Sky Blue and I grew up together, inseparable best friends from the time we were young fillies. We were always there for each other, through thick and thin, good times and bad. We got into, and out of, more jams than I can count, and we always did it together.

The day she coughed and a few little droplets of blood sprayed out was no different. I was there with her, waiting in the doctor’s office, holding her hoof while she was shaking like a leaf.

She started crying. I rubbed her back and told her it would be okay. Obviously, I had no idea if it would or not, and I’m sure she knew that, but it was enough to help her pull herself together and calm down.

Just being there was what mattered.

She trusted me to be there because she knew what I didn’t have to say.



It was just a little before the Running of the Leaves when she started to really get sick.

The changes she began going through were so much like the season; the way things fall away, showing what’s really underneath the foliage.

When some trees lose their leaves, the skeleton of branches underneath is all thorns and sharp twigs, tangled inward and waiting to jab anypony who gets too close. She was never like that. What showed in her was like one of those trees that reaches up, grasping for the sky with inviting, wide-open arms.

Even when her mane had fallen out and her feathers were molting in clumps, she never grew thorns, and never pushed me away. She never lashed out to protect herself, afraid to be seen like that.

She wasn’t afraid because she knew what I didn’t have to say.



I entered the Running of the Leaves that year. She couldn’t. She didn’t have the breath for it, not the way she was.

She could only watch. Right before the race started, she walked up to me on the track, took the handkerchief off her bald head, and tied it around my front leg, the way a noble lady used to tie a scarf around the leg of a knight she favored in a tournament.

“Good luck,” she whispered in my ear.

Suddenly, I didn’t feel like I needed luck.

The race started, and I ran. I ran hard, and I ran fast. I pushed with everything I had until I was exhausted, and then I pushed even harder. I did it all for her.

I won.

It’s the only time I ever have.

All the rest of that autumn, when we went out walking together and we saw the fallen leaves, we’d look at each other and smile, because we both knew what they meant.

Those leaves said what she knew I didn’t have to say.



Toward the end, when she was spending most of each day on strong painkillers, sometimes I would come in to visit and find her lying in bed, just staring out the window with an empty, listless look in her eyes. When I saw her that way, I knew the worst part of this for her: not being able to fly, not being able to soar free in the clouds, where a pegasus belongs. As an earth pony who likes keeping her hooves firmly on the ground, I don’t know what flying is like, but I could feel how terribly she missed it. It hurt me to see how that loss just crushed all the hope out of her sometimes. I’d have given anything to give her just one more day, just another hour, in the sky.

But when I came in, she’d turn away from the window at the sound of my hoofsteps. She would look at me and smile, and even as tired as she was, her face would light up like the sun.

She smiled because she knew what I didn’t have to say.



When Sky Blue died, she was cremated, and I spread her ashes here on this hill, overlooking the town and the fields and the forests around it all. I come here sometimes, and think of her.

Sometimes I think about how I never told her, “I love you.”

I never said it, and maybe I should have. But truthfully? I don’t feel bad about it, because it was what I didn’t have to say. She knew. She always knew.

How could she not?

It was in the leaves.