a story and the ending doesn't quite gel with everything that came before.

There's never a good place to have grammatical errors, awkwardly structured phrases/sentences, etc., but the opening paragraph is one of the two worst (the other being the closing paragraph). That's a pretty good way to lose the benefit of the doubt when it comes to such errors elsewhere.

Quite a bit of this story is Pinkie Pie demonstrating why she is worst Mane 6. I recognize this may be a somewhat controversial position, so allow me to defend it:
Pinkie is more prone to overreaction than even Rarity and has been known to be even more insensitive than Rainbow Dash. She thinks at odd angles to everyone else, which is occasionally useful but more often not and sometimes actively counterproductive - and she's bad at communicating her thoughts (to be fair, that fault's hardly unique to her, but it amplifies the difficulties caused by her unusual approaches to things). Even when she's aware that she's screwed up, I rarely get the sense that she knows why what she did was wrong (or at least, the wrong thing to do), meaning I have less confidence that she won't make the same or a similar mistake again.
In short, she is aggressively childlike, in a way that is very out of place when compared to the rest of the Element bearers - which might not be so bad if they weren't all supposed to be more or less the same age she is, maybe a little bit older. As it is, though, she's in the position of being someone who really ought to know better but doesn't seem to, which makes her difficult to write in a way that doesn't make me want to pull my hair out. (Also, "lolrandom" can go die in a fire. Not that that's relevant to this story, just in general.)

>>Xepher notes that Pinkie is "the princess of pranks", which suggests something that might make her actions in the first half of this story somewhat more palatable to me: Pinkie could be aware that Starlight and Maud are trying to pull one over on her, and she's counter-pranking them by going along with it and seeing how dedicated they are to staying in character. I would be fine with that. The only problem is, there's nothing actually in the story that indicates that's the case.

I didn't mind the ending, at least not as much as some people seem to have, but it didn't really grab me.

I concur with those who've noted the Petriculture similarities, and also with those who feel this needs more words than you had on hand to give it.

>>Monokeras

The first sentence, formal as it be, seems incorrect to me. You wrote: Whoever she be, Princess, she be possessed by a demon! While your use of the subjunctive in the first clause is bang on, since that clause casts a doubt on what Pinkie will become, the second one, on the contrary, is a definite affirmation that “she will be possessed by a demon” and, therefore, the use of the subjunctive is improper. You should instead use the simple future tense to mark that this is an unavoidable fate: Whoever she be, Princess, she shall be possessed by a demon!

No, what's written is fine. It's archaic for "she is (currently) possessed by a demon", as in right now.

Hey! Finals for the first time!

My last two writeoff entries, at least, have featured literal takes on the prompt that came at it from an angle nobody else did.

In case anyone was curious: California Baptist University is a real school that is scheduled to move up to NCAA Division I in the next couple of years, and will be ineligible for postseason competition for four years after that as part of the reclassification process. I chose them by looking down a list of DI or future-DI schools and thinking, "Which of these names would be simply embarrassing to lose to, but not fuck up the flow of the text like Southeast Missouri State would?"

I could have sworn I'd indicated that the narrator's team had had serious national title hopes that were now in very real jeopardy, but I don't see it anywhere. Not naming his school was a semi-deliberate choice, but I definitely pictured them as one of the perennial contender schools (Duke, Kansas, North Carolina, Kentucky, etc.). "Coach D" was intended to recall "Coach K", the active coach who holds the record for most career wins, but that's something that would easily slip past a lot of readers; fortunately, I didn't intend that as a reference that was necessary to understand if you wanted to follow what was going on.

The last line is kind of tacked on, I'll admit. Not only that, it doesn't quite capture the intended meaning (which was less "most important shot of his career, period" and more "most important shot in the moment he took it" - maybe there were others that did more to change the course of his season or career, but those could only be identified in hindsight, whereas he knows going into this one that if he misses, the season's over and he's going home disappointed).

>>Monokeras
Baseball would actually have been a terrible choice, being the only one of the major sports in North America that doesn't have a game clock. You can't have a last-second play if there's no last second. Soccer has a game clock, but the ends of halves are a little fuzzy (at least, when the clock counts up, as it does in international play and just about every major professional league), and I don't know nearly enough about hockey to write about it. American football might have worked, but basketball is a more international sport and the in-game scope is a lot narrower - the playing surface is a lot smaller, and there's only 10 guys out there instead of 22.

>>Fenton
Yeah, the last-second play to win is horribly cliché, but stories do need some sort of drama. For a story that's just about a moment, I think playing just to stay alive works at least as well.

>>TitaniumDragon >>HoofBitingActionOverload >>MrExtra >>Ranmilia >>Not_A_Hat >>AndrewRogue
Thank you for your time and comments.

I'm wondering if this was intended as a children's story. The first couple of sentences, in particular, have that kind of feel to them:

"Will you throw the ball?" asked the vendor at the stall.

Mr. Cormerick with his cane read the sign at the vendor's side, with its glittery glitter and silvery silver:

The first sentence has an internal rhyme (ball/stall) and enough rhythm to it that it feels like verse (almost Seussian, though the foot size is two syllables instead of three and Seuss didn't write much with two-syllable feet), and the two combined give an impression that either one alone might not. The second sentence, of course, has "glittery glitter and silvery silver", and I have trouble believing that was unintentional, but those aren't phrases you generally see aimed at anyone over the age of about 5.

Beyond that, this story as a whole has a lot of monosyllables, which tend to slow down a piece of text and make the reader take a little longer. This, of course, makes them ideal for younger readers.

If that was, in fact, the goal, then it seems to be decent, though the pacing feels a little off in a way that I can't identify as clearly, and there are a few commas missing. However, since it seems written for a much younger reading level, I'm having trouble rating it high (Tier: Misaimed).

I do like the repetition of the opening sentence at the start of each scene.

Well. That ending.

Dialogue-only is an uncommon choice, and one that I'm not entirely sure was necessary - you only ended at 563 words, so you had plenty of room to throw in the occasional bit of narration, and it should have been possible to add without spoiling the end.

Punctuation might seem an odd thing to complain about in a dialogue-only story, but it seems to me that you're missing a number of commas. None that really took me out of the story, but it's a thing to be aware of.

Despite those complaints, I thought this was an entertaining little story. The interaction between the two characters in the first section was well done, and the ending does a good job of recontextualizing what came before.

I'm in. First time I've submitted to an original fiction or a minific round.

All right, okay, I get it, I need a better ending for this. Message received, and I've already started working on it. (The story may be renamed by the time I'm done, but it will still be recognizably descended from what's here.)

Honestly, part of the reason the ending is what it is is that it was midnight-thirty and I just wanted to throw something onto the end of it so I could go to sleep. Writing a better one would have taken more time than I was willing to spend that night, and it might have devolved into incoherence anyway.

"Literal total darkness" was the seed of the idea for this story; I don't think I actively decided to also go for the metaphorical meaning of "darkest hour" so much as I discovered a ways into writing that this idea could also fit the figurative version and decided to go with it.

>>GroaningGreyAgony

(I laughed aloud at Random Walk).

A Glimpse Into The Process:

What's the most embarrassing situation I can think of to have this character get lost in?

How about in a city where the street names are numbers and letters?

...No, I can do better than that. "Literally a numbered grid" would be even worse.

...There's really only one thing I can name this character, isn't there.

Don't worry, it was only a 2D grid, so he did eventually get back to where he started. ;-)

>>Zaid Val'Roa

I'd love to see a more fleshed out version of this story, where we get to actually see the chambers.

I hope the final version, when I get around to completing it, meets your expectations.

>>CoffeeMinion

I also like that the part at the end pulled us deeper into her world, as we got to see some of the support apparatus that surrounds her adventures.

I'd have to rewrite that scene more or less from scratch, but I do intend to have something like it in the final product.

>>Posh

Also, I don't see why someone like Daring Do, meticulous and methodical lass that she is, wouldn't bring extra batteries on a trip. I like the idea that she literally has no room to maneuver enough to swap them out, and in total darkness, probably wouldn't be able to do so effectively anyway. But let her have them, fer the love of Mike.

My thought was that they were back at the campsite, where they still ought to have been reasonably accessible (but weren't, because she couldn't go back and get them). If that's still unsatisfying, I can certainly go back and change it - it's not like being able to swap them out would have even fixed the problem of a burnt-out lightbulb anyway.

One more thing: I think you go overboard with the pony puns. And this is coming from someone who put "Nägermeister" in a story.

The words "time-honored tradition" spring to mind. I do not apologize for those.

(Actually, I was going to have "Chineighse water torture" until I discovered that there's no evidence that "Chinese water torture" is really from China. That one, I might have been sorry for.)

A slightly more literal take on (perceived) darkness than some of the submissions I've seen. You're clearly going for sadness as the primary intended reaction.

It's unclear what exactly happened at the beginning of the fic, and to an extent, it's irrelevant quite what went wrong. What is more relevant, and also poorly explained, is why retinas, or whatever the issue was, cannot regenerate, if other parts of an alicorn's body can. It's a major plot point that this is an unsolvable problem, but you haven't provided much reason for why that should be the case.

The last line is another spot that I'm not sure what to think about. It looks like it's supposed to be optimistic, but the rest of the story indicates that that's not going to happen any time soon.

There are things this story does well - the navigation scene is a nice touch - but it is unsatisfying in a couple of (to me) critical ways.