A year from now we'll all be gone
All our friends will move away
And they're going to better places
But our friends will be gone away

This isn't where you're meant to be. What are you doing here?

It's a question you seem to ask yourself a lot these days - What am I doing here? What am I doing here? What am I doing here? (Repeat ad nauseam - you get the idea). Being homeless is hard. For most of your life you've had a pretty solid grasp of where you are, where you belong; you've had a place to go back to and sleep, friends to turn to, family to love. You've a had familiar landscape, be it rolling foothills or desert sand. You've had landmarks, which is important, because you're miserably adept at getting lost. You've had somewhere stable in an unstable world, somewhere constant and reliable, somewhere home.

Where that is is a mystery.

For now, you're homeless. Vagabond. Wanderer. Lost. So of course you go to the least concrete place you possibly can possibly think of, because if you're going to get lost you're going to get thoroughly lost, goddamnit.

----

Hours later - or has it been days? - you certainly are lost, and lonely, and quite ready to move on past your morose mentality and get back to living in the real world. There's something unsettling about this place, about the way the world seems to curl up into a sphere, a snowglobe with you caught up in its center. You cannot find the horizon - looking for it makes your head spin and your stomach churn, and so you try not to focus on the uncomfortable endlessness of the mirror world. Instead your sunbeam gaze skids over ripples and past the slightest shifting of watery sand, seeking desperately any sign of life, any guidance as to how you might escape. Perhaps a good plan would be to simply walk straight in one direction - surely this place has to end somewhere - you came in from somewhere else, after all. But no matter how you try to maintain a direct path you always seem to turn, your hooves tracking an endless circle of hoofprints that disappear into the glass as soon as you raise your legs.

Abruptly you halt, frustration drawing ugly lines on your normally cheerful face. What am I doing here? you question again, bright gaze falling to the mirror below your hooves. The reflection that stares back offers no answers - it merely returns your stare, impassive, unashamed by its collection of scars and missing wing, the metal that creeps like poison out of its barren side. You shiver, your frown deepening. To your tired, claustrophobic mind, the thing that glares back isn't you: it's a collection of memories and mistakes, a sculpted homage to your internal injuries and external scars, your external failings, your disability.

No wonder you can't find a home, it sneers. You can't even get out of here.

And just like that, you're angry. With all the expressive rage of your sire, your dam, you rear, your forelegs rising in the air before crashing down onto the twisted reflection, water and sand flying in the wake of your wrath. "Stop it!" you shout at the demonic likeness, voice high and frazzled as your hooves continue to tear into it, now stomping, now digging, now just flailing uselessly at the ground. "Stop it!-" but your voice sounds too loud, magnified and contorted by the bending sky, the concave earth, and your shouts sound like laughter-

And before you know it they are laughter, and you're the one laughing, kneeling, your front knees buried in the shifting sand, your laugh uncontrollable. Have you gone mad, Zero? Has your poor, innocent brain finally split like the egg you came out of?

At last your laughter seems to subside. You inhale air, gulping it down like a starving fish, your sides heaving and the occasional giggle still slipping past your lips. Your gaze is trained upward, now, at the dome of the sky; you grin at it, defiance spread across your face, and announce to the broad and listening expanse, "I really hate this place."