[I suggest listening to this while looking at the picture]

“I couldn’t believe it. Velvet Remedy was gone. I couldn’t understand. How could she leave? Why would she go?

The door out of Stable Two was closed and sealed. Only the Overmare knew the secrets to opening it, assuming it even could open. Which, obviously, it could.

But why? Nobody really knew what was outside, if there was anything out there at all. Historical books suggested the world outside was blasted, lifeless and poisonous. That was, at least, the common and logical assumption. But a ghost story somepony told at my first (and only) slumber party had given me horrible nightmares and still lurked in the shadows of my head: a tale of a pony who somehow got the Stable door open and stepped outside… only to find out that there was no outside! Just a great nothingness that whisked the pony away, devouring her soul so that she was nothingness too.

Empirically, I knew that wasn’t the case, but the mental image still haunted me.”