*"Is your daddy dead?"*

She asked, this strange little dumbass intruding on my own personal brand of tragedy. Or…wait, this was funny, right? So it was a comedy, the other really creepy smiling mask that prophesized hilarity and the probability of me jumping the broom with someone. Anyway, the point was that I didn’t hear her, didn’t pay the slightest attention to her, because I was still on my back and my legs were still flailing in the air, hopelessly, helplessly, as though I were trying to swim my way to the heavens. Or…something. I don’t even know, man. I was doing something and it didn’t make a lick of sense but whatever.

I began to roll; I threw my body to the side, my legs folding underneath me as I flung about like a limp sausage, the laughter becoming muffled as my muzzle became shoved into the dirt. I rolled over completely, then did it again, not quite noticing the ledge I was inching closer to by the second. Or maybe I did notice it, and I was just being a hard-headed twit and wanted to see what would happen if I decided to roll my loony ass over the ledge of black granite, into a lake of blue fire and disappointment. I don’t know, I can’t remember what I was thinking at that time. I was just laughing and ignoring this stranger and rolling my ass over, and over, and over, and when I finally pitched myself off the cliff with a resounding ”WHEEEEEEEE!” and a last limp-dick jerk of my hooves.

Free-fall is a motherfucker. I only fell for seconds, but those seconds felt like hours, days, weeks and months and years to me. An entire lifetime, filled with all sorts of crazy characters including my loved ones and loved ones I had yet to meet and enemies I had yet to slay and smoky black scales and dragons and dragon-fire and sunbursts of color behind my eyes, because I was also probably going insane. Maybe it was the flower—yeah, that sounds smart. The feeling of complete weightlessness and insubstantiality probably fucked with whatever chemical was giving me these visions, and it was all very emotional and sweet and pretty fantastic, if you’re into that sort of thing. I wasn’t, so I found the whole pretty freaking disturbing, but what the hell did I know? I was falling to my death and laughing my ass off about it. I didn’t have the right to feel disturbed.

Anyway. It lasted seconds, like I said earlier; I fell from the ledge, squealed a little bit, then used the spark in my bones to zap! back onto the isle of the Gods before I had fallen too far away. I was laying on my side when I materialized from the shock stream I had jumped into; I lay dead, breathing slowly, my eyes on the girl who had stumbled upon my high and happy ass. Except I wasn’t so “happy” right now—for one thing, I had stopped laughing. My glare was an angry one, too. Just…dead and angry as I lay on my side, my right eye pressed in the dirt, my other one steady on the brown wings of this little girl that shared many things with me, and nothing at all.

“If he was dead,” I growled, my voice rustling the black dust around me, “we wouldn’t be half as screwed as we are now.” I had stopped laughing because, simply, she wouldn’t have understood the joke. It was that sort of thing you had to be there for, y’know? And she had definitely not been there.