There is an oft’ repeated phrase, words to the tune of “time heals all wounds”. Their origin has been lost to the most ponies, who continue to echo blindly the assertions of those past.

T'was sister who first spoke those words. For all her wisdom, I do not hold them to be right. The wounds remain. In time the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it never leaves.

I ask not that you trust me on this. Take this room for your example.

It’s small, only a few metres in each direction. It sits perched at the top of a tree on the edge of a forest, composed entirely of the forest’s flesh save for the nails of iron that hold it together.

The filly inside is in no state to appreciate the irony. Curled into a corner, wings held tight against her sides, she looks about as small as it’s possible for a pegasus to get. She’s tired, not from the race she ran earlier today, or her falls, her failures to fly, or even from the long, lonely canter-half-gallop through the dusk to the room she now finds herself in.

That is not to say that these did not take their toll.

Tears leak from beneath closed eyelids, and a clamped muzzle stifles a faint, quietening whimper. Her breathing slows, her eyes close, but the muscles do not relax. This world fades and another begins, and she finds herself now atop a hill, grassy plains racing to eternity all around her.

Two ponies stand in-front of her.

They do not appear before her in the strict sense of the word, for this is the realm of thoughts and memories and she has long since forgotten what they look like. They are something else; comprised not of flesh and bone but vague, aged recollections.

A blurred face looking down on her through a film of tears. The warm embrace of legs large enough to wrap around her tiny frame. An affectionate nuzzle, reassuring nuzzle, on the back of the neck.

Above all, they are present in their absence.

She stands still, contemplating the eternity of mere moments she’s been here.

Moments pass, a hundred thoughts into the future.

And then a voice calls out her name, faintly, as if from a great distance or height, from a place just out of view.

She doesn't understand. This is hers, her dream, and these voices are not of her making. They shouldn't be here, don’t belong.

There are more voices now, and they grow louder, more insistent, coming from each and every direction until space and sound become indistinguishable, a cacophony of existence that slowly fades to oblivion. She closes her eyes…

… and opens them once more to the confines of that small, wooden room.

There are two other ponies there, now.

They are real, flesh and blood, and the familiar sound of their voices as they call her name banish the last remnants of a now forgotten dream.

They have known each other for ‘nary a few summers. They are not the ponies that she lost. They never tried to be, and never will be.

She doesn't care. That’s what makes them special.

And somehow, in spite of everything she slowly stands, taller, fuller, and they embrace.

Sister once said that time heals all wounds.

She may not have been so wrong after all.