First Fruits

Chapters

Final Exam
The Secret of the Fall
Off
Miscalculation
Primrose
The Three Missions
The Root
Hope
By Name
A Message
... With a Metaphor
The Nightmare and the Idyll
Children of Selene
The Highest Virtue

Final Exam

Sacred Oak watched the impending battle from the upstairs window. The pane was layered with dust left by rain and wind, but was yet transparent enough to provide a view of the lanky colt who stood at the edge of the walled garden that abutted the backyard. The boy below was stock still, his face set with grim determination. There had been a time, not long ago, when fear would have rattled his knees, or caused him to look back for reassurance. Sacred Oak's lessons had put an end to that.

“Go on,” he muttered. “Sun’s down. They’ll come a callin’ any minute.”

The colt crossed below the white roses that had been woven into an arch in the wall’s only entrance, braided like thick fingers over years long forgotten. Above his head, a crescent moon weathervane at the arch’s crest creaked on its stem, turning as if to point its single clawed finger at the intruder. A tribe of swallows broke from the surrounding hedge. Nothing else moved.

“Right,” growled Sacred Oak. “Here we go. Time to see what you’re really made of.” He saw the boy sit back on his haunches and cross his hooves over his chest. Along each wiry leg ran a rusty sickle blade, fastened with coils of frayed hemp twine. Two more were bound to his hind legs, and a half of a sheep shear protected his muzzle. His lips were moving, and his eyes were turned to the stars.

Sacred Oak brought his own forelegs to his chest, scarred and weathered with age. “Mother of the Blessed Night, protect him,” he whispered.

As if summoned by his words, a pair of mottled brown legs exploded out of the moss mere inches from where the colt sat, throwing loose, black soil over the green as they searched to grasp and drag. Three more geysers of gravel and rotten leaves violated the evening silence, disgorging worm-scored flesh still draped in funeral finery onto the neat, mown grass and marigold beds. A howling filled the yard; a mournful, multi-tonal roar of tortured throats forced open by an unnatural strength.

“Well, good evening to you,” Sacred Oak chuckled.

The colt leapt back to avoid the sweeping limbs of the first attacker. He tucked into an easy roll and sprang to the ready, flexing his shoulders to check that the knots that secured his blades had not come undone. Before him, three ruined ponies rose on atrophied legs. They lifted their dirt-clotted muzzles to the darkening sky, dipping and searching until they all aligned to the newly risen moon. As one they opened their mouths, wider and wider until the jaws broke, unsheathing sharp bone from desiccated muscle. They stood uttering their infernal noise while the fourth scrambled out of its cold womb.

Before it could wrench itself free and flank him, he jumped toward the trio and began to run at full gallop. Their bellowing receded to a sloppy growl as he approached. Whatever intelligence drove them perceived him as a threat, or marked him as prey. They gouged the earth with their hooves and stamped deep holes into the ground, each blow reverberating like the fall of an axe on rain-soaked wood.

The colt ran harder. At a tail’s length from the lead creature, he lowered his muzzle to bring the sheep shear to level.

The monster reared to avoid the blade, burbling out a waterlogged battle cry. Its hooves snapped out with obscene alacrity, the greasy keratin flicking filthy matter of long interment, eager to connect with bone and break it.

They found only air. With a fine-tuned dive, the colt turned in mid-air and arced his sickles to either side, his momentum carrying him under and through. There was a sound of thick branches being hewn. The creature toppled onto its side, its hind legs severed at the knees. It scrabbled its remaining limbs with the energy of a dying spider, pus spraying from its death-slackened lips.

Before its partners could react, the boy launched himself onto the back of the nearest and crossed his crescent blades behind its neck. As it bucked to dislodge him, he pushed the edges into the gray meat and brought the backs of his hooves together. Its roar became a hollow gurgle as its head slid away. Maggots foamed out of the exposed hole like the froth of over-fermented beer.

He avoided the white globs of larvae, cutting through the shoulder tendons of the decapitated, still-struggling torso and dropping it to the moss where it squirmed with the desperation of an asphyxiating fish. It was then that the third heaved itself onto him from behind, its mouth descending to ram its broken jawbone into his unprotected nape.

The boy threw his head backward, and the sheep shear did its work. It sliced through what little connected the mandible to the skull, continuing into the brain pan. Ignoring the moist press of the screaming larynx against his scalp, he whipped his head free, swiveled, and cut. The decayed forelegs fell to the earth, a pair of pruned saplings leaking black sap. A final slash, and the wretched head joined them.

Sacred Oak smiled down at the twitching limbs and bodies that littered the once-pristine garden. “Well done as always, my boy,” he said to himself. “Getting sharper with the tools. But some fights aren’t about who’s stronger or smarter.” He got out of his seat and brushed the curtain to the side.

The moon had assumed full command of the sky. Awash in its solemn light, the wiry figure was trudging toward the remaining creature, which had become tangled in a net of roots as it fought to unearth itself, and was still half-buried in the spongy turf. The few patches of its dress that were unstained by the grave glowed bright white.

He stopped a few paces from where it raged and knelt. Even from his distant vantage point, Sacred Oak could make out the pain that seized his features, and the word he spoke.

Mama.

The thing that had once been a mare ceased thrashing and turned. Parts of its face were balding, and its shriveled eyes, still flecked with hints of the brilliant green they held in life, pointed in different directions. Its mouth cracked open in a brown-toothed grin.

Sacred Oak leaned forward so far that his nose bumped the window. “It’s just dead matter, boy. Soul’s long gone. Finish it now.”

Below, more words were being spoken, and a trembling hoof was reaching toward the white-draped abomination. Its two skeletal forelegs rose up in response, and inched forward as if to receive a newborn. Just as they were about to touch, the dead mare shrieked and shot forward, its shredded dress expelling a plume of white tatters like a dandelion blasted by a gust of wind.

The boy recoiled, but not in time to avoid the two branches of saggy flesh that hooked around his neck and pulled him against the snapping jaws and black, dirt-caked tongue. The teeth found his leg, just below his shoulder, and bit deep into the lean muscle. He cried out over the babbling of the torn corpses that surrounded him—the first sound of life since the conflict began—and pushed away, leaving a gobbet of his flesh trapped between the dull, gnashing molars.

He stood, bleeding. The pain and confusion left his face, and were replaced with cold apathy. As quickly as his resolve had returned, he spun and bucked the frenzied creature, and as it whipped backward against the edge of the pit, threw himself on top of it. Sickles and shear rose and fell with surgical precision.

When he was finished, he limped away from the dismembered mess and out of the garden. In the quiet of the battle’s aftermath, the brilliance of the moon and stars, and the gentle swaying of the lilacs that cooperated with the hedges to form the sanctuary wall blended in nightmarish contradiction to the ruined bodies that still squirmed and barked beneath them. Beyond on the horizon, the lights of a town twinkled warm yellow and white, its occupants already asleep and dreaming.

The colt returned, cradling a lit torch with his wounded leg. A bucket of black liquid swung from his mouth. He passed once more below the roses and the sign of the moon, and with well-practiced motions began to splash the piles of restless body parts with the contents of the bucket like they were so many flowers in need of watering. When each had received its libation, he set them alight with the torch, crossed his sickles over his chest once more, and addressed a final prayer to the blazing skies above him.

He watched the pyres burn until all was black and silent, and ground the torch’s flame in the dirt to extinguish it. A cat appeared from the shadows of the yard, testing the smoky air with its nose. Satisfied that the danger was gone, it padded to where the boy sat and rubbed against his haunch.

The warm, soft touch broke his reverie. He stooped to stroke its head, and picking it up with his good leg, limped toward the house. Crickets began to chirp from somewhere in the grass.

Sacred Oak met him at the front door. His deep-set eyes lingered on the soiled blades, and the blood, and the bemused expression of the cat. “First Fruits. My boy. You’re ready,” he said, and without waiting for a reply, went back inside.

The Secret of the Fall

Still short of breath from his battle and encumbered by his gear, First Fruits clambered up the worn wooden steps. “I’m ready, Da? Ready for what?”

Sacred Oak was already in the kitchen, busy at the counter. A teakettle and dishes clattered over his conspiratorial chuckles. “You popped the cork on old Smelter nice. Should have saved some of the white wigglers for Ms. Sugar Plum’s goldfish.”

First followed him inside, into the low yellow light of the firefly lamps strung above the dining table. “Yeah, should have. Deadheadin’ his Rose was easy. The last one was—” he paused to steady his voice “—the last one was hard.”

Sacred stopped laughing. He closed the lid on their wood stove and slid a teakettle around on the gritty iron top to center it. “I know it was, First,” he said, giving his son a sober look. “It was meant to be. But I want you to know that your mother and I talked about it before she passed. It was her idea. She knew her time was coming, and wanted to be of use to the cause even after she left us. She said, ‘Don’t put me in the ground just to rot, much as I’m looking forward to feeding the foxgloves. I brought our boy into the world, and I want to be the one who either takes him out of it or proves him worthy.’ Careful now, you’re gettin’ blood on Cinnamon.” He gestured with his muzzle toward the cat. “Best tend to her before she licks; wouldn’t want her gettin’ an appetite for horseflesh.”

The cat met First Fruits’ startled appraisal with mild interest. He set her down on the chair that had belonged to his mother and began to loosen the knots of his bindings. “Oh, Mama,” he sighed, “wish you could have seen how good I did.” When he’d finished removing his filthy weapons, he soaked the end of a rag in a soapy dish bucket and began to dab at the oily red stains on Cinnamon’s fur. She complained, but didn’t flee.

Sacred Oak gathered a small brown bottle and a roll of gauze from the cabinet and sat down in his customary seat at the table. “You’ve heard me tell many a time about our kin. How we’ve served as Caretakers from the old days of the High Sanctuary, when our order numbered in the hundreds and thousands, and the foe were thrice as many as that, and all manner of monsters roamed the kingdom all on their own account, lookin’ to wreak mayhem long after the Nightmare was banished away.” He pushed the medical supplies across to First Fruits, who took them with a nod. Matted but cleansed, Cinnamon jumped away and vanished into the corners.

First took her place, dropping into the chair. “Yes Da, I know it all by heart, like I should.” He unscrewed the bottle’s cap, pressed a length of gauze over the top, and upended it.

“Well just now you proved yourself—passed the final test—and mighty justified I am as a Caretaker and a father to have seen you do it. So today’s the day I bestow on you our family’s most secret secret. Today’s the day that I tell you that—” the stallion leaned forward on his ravaged forelegs “—he was there.”

First pressed the loaded gauze against the raw crater that the cadaverous teeth had gouged in his foreleg. His wince would have gone unnoticed by anyone but his father. “He? I … I don’t follow you, Da.”

“I’m sayin’ he was there when it happened. When She fell.”

First Fruits’ eyes widened as understanding took hold. “Stars and moon, Da! You mean he … that can’t be true! No pony—”

A swift hoof walloped him on his good shoulder. “It’s true as the welt you’re gonna have tomorrow right there where I whacked you! Are you listening to me?”

“Yes Da, I’m sorry. Spoke out of turn.”

“Good. Right. I was sayin’ he was there. In the Gardens of Selene, when the world changed forever. Now I know the songs your mama and I taught you make them out to be fairy tales and myths, and fancy as they are, I can tell you that none of them approach doing justice by their true grandeur. For miles they lay like an unearthly playground for the trees and the topiaries, great wonders giving way to even greater with every step, the pools and fountains strung together by rivulets all flowing like sweet wine for the arbor.”

“The Gardens of Selene … The Moonlight Paradise … it was real?”

“The Moonlight Paradise,” Sacred Oak echoed. Tears began to gather in the corners of his eyes as he remembered the songs of his youth, and gazed at what his imagination displayed for him. “That was a secret too, even back then. A place She would go to be alone to create the night, and do things proper to a Princess that only a Princess would know. Joyous Grove was Her head gardener. It was his job to make it the most beautiful place in the world. And he did.”

“Joyous Grove … the first in our line. You mean he—”

“That’s right. He was always there, night and day, doing the holy work of groundskeeping the Paradise. That’s why he was the only mortal soul to have witnessed the Great Evil.”

“Did he go blind? Or mad?”

Sacred Oak shook his head. Behind him, the teakettle was jetting a column of steam. He paused his recollections and got up, hunched under the weight of his years. Two mugs waited next to the stove. He filled them, and grabbing one with his teeth, set it in front of First. “There you go. Put a sprig of honeyfruit vine in yours to numb the sting. And no need to worry. No poison in our Roses’ thorns, though there’s tell there’s some that got it.” He took his mug and returned to his seat. “No,” he said, rubbing his temple, “the stories don’t align as to what became of Joyous. Some say he wandered off into the Gardens and was never seen again. Others—from the tradition we know and pass down—tell of his work after Her fall, trimmin’ back the foul influence of the Gardens’ corrupted magic. But all that’s long gone. What we have to discuss now is the next phase the moon has in store for you.”

A coyote warbled outside in the darkness. Others, more distant, yammered gibberish in reply. The canine noise drifted around the perimeter of the house’s walls, settling in the direction of the sanctuary. Voice by voice, it changed to the gnawing of bones.

First’s hoof twitched toward his blades. “Whatever it is, Da, by Her grace I’ll see it done.”

“Don’t be too sure there, charger,” said Sacred. “You ain’t heard what you gotta do yet.” He blew across his tea, watching the bitter vapors disperse in the empty space between them before taking an experimental sip. “That’s the ticket. Blended just right, if I do say so. Now, I’ve got another secret to tell you, and it’s of practical concern, so pay attention.”

He gave First a moment to cool his own brew before continuing. “I told you … I told you that you passed the test. Truth is, part of me was hoping that you wouldn’t; that I’d have to come down there and wrestle the buggers off you like I did when you were but a knee-high. You see, when a Caretaker proves his mettle in battle, and his resolve to safeguard the Princess’s domain, he takes on a new responsibility. First, it’s time for you to begin your life’s work. Tomorrow you need to leave here and create your own Sanctuary.” He gave his mug a few gentle rotations and looked away.

First forgot his drink. The feasting of the coyotes had finished, yielding to the intertwined choruses of the crickets as they rose and fell in the outdoor cool. “How am I supposed to do that, Da? Create my own Sanctuary? I’m only—”

“I know, First, I know. I wish it didn’t have to be that way, but those are the rules. This land—it wasn’t always a tame little Rose garden and hobby farm to fool the neighbors. I had to fight. To earn it. Just me and your ma. You know how in our devotions we affirm the highest and final virtue?”

“Sacrifice,” First murmured.

“Without sacrifice, there’s no war, no story, no nothin’. Now I gotta make mine, and you gotta make yours. It won’t be the last for either of us.”

Sacred Oak stood, gulped down the rest of his tea, and clomped heavy-hoofed upstairs.

Off

First Fruits was walking alone on a litter of oozy leaves, surrounded by the dark, primeval bodies of ageless trees. The rancid turf made no sound as he wandered, and he was as silent, bating his breath as a swimmer would for fear of inhaling the poison mists that broke across his face. He knew he was dreaming; he had this dream every night.

There was no moon, so he was lost. All around, ill will embodied by creatures that had been twisted by fell magic hung like the odor of carrion. Their presence pressed in on him, promising ambush and death should he make the misstep that triggered their wrath. Still he slogged onward, looking for something that had been given as a quest some time before by a musical voice and curtains of night blue tresses and wings.

An angry scream lifted from the thickets, not unlike that of the coyotes feasting on the burnt bones of the Roses. He stopped and looked to the sky, eager for what came next.

In response to the scream, the clouds above swirled to unveil the full force of the moon. Its silver rays cascaded in waterfalls of light mightier than the waters of Canterlot Mountain, and at its shining center a single, sorrowful eye appeared, as green and patient as the sea. The eye searched, turning to each break in the insidious canopy, reviewing each hopeless, night-beleaguered meadow in vain.

As always, it closed unfulfilled, and a word was whispered and wailed and thundered from the freshest root to the oldest, moss-clothed bole, and all the lost memories of the false reality.

Joyous

***

The dream ended, and First Fruits’ mind spun upward from the deep. He had always wondered what it meant. But now that he knew the true history of his lineage, the connections he was able to make brought no satisfaction: Joyous Grove, his ancestor of old, had seen the Great Evil with his own eyes, and with it the ruin of his life’s work. And now, like Joyous, he was to be an outcast, bound by rules he didn’t understand, let alone have a say in setting.

Gray light weighed on him like lukewarm bathwater while the wandering minutes slipped by. Morning had broken, and his father had not awoken him to start his chores. As he threw his blanket off and ratcheted upright on his mattress, he nearly fell onto the floor. The unease of the dream returned. Outside, the thud and rattle of a hoof against wood echoed like a monstrous chopping block. His father had never missed a day rousing him from sleep as far back as he could remember.

He managed to rise and head to the bathroom. In the mirror, he could see that his wound had dried, and that the edges had crusted over like they should. He smiled at the mouth-shaped hole. Just like Mama, he thought. She always got her point across. Now, in a way, she would be with him wherever he had to go.

When he had finished in the bathroom, he limped downstairs and into the kitchen. The dirty window shone its brownish light across the sink and bow-legged chairs. Instead of his usual tea and plate of oats, a saddle bag and water skin occupied the table. Cinnamon was inspecting them, sniffing and recoiling in turns.

“Guess I know what that all means,” murmured First. He ambled to the table and pulled the bag’s flap open.

There was a jumble of items inside: a hoof-written note lying on top, a quill bound to a thin book, an inkwell, a glass jar of oats, a ball of twine, an old map, and a box of matches. He dug deeper. At the bottom, bundled together so as to take up as little space as possible, were his blades.

Cinnamon bumped his foreleg and rubbed her spine along it as he lifted the note into the sunlight and began to read.

Deer First,

The day has come for you to be off. I wanted to say good-by to you, but there was something wrong with the fence I had to take care of. I’m not allowed to tell you what you have to do or where you need to go. I don’t know either way. But there’s nothing in the rules that says I can’t give you a hoof. So I’m giving you the contents you see in the bag, cause they’re things I wish I had when I went out to make my way.

1. An empty book in case you want to write down your thoughts

2. Some food

3. Twine for whatever requires it

4. A map they say was from the days of the High Sanctuary

5. Matches. A fire is for more than just cooking things

6. Your Rose shears, in case anything needs a trimmin

Your my son, so I know you’ll do alright. You can fight better than I could at your age, and your a likely lad. Speak only when you mean it. Be respectful to mares and your elders. Don’t be stupid. See to those three things and that will get you halfway.

Write to me when you’ve claimed your Sanctuary.

-Da

P.S. Cinnamon’s probably coming with you. You know better than to try to stop her.

First folded the note and tucked it between the blank pages of the journal. “Is that right, Cinnamon? You really coming with me?” He picked her up and tried to look her in the eye. “If you do, who’s going to keep Da company? Help him mind the Roses? No, you gotta stay here. Out on the road ain’t no place for a cat, even if she’s used to the outdoors.”

The cat pumped her forelegs, hanging limp in protest. Sighing, First set her down on the floor. “On the other hoof, I suppose Da’s got Ms. Sugar Plum to talk to if he wants. And the Mulberries.” He slung the tinkling saddlebag onto his back, and poked his muzzle through the strap of the water skin. It slipped down to his shoulders.

As soon as the cargo settled into place, Cinnamon jumped up behind his neck and sat down. He could feel her whiskers tickling his nape.

“OK,” he laughed, “that settles the matter. But if we get into any kind of trouble, don’t blame me.”

He took a hard look around the kitchen, willing the worn dishware and rags and cabinets to be branded into his memory. The sound of his father’s hoof pounding against the fence that they had both repaired a week ago and needed no mending rang out, sending imaginary heads tumbling. Laying a hoof on the back of his mother’s chair, he closed his eyes and spoke to the shadows, “Watch out for me, Mama.”

Before the possibilities of what might happen if she didn’t could creep into his thoughts, he turned, stepped into the brightening morning light, and onto the dusty gravel path that led away from home.

Miscalculation

It only took a few minutes on the trail for First Fruits to discover something fascinating about sunlight: it was still sunlight, whether he had a home or not. Whether he was tending the gardens of his father’s Sanctuary, or asleep and dreaming of the sorrow of a goddess, or being eaten by Roses, the birds would still sing, the clouds would still drift across the sky, and the grass would still whisper. None of that had changed after his mother had gone to be among the stars, he considered. It would be the same for him.

He also discovered, pausing at a fork in the trail to shield his eyes against the dry heat of the sun, that his new awareness of the constants of the universe did nothing to give any clue as to where he needed to go. His father had bidden him to create his own Sanctuary. The fact that this had come after proving himself in battle suggested that whatever he had to do would involve putting Roses down, but it revealed little about his destination.

He knew for certain that there were none in the town that waited at the end of the left fork of the trail, the lights of which he’d watched from his bedroom window all his life. There were shops serving the few families who lived there, a park, and the residents themselves. He turned right, into the sun.

The open farm fields that surrounded his home grew hilly and began to descend in a slow grade into a valley. Cinnamon was warm on his back, but if she was upset at the heat, she had not yet given voice to her discomfort. He took a drink from his water skin as he pondered the likelihood of finding his Sanctuary before night fell. The odds, he concluded, were poor, for the simple reason that he had only the white wispy clouds and humming fields to ask for a place to start. He wasn’t sure anyone would tell him—assuming that they knew anything about it—given how strict the quest’s rules were. Without family in any of the nearby villages who knew the family history and might at least give him a hint, he was left with the outside chance that a library might have some ancient book on its shelves from the old times that recorded all the dens and haunts of the monsters throughout the land.

He stopped short, causing Cinnamon to wobble against the back of his mane. Chuckling at his over-eagerness to start his journey, he unslung his saddlebag and withdrew the old map his father had packed for him. The thick parchment was the color of weathered yellow paint, with no part of it flat or free of fine wrinkles. The bottom bobbed like a dusty tail in the hot breeze as he held it in front of the sun.

The ink had long ago faded to a faint gray, and there were drops of it spattered across the bumpy surface, but he could still see the outlines of mountains, rivers and towns, few of which matched his knowledge of the placement of things. He could make out the gorge that was told to be home to monstrous serpents that burrowed in the walls of the cleft rock, and the Castle of the Two Sisters close by one of its branches. That the Castle was not represented by ruins spoke of the parchment’s age.

He peered closer. What he had at first taken as dried droplets spilled from a careless quill were in fact hundreds of crescent moons. No feather he knew of was thin enough to have drawn them. They could only have been created by magic.

They speckled the page like dark stars in a blazing night, thick in the wild areas and sparse near the cities. Some had been doubled with a second crescent to form a sharp-edged full moon. Dispersed as they might be, there was a pattern. They all converged at the miniature emblem of a single rose, solitary amid a forest of tangled limbs that skirted the Sisters’ domain of old.

Cinnamon stood up, stretched, circled once on his back, and lay down. He mulled over the possibilities. It was a waste of time to try to decipher the meaning of the symbols without seeking out what they represented. There could be no doubt that the rose signified something of utmost importance, but it seemed a bad idea to target a location that had been deemed of such prominence in an age when magic was dark, powerful and wild.

He traced the hair-like undulations of one of the rivers to the southwest of the rose with a hooftip. It was difficult to be sure, but the bends struck him as familiar, like those of a creek he knew lay at the bottom of the shallow valley he was descending. Beyond it on the map, a crescent moon was painted above what might have been a drop of water. It was as good a place as any to begin the search for his Sanctuary. He folded the parchment, tucked it back into his bag, and continued down the hill.

It took several degrees of the arc of the sun’s track to come within earshot of the creek’s anxious babble. Over the noise, he heard voices. Colts—older boys—laughing and snorting at some ongoing joke. He caught sight of them through the trees at a bend in the path. Five of them were lounging against the foundation posts of a wooden bridge that spanned the creek, hitting and pushing each other and telling tales. Above their heads, a single Pegasus hovered like a sweat bee, throwing rocks into the turgid brown water.

One of them—white of coat and bigger than the rest—whacked his nearest companion’s chest and brought the raucous herd to silence. The Pegasus dropped his load of rocks and crossed his forelegs. They all watched First as he emerged from behind the screen of saplings.

“Hey there, scrawny,” the leader called out. “You lookin’ to cross over?”

First Fruits stopped far enough away to get a head start should they decide to rush him. He’d been around danger often enough to be able to sense the tension in the air, and to know that one always needed space to maneuver, or escape. The colts on the bridge would be easy enough to deal with. It was the Pegasus who concerned him. He eyed the glaring flyer.

“What are you lookin’ at, chief?” he challenged, performing a mid-air somersault. “Never seen a pony with wings?”

“I seen plenty of featherhorses,” replied First. It was a lie, but letting on that he had seen only one before in his life, and from a great distance, would have invited more ridicule, or worse.

“Featherhorses, huh?” the Pegasus laughed. “I think maybe I need to take that as an insult.” His grin became a snarl in an instant.

“Hold up, Shriek,” said the leader. He turned to First. “There’s a toll for this bridge. Fifteen bits.” The rest of the gang came forward to form a living barrier.

There was still enough distance between them to run, First estimated. He held his ground. “What if I don’t got fifteen bits?”

“Well, then we need to get creative. Your bag will do. In lieu of the hard currency, you might say.”

“Aw yeah, old Pomp with the fancy words,” cheered a long-necked mustang.

First closed his eyes and smiled. The precepts of the Caretakers rose in his mind, ever ready to guide him, affirmed and engrained through years of daily repetition. The one he needed now resounded like a clear bell in his thoughts.

Harm no living pony.

“I’ll tell you fellas, I don’t wanna give up my bag, and I gotta cross the river, so maybe I’ll take a swim.” He circled to the narrow shoreline, giving the would-be thieves a wide berth.

They gaped at him as he stepped into the water and began to paddle his legs. The strong current dragged him downstream away from the bridge, but he had no trouble staying afloat, pushing off from the submerged rocks as he was carried into them. Cinnamon inched higher on his neck.

“Swim my tail!” Shriek bellowed. He dove out of the air and made a grab for First’s saddlebag. The others ran to the shore, jeering and ready to snatch the bag if it was tossed back to them.

“Get off me!” shouted First, but he knew it was an empty threat. He had underestimated their hostility, assuming they would respect a pony who would choose to ford a dangerous creek rather than yield to their demands. Now he had lost his escape route as well.

Just as the strap of his saddlebag began to work loose, he felt a weight push off from his shoulder blades. Cinnamon had launched herself onto Shriek’s face, digging her claws deep into his muzzle and ears. She spat and yowled as he flopped in midair above the thrashing surface of the water. Shriek, for his part, lived up to his name.

“Cinnamon, stop that!” First cried. He struggled to swim upstream, but had drifted into the fast current at the middle of the creek. He could only watch as the wrestling match between his cat and the angry Pegasus spun out of control, landing them both in the water. When he opened his mouth to shout again, the creek stuffed it full of grainy water, and his back struck a rock.

He spun, his neck whipping backward in a flash of stars. The cold waves closed over his muzzle.

Primrose

When the world returned to First Fruits, it was tickling his muzzle. Then it was cracking his head open like a walnut, and gagging him on sand and bits of river wash. He swatted at his nose. An insect with too many legs buzzed against his hoof and sprang away.

Fragments of the last few minutes played out in his vision: sneering faces of colts guarding a bridge, shaggy, unkempt manes, Cinnamon clutching a featherhorse’s face as they both dropped into a rocky brown river.

“Cinnamon …” First groaned. “Aww, no.”

He stood and let himself sink to the ankles in the mud island on which he’d washed up, ears and head hung low. His saddlebag was thick with clay and soaked through, and his waterskin was nowhere to be found. No voices reached him from upstream.

Step by step he slogged through the mire and, gripping a log half-buried in the bank, heaved himself up onto the grassy shore. The sun had drifted lower in the sky, but was still potent enough to burn his ears. He sat down and gazed a while at the water’s flow. When his lost cat failed to drift by, he sighed and unstrapped his bag.

He upended it, letting its contents spill out along with a brief torrent of water. The oats were still sealed in their glass jar, and his shears, rusted for years, would be none the worse for wear. The map was intact as well; the water had beaded on its surface, either by virtue of magic or a layer of wax too thin to detect.

A soft cardboard box plopped out. The matches inside were a lost cause. The twine and the journal followed, soggy like the rest of his supplies, but questionable. He placed them both outside of his shadow in the light, lay down, and watched.

He watched the journal’s blank pages dry, curling with imperceptible slowness, because he didn’t want to think about how many years Cinnamon had been with him and his family; of how his parents had surprised him one Hearth’s Warming morning by opening a box and showing him a ball of fluff with a red ribbon and bell around its neck. He watched an ant as it struggled to drag a dead fuzzy caterpillar to its nest, and was reminded of how quickly Cinnamon had brought him her first mouse, brown and limp outside his bedroom door.

He watched the sunlight play on leaves and dead matter as it was conveyed out of sight by the restless stream, and when it had turned from clear white to yellow, he uncorked the inkwell, found the driest page in the journal he could, and wrote at the top:

Day One

I feel like a darn fool.

Nothing else occurred to him to write. He packed everything but the map back into his grimy bag. Judging from the path of the sun, and how the stream bowed at a sharp angle south and southwest, his destination was to the northeast. He left the stream and its misfortunes behind, because that, he had learned, was what a Caretaker ought to do.

The grade of the field began to rise as he walked, and the smooth grassland became scored with gullies. Boulders peeked through the barrel-high green waves. Some of them were engraved with spiral patterns, and a few that were perched upright bore symbols carved deep into their gray faces. As he wound his way through the chaotic checkerboard and further uphill, the grass thinned to isolated clumps.

At the summit, First discovered that the hill was in fact a ridge that ran the length of the creek for as far as he could see. To the darkening east and north, a layer of thorn shrubs rose twisted from the earth, growing in height with the distance into an impenetrable forest wall. Back in the other direction, the mild grasses reigned, rippling under the lowered sun. He consulted the map, then glared over its edge at what lay on the opposite side of the ridge.

It was another gully, deeper than the others, and bedded on one side by weathered stones. A pool had settled in the depression it made in the slope, a mass of still grey water over which no birds or dragonflies played. A ring of dried, cracked mud surrounded it, faded yellow like the sun-bleached coat of a dead deer. From the mud to where First stood, the land was flint gravel, unbroken by anything living.

Above the pool on one of the girdling stones was carved a crescent moon.

He nodded and slipped the map into his bag. The sun would rule the sky for a few hours longer. Finding a town and a hostel that would give him shelter until moonrise seemed the best option. He thought it odd that the ground was unbroken—that there was no evidence of Roses at all—but that was a mystery he would solve tonight.

Scanning the horizon, he caught sight of a grid of lights canvasing the plains, midway between the daylight’s aura and the evening that trailed it from the east. Marking its position relative to where he stood and the gap in the hills that would welcome the sun to bed, he trudged down the cutting hard pack and back to the cool caresses of the grass.

Near the foot of the ridge, his thoughts of past battles and how he would need to steel himself for the unknown enemies that waited for him up at the grotto when he returned were interrupted by the sight of another traveler. It was a mare, ahead of him on the trail and walking, like he was, toward the town. She was burdened by a pair of overstuffed saddlebags, but somehow managing to keep her balance.

As he passed her, she stumbled nearer to him, causing him to brush one of her bags. A plume of tiny white feathers billowed out like dandelion seeds.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” he mumbled, and hurried to get ahead of her.

“Hello?” she called. “I’m sorry to intrude, but I couldn’t help but notice the mud. Did you take a tumble, sweetie?” Her slowing hoofsteps invited First to stop and turn.

“I’m all right,” he said to the ground. “Took a step too close to the river. Just need to get to town and wash up.”

“OK. Well, I’m glad you’re alright. My name’s Primrose, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Ms. Primrose,” he chuckled.

The mare shifted and gave him a wry look. “I’m sorry, is something funny?” She shooed a fly that was performing acrobatics near her muzzle, getting closer and closer with each loop.

First stopped laughing. “My apologies, ma’am, no. It’s just that … the flower on your mark ain’t a primrose.”

“Well Celestia’s fuzzy pink slippers, wouldn’t you know everypony says so! Everypony who knows flowers that is. Are you a gardener, Mr. …?”

“My name’s First Fruits. I’m a farmer. My ma knew flowers pretty good. I learned a little bit from her.”

“Knew? Is she …”

“Yeah, she passed away last month.”

“I see. I’m sorry to hear that. Pardon me for saying so, honey, but Greywater Fell is no place for a colt your age. Let me walk with you back home to town.”

“That’s OK, ma’am,” said First, looking from side to side for a way out. “I’m on an errand. Never been to the town up ahead. If you know of a hostel there, though, or a place that would take me in for a night in exchange for some dish washin’ or wood choppin’, I’d be grateful.”

“Dish washing? Wood chopping? You mean you’re out here by yourself with no money? No, I’ll have none of that. You can stay with my brother, Bellows. He’s the local blacksmith. If you really want to pay your way, I’m sure he can find something for you to do to make things square. Now come on, it’s getting dark.”

“Yes ma’am,” said First, falling into step behind her.

When they arrived at Bellows’ house, they found the window shades shut and the doors barred from the inside. Without a second’s hesitation, Primrose led First down an alley to the attached workshop, which she explained was always locked to keep thieves from stealing the expensive tools within, but had a secret entrance in case Bellows lost the key. First found it unusual that the blacksmith should include such a measure, but said nothing as his guide tapped a brick in the building’s foundation and opened the top of a rain barrel set tight up against the wall. Giving him a wink, she sloughed off her saddlebags, hopped in and disappeared into a hole at the bottom.

First peered into the barrel, worried that he had made a fatal error. Primrose, for all he knew, was a thief like the colts at the bridge, or worse, it could be that those very colts were waiting on the other side of the wall, ready to beat the unpaid toll out of his hide. He was formulating an escape plan when the lock clicked, and the metal-ribbed door creaked open.

Only Primrose appeared, smiling. She beckoned him inside when she saw him lingering at the bottom of the steps. “Come on, what are you waiting for? My brother is probably out travelling to pick up coal. He burns through a ton of it. There you go. Watch yourself coming in.”

First stepped out of the fading daylight into the gloom of the dormant forge. A sheet of metal squealed behind him, and a firefly lamp’s tremulous glow filled the room.

He ducked his head. The sudden light had revealed a row of scythes hung from the ceiling joists inches away, their wooden handles suspended like prison bars. Racks of spears, fence posts, and shovels lined the walls, interspersed with boxes piled high with horseshoes. At the far wall, the dark stone hulk of a furnace stood like a golem of legend, waiting for its master to return.

Primrose backed out into the doorway. “Yeah, he’s got quite a few orders he’s working on here,” she said. “Probably why he needs more coal. There’s a bucket of water he uses to quench the hot iron that you can use to wash the mud off. And see that hay pile over there? That’s where he sets the finer pieces to keep them from breaking during the course of a busy day. You can use that to sleep on if you like.”

First bowed his head for lack of a better way to show his gratitude. “I appreciate your help, ma’am. I gotta ask, though, why do you trust me? You talked about your brother keepin’ the door locked against thieves. What if I take a liking to one of these grass cutters here and walk off with it?” He gestured toward the scythes.

“Oh, well, call it a strong hunch,” Primrose chuckled. “I’m pretty good at reading ponies’ vibes, and I don’t think you’re that sort. And also, I know what you look like. Half the town goes to Bellows for this or that. There would be a lot of ponies searching for a young colt with a gray coat and a … a full moon forest for a cutie mark.” Her lime-green eyes pierced the shadows cast by the metalwork.

First looked away. “I get the picture, ma’am. I wasn’t intendin’ no trouble.”

“I know, sweetie. Now get some sleep. I’m heading home. I’ll stop by tomorrow morning at daybreak to check on you, alright?”

“I’ll do that. Thank you, ma’am. I won’t forget it.”

Primrose gave him a parting smile and shut the door. When her hoofsteps had faded into the night, First went to the window and checked the moon’s altitude. It was still low over the cooling hills, raised by the Princess no more than an hour ago. It would be another three before midnight. That left about two hours to wait, as it would take some time make the trek back to the grotto.

The layer of mud on his coat had crusted over on the way to town, and was causing an itch he could no longer ignore. He swung his saddlebag to the floor and began to look for the water bucket that Primrose had mentioned. As he picked his way from corner to corner, he marveled at the products of the blacksmith’s craft. The heads of the spears were identical; no burs, scratches or uneven edges differentiated them. It was the same with the woodwork of the shafts, and of the handles of the smaller axes, mauls and hammers that filled every shelf and wall rack. Every metal surface shone with a film of oil against corrosion. This was the workplace of a master; an established stallion who need never worry about the next week’s income.

He found the water bucket on the scarred anvil that was bolted to the floor beside the furnace, and a pile of rags. He took one and, dipping an end into the water, began to dab and scrape at the stubborn river clay. His gaze fell on the massive hammer lying against the anvil as he worked. Any pony who took something from this shop unbidden would have a very bad day if Bellows found them.

His coat cleaned and dry, he retrieved his journal and lay down on the hay bed beneath the window where he could write while marking the time by the moon. After loading his quill with ink, he started to scratch at the page, taking long breaks to gaze at the sky and think.

Still Day One (night time)

Found the Sign of the Moon by a spring. Looks bad. Maybe I need to cut whatever vines might be clingin to the place. Maybe that’s how I claim my Sanctuary.

Met a mare on the way. Seemed She’s nice. Her name’s Primrose, but go figure had carnations for her mark. I laughed. That was rude, shouldn’t do that again.

Need to think of how to repay Bellows for stayin the night in his forge. Bellows is Primrose’s brother. Don’t get on his bad side.

When he’d finished, he knew that it was time. The hour called to him in a chorus of voices: invitations made by the starlight; the heightened song of the crickets; the single perfect curve of the moon’s eastern side contradicted by the vague, diffuse west; the blued clouds that clothed her. It was so on every night that his duty as a Caretaker was to be fulfilled. He took up his saddlebag and stepped out to resume his role in the eternal play.

The sparkling grasses swept against his limber legs as he strode toward the hills. It was easy to retrace his path with the western horizon highlighted by the luminous sky. Urged onward by his purpose and unchallenged by pony or beast, he soon came to the spot where he’d met Primrose. The turf was still beaten down where the two of them had stopped and talked. She would be fast asleep by now, he mused. Perhaps the Night Princess was watching over her in her dreams. He began the climb up the ridge’s steep slope.

When the green carpet had balded to reveal the hard pack beneath, he tossed his bag to the ground and withdrew his shears. The twine, he found, was somewhat brittle from its turn drying in the sun, but did not break as he tightened the knots that bound the blades to his legs. He clamped the final loop between his top teeth to fix the final instrument to his muzzle and rushed up the ridge to find his enemies.

At the crest, by the side of the barren grotto, he found them. Two silhouettes marred the sky, blotting the ridgeline into nightmarish shapes. Downslope a creature stooped, its twisted, hairless face sloshing at the pool’s surface. Its bloated black tongue lapped the lifeless waters through a jumble of fangs too numerous for its pasty white muzzle. Its claws, sprouted from what once might have been hooves in odd-numbered, asymmetric digits, scrawled against stone as they kneaded in violent tension.

Another figure sat above the pool at the moon-engraven dolmen. It wore a black hooded cloak that concealed all but the fact that its occupant was a pony. A puppy hung limp in the crook of one foreleg. The other hoof bore a knife.

The creature finished drinking and looked up at the listless animal with pus-white pupils. Its breath quickened, polluting the calm night air with rancid coughs of hunger.

“In the name of Selene,” a mare’s voice hissed. She drew the knife across the puppy’s throat, cranking its neck to let the blood streak across the monster’s face. It howled and raised its clawed forelimbs in exaltation, as if to grasp the moon and pull it down for its own. In reply, the pony threw her offering into the pool.

The creature plucked up the dying animal and found the source of the spraying blood with its fangs. It purred wetly, sucking hard enough to shrink its prey’s abdomen and wither its limbs. When there was nothing left for it to gulp, it cast the husk aside and let free a raw-throated shriek of triumph.

The mare dropped her knife and bowed her head. She did nothing as the monster climbed wolf-like up the grotto, sniffing and eager. She did nothing as it opened its reeking, bloodstained mouth wide, lolled its tongue, and gave her cheek a long lascivious lick.

First Fruits had seen enough. He raised his forelegs and crossed them, baring the old blades to the moonlight. “Accept your servant’s labor, o Mother of the Sacred Night!” he spoke aloud. “This branch too will fail, but by Your grace may it not be tonight!”

The mare gasped at the calling of his prayer and backed away. Bound by his code to avoid injury to the living, First kept an eye on her and began to circle the beast. This, it was clear, was no ordinary Rose. He knew nothing of its capabilities beyond its claws and fangs, which made his usual battle techniques dangerous to employ until he could draw its strengths and weaknesses out.

He leapt forward and gave a quick feint with one of his blades. The creature caught it in its claws and slammed his foreleg to the ground. While he was pinned, it lunged at his face, ready to resolve the matter in a single snap of its jaws.

In the instant before the oily red teeth touched his muzzle, First ducked his head and swung his shear upward to cleave the creature’s jaw in two. The metal dug into the pale gelatinous flesh, but before it could split the knotted bone, the twine binding snapped. The beast roared and, pulling the shear from its throat, swatted First into the side of the ridge and jumped on top of him.

Struggling to bring his foreleg shears up for protection, he saw something quick and agile tear across the gravel to his side. It darted up into the air like a squirrel leaping to a bough full of acorns and attached itself to the monster’s face. Quick, vicious claws raked its baleful eyes, slicing them open in sprays of black fluid. As quickly as it came, the furtive savior hopped away into the darkness.

First seized the opportunity. A sharp double kick with his hind legs pushed the thrashing abomination off and to the edge of the pool, where it balanced on three legs while it rubbed at its shredded eyes. He found his muzzle shear and, pressing it between his hooves, rolled and cut at the planted foreleg. The limb cracked and bent backward.

As the ruined monster fell off-balance, he sprang upright and swung the shear upward to continue the cut he’d made earlier below its jaw. The blade entered the hanging flaps of cloven flesh, and with an exhalation of septic fluids its wretched head separated from its neck. The body slumped to the ground and began to convulse.

“First Fruits? Selene blesses us all, you’re a Caretaker! I knew it!”

He paused, ready to sever the still-thrashing claws and stomp the gagging head flat.

“Ms. Primrose? Is that you?”

“Yes and no, sweetie,” she laughed, her hooves wet and dripping with blood. “My name is Wild Carnation.”

The Three Missions

First’s blades arced down, and the repugnant pale limbs of the creature dropped to the gore-slickened gravel. The gargling head he placed on one of the weathered girdling stones, and, lifting one of the fallen boulders above his head, brought it down to crush the cartilaginous skull. Pieces of jaw and blackened brains cascaded down the sides of the makeshift anvil.

Satisfied that any threat had been neutralized, he walked to the still-troubled water and knelt, paying no regard to the restless remains that littered the ground around him. He crossed his blades and spoke out to the cloudless moon.

“Let your Garden be that much more beautiful, o Night Princess. Thank you for guiding my shears. All is in service to You.”

The cool night wind whispered over the crest of the ridge in reply.

“Cinnamon, where are you girl?” he called to the darkness. He broke his pose and smiled. “Trimmed the Rose … it’s safe to come out.”

A ruddy shadow appeared from beyond the ridge’s crest. Silent paws picked their way over the battle-raked earth, homing on the sound of his voice. Cinnamon stepped into the moonlight, and saw her friend. She bounded the rest of the way, leapt onto his back to her spot below his mane, and curled up.

“The Salute! You did the Salute! Oh, it’s really true,” Wild Carnation shouted. She sank to her haunches, laughing and crying at the same time.

First smiled as Cinnamon nuzzled his neck. “Are you OK, ma’am?”

“No … yes … I don’t know! I just … I never thought I’d be free of that thing.” She rushed down from the head of the pool and swept him into a bone-crushing hug.

“Blessed stars! Selene has finally sent a Caretaker to us in our dire need. So many years. So much misery. So much … what’s the matter?”

First had begun to squirm in her grip. She let go and backed away, checking him for injuries. Seeing none, she sat down at a safe distance and waited for him to collect himself.

“I’m not supposed to look at mares …” he mumbled, crossing his forelegs. His shears clacked together and locked, almost tripping him. “Until I’m a full-grown stallion.”

“Oh honey, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to butt into your personal space. Shoot, I shouldn’t have said butt. Bad timing. Isn’t it funny how things like that come out at the wrong time?”

“It’s OK, I guess. You were probably getting blood on Cinnamon either way.”

Wild peeked around First’s head. Cinnamon glared angrily back at her, covered in thick red streaks.

She looked down at her own stained forelegs and grimaced. “Goodness. Well, OK. Why don’t we all get back to the forge and wash up? Bellows has to have more than one towel, although—” she turned and retrieved her saddlebags from behind a boulder “—a pony never knows with singletons like him. I can use a shop rag if he doesn’t.”

She swiveled downhill and began to trot in the direction of the distant town lights. “I’ll come back tomorrow morning to collect the remains of the werebeast and poor Sweet’ums. Poor puppy. Just for the record, she was unconscious. I drugged her with Pillowcase herb extract so she wouldn’t feel it when I …” She paused when she realized that First wasn’t following her.

“Aren’t you coming?” she called up the hill.

“I smelled your mane,” First mumbled, his head bowed to the ground.

“You … oh. Was it bad?” She pushed one of her locks in front of her muzzle. All she could detect was the peach scent of her shampoo, faint after the long day’s labor. She strode back to where First was slouching and rested a hoof on his shoulder.

“Listen, we both serve holy Selene, but even if we didn’t, I’d respect your … uh … the way you were raised. OK, honey? I’ll try not to make it awkward for you again. But I also have to say that mares are just ponies. We’re not magic, or sacred, any more than stallions are. Or maybe I should say we’re all equally sacred in the eyes of the Night Princess. OK?”

“Yeah,” said First, “guess I never thought of it that way. Sorry for—“

“No sorries,” Wild interrupted. She swung around once more and resumed her descent into the valley. This time First Fruits followed.

Their hike along the winding dirt trail was far more harrowing for him than the last. After the battle with the creature by the barren pool, he was watchful for more of the beasts charging across the acres of dew-soaked grasses, aiming to avenge their fallen pack mate with flailing claws and gnashing fangs. The moon watched with him, he was glad to see, leaving no hill or rise shadowed below the stars. Nothing could launch itself out of the darkness without there being plenty of time for him to prepare himself.

When they entered the town, they were met only by a solitary raccoon as it trundled across the cobblestone road. They passed below halos of moths and wispy mayflies entranced by the street lamps’ orange light, wheeling and slapping against the glass in whispering clouds. It was well into the morning hours, and all of the balconies and doorsteps were silent. They ducked under a line of forgotten laundry strung across the alley behind the empty forge and, checking for eyes in the windows above, stepped inside.

Wild opened the damper of the firefly lamp like she had before. “So, any trouble getting that mud off of you earlier? Wait, before you answer that, how did you really get it on you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

First went to the quenching bucket and threw her a wet towel. “Well, I found a bridge across the river, but there was a bunch of no-account ponies there waitin’ to collect a toll. Told ’em I’d rather swim, so I did, but it all went kittywampus. Next I knew I was washed up in the mud somewhere downstream, and Cinnamon was gone.” He picked up another towel and began washing the blood from the cat’s long tawny fur. “Can I ask you something now?”

“Sure, I don’t mind,” said Wild as she scrubbed the side of her face the creature had defiled with its tongue.

First turned his attention to cleaning his forelegs and chest. “Well, uh, what was that all about up on the ridge? Never heard of a Caretaker doin’ somethin’ like that.”

“Well … I …” Wild faltered. Her voice lost any hint of cheer. “I was making an offering. Sacrificing to the werebeast.”

“You were what? You’re supposed to trim the Roses, not feed ’em.”

“I know, I know. I’m not a Caretaker, First. I can’t do what you do. No one in the Lowlands can. We’ve been—” she sniffed “—we’ve been without a Caretaker for almost twenty years. Two hundred and twenty-eight cycles, and no one to defend us from that cursed wight. So we had no choice but to give it what it wanted. It bested Hazel, the last Caretaker. That’s how it started. The townsfolk found her … most of her … by the Greywater—that’s the pool on the ridge. More bodies turned up in the days that followed; ponies we all knew. Ponies I grew up with. I was just a filly at the time, but I remember the adults talking. And how scared they were. Those in service to Selene knew it to be a Rose of some kind. They eventually came up with the idea to leave a chicken by the Greywater, hoping the thing would be appeased. I was … I was the one they chose to bear the offering. If I came back, they’d know their plan worked.” She rubbed at her face harder, as if her skin were diseased and she was sanding away a rash.

First scraped at the worn floorboards. “Sorry how much sorrow the thing caused you. Glad I could do my part to help. But I’m wonderin’, if you’re not a Caretaker, how do you know about Roses? Why were you sent to the Greywater?”

Wild stopped scrubbing herself. “I am a Lorekeeper, of the Order of the Moon Brilliant,” she replied, holding her head high.

First appraised her for a long moment, his brow creased in thought. “Haven’t heard of Lorekeepers.”

“You haven’t?”

“Nope. Far as I know a Caretaker’s a Caretaker.”

“Oh, well, we’ll have to fix that right now!” Wild retorted. She hung her towel over a rack of what would eventually be pickaxes, headed to the hay bed where First had rested earlier, and lay down. She beckoned him to join her with a wave of her hoof.

First hurried to unstrap his blades. While he worked at the knots in the twine, Cinnamon padded to where Wild was waiting and burrowed under the hay beside her.

Unencumbered, First eased into the soft, dry straw. Cinnamon began to purr, her rasps doubling and trebling with her contentment.

“In the days of the High Sanctuary,” Wild began in the low, conspiratorial voice of a scholar long enthralled by her studies, “there were three missions, fashioned after the three duties of the laborers of the Garden. The first mission was that of the Caretaker, modeled on the groundskeepers who would work all hours, in the days of old, to trim and dig and sculpt the earth. Theirs were the hooves that moved the soil of the Moonlight Paradise. The Caretakers, like the groundskeepers, were greatest in number of the three, and were charged with protecting the subjects of the absent Princess in Her time of woe. It was they who would reclaim the lost Sanctuaries, and tame the fell magic that had taken root wherever it was spread by the idolaters of Nightmare Moon.”

First stared in awe at Wild’s words. “Stars preserve us,” he whispered. He curled up, eager to hear more.

Wild saw his enthusiasm and smiled. “The second mission,” she continued, “was the Lorekeepers, who were inspired by the Garden’s sages who wrote the almanacs, and whose business it was to know the season and needs of every plant and fruit, and the habit of every creature that was let to roam there. The Lorekeepers’ role was to track the history of the High Sanctuary, and to record all of the deeds of its members. It was organized into Orders, each with its own task. Arguments arose over the centuries, sadly; disagreements over details at first, then full-blown schisms. 'The past is past; who can tell what the truth is?' Or so they say.”

First nestled deeper into the warm bed of hay. “What was the third mission?” he asked.

“The third mission, and the smallest, was the Wayfinders. They were the counterparts of the Garden’s architects, who were privy to the will and whim of the Night Princess. The architects would lay the plans, and guide the sages and the groundskeepers in their execution. The Wayfinders, likewise, were the seers. They could perceive what others could not; the lines of magical force that underpin the earth. The way of things was known to them, and the story that nature tells. But they are unknown in these days, except a few. And all are cursed.”

“Cursed?” First probed.

“Yes. In the early days, a powerful Wayfinder was seduced to the worship of the Nightmare aspect of the Princess. She doomed her fellows to speak no more. All who followed, born with the vocation, are as silent as the stones.”

“’Silent as the stones’ … that’s horrible.”

“It is. I only know of one in this region: a mare about my age who lives in the marshlands. I haven’t met her, but there’s tell she has the gift beyond doubt.” Wild was quiet for a time, listening to Cinnamon’s constant purring. After taking a deep breath, she sighed and looked up at First once more. “Well, I’ve blabbed at lot,” she said. “Do you have any questions?”

First thought for a moment. “My head’s spinnin’ like a top,” he said. “Not sure where to start. Maybe the Caretakers, I guess. Can you tell me more about them, seein’ as I am one?”

Wild nodded and cleared her throat. “In time, the Caretakers dwindled, their ranks decimated by the nature of their work: either they succeeded and lessened the need for more, or they didn’t and … well … their lines ended. They divided into clans, and eventually isolated families, living on the sites of the Sanctuaries they purged and maintained. Do you know anything of your family’s history? Tell me your ancestors’ names, if you know them, and I’ll see if I can place them.”

“Well, my da’s name is Sacred Oak," replied First, scratching his head, "and his da’s name was Silver Branches, and his great, great, great grandmama’s name or somesuch was Pine Delight—we know because we have a letter quilled by her own hoof—then—”

“Wait, did you say Pine Delight?”

“Yup. Don’t know much about her except she mentions prunin’ back the Roses sure enough in her letter, which means she was a Caretaker too.”

Wild began rubbing her temple with her hooftip. “That’s … hold on, that’s ringing a bell. That’s right, there’s a Pine Delight mentioned in the Chronicles of Receding Blight. Page two hundred sixty-one, paragraph six, if I recall. ‘And Pine Delight overthrew them every each, the Children vile and grim of Weeping Willow, bearing the holy sigil and geis of her forebear, all glory to Selene.’ Or something like that. If she’s your direct ancestor, that means you’re of the lineage of—“

“Joyous Grove?”

“Yes! The Moonseer. The One Architect, favored by Selene above all. Do you know his story? You must.”

First nodded. “Some of it, I guess. Ponies actually heard about him? I thought only me and Da knew. Family secret.”

“Of course ponies know about him! Well, all who belong to the missions. First, Joyous Grove is—“

The door that connected the workshop to the house crashed open. A stallion appeared out of the shadows beyond, tall and lean, with muscles that writhed at every joint as he moved. His black mane brushed against the top of the doorframe.

“What have we here?” he rumbled, one eyebrow raised.

The Root

“Bellows!” Wild called. “You’re back?”

The charcoal-coated figure shifted from one side of the doorframe to the other. “I’m struggling to think of a sane reason you would be chatting with a colt at three AM in my workshop,” he said, scratching the bristles of his carefully trimmed goatee. He let the following silence turn the statement into a question.

“Bellows, listen, you’re not going to believe this,” Wild began.

“I already don’t believe it.”

Wild shook her head. “This ‘colt’ is First Fruits, and”—she stood, disturbing Cinnamon enough to cut her purring short—“he’s a Caretaker! The dark times are over at last!”

Cinnamon burst from the hay and dashed into the labyrinth that the wooden feet of the racks and display cabinets made above the shop floor.

“A Caretaker with a kitty cat,” Bellows mused, descending the hoof-sawn steps that led from the house. “Where did you find him, Primrose, lurking around the graveyard using his pet to catch the barrow rats?” His heavy hooves drummed his advance.

First rose as the towering blacksmith stopped just a bit too close, his uncertain gaze at a level with the stallion’s chest. Bellows smirked down at him, daring a reply.

“It’s true, sir,” he said, “been at work in the garden long as I can remember.”

“Bellows,” Wild cut in before the conversation could take a wrong turn, “number one, I’ve already told him my real name, so you can stop calling me Primrose. Number two, I’m serious. I saw him cut down the werebeast with my own eyes. Him and his ‘kitty cat’. And he did the Salute, before and after, just as the Chronicles tell of the Lunated warriors of the High Sanctuary! You know, like in chapter twenty-seven, page forty … no, forty-one of—”

It was then that Bellows noticed the scars that crisscrossed First’s forelegs, and the deep, ragged crater in his shoulder. He lifted a hoof to silence Wild.

The smirk faded from his face. “If that’s true,” he said to First, “you didn’t do it with your bare hooves. Show me what you used.”

First gestured to where his shears lay, haphazard in loops of still-knotted twine.

Bellows blinked and turned quickly to the window, which framed the luminous night sky. “Ah stars, things change …” he sighed. His words faltered. The distant lights he’d invoked flickered back at him from the depths of their black sea. “Sometimes for the better. Thank you, Selene. Thank you for taking this burden from us.”

He cleared his throat and turned back to First. “My sister has suffered a long time because of that monster. I won’t forget this.”

A pair of whiskers and a probing snout slipped through a break in the shadowy furniture undergrowth. Cinnamon emerged, not missing the opportunity to scratch her spine along the bottom of a stand of saw blades. She hopped to her spot on First’s back. “It only seems fair to me, sir,” First replied to Bellows. “Ms. Carnation has shown me kindness and nothin’ else. Besides, it’s what I was born and raised to do.”

A smile broke on Bellow’s muzzle like a crack in granite. “Be that as it may, you must be tired after your battle, not to mention being up all night and most of the morning. I myself have been traveling the night through. Had to settle a debt with my carpenter. Why don’t we all get to sleep and tell the rest of the story over breakfast tomorrow?”

“Sounds good to me,” said First.

Wild yawned. “Seconded,” she agreed.

“Great. Problem is, I only have one guest room. Don’t get too many guests, for some reason. You mind spending the night out here, First?”

“No, sir.”

“Good enough. Follow your nose to the kitchen when you get up. I’ll leave the door to the house unlocked. Wild, as for you, you remember where the guest room is?”

“Yuppers,” said Wild. She launched into an exaggerated yawn and headed up the steps out of sight.

Bellows watched her go. Turning once again to First, he placed a hoof on his shoulder. “I meant what I said, by the way. I won’t forget what you did for her. You’re welcome in this house while I’m its owner, and if you ever need supplies, come to me. You won’t pay a thin bit.”

It was First’s turn to smile. “Yes sir, I appreciate that.”

“OK then. Wash room is the door at the end of the hallway on the right. See you in the morning.”

First knelt down into the soft bed of hay and curled up. “Good night,” he called.

The door clicked shut. A few moments later it opened again to reveal Bellows’ stern face. “One more thing,” he said.

First lifted his head back up out of the sweet-smelling hay with effort. “What’s that?”

A thick white bath towel landed next to him.

“Don’t use up my shop towels.”

***

The first ray of sunlight that crept over the windowsill spilled onto the nape of First’s neck, adding to Cinnamon’s warmth. The scent of cooling bread and fried eggs mingled with that of wood and charcoal that hung in the forge. He shook his mane, his signal to Cinnamon that it was time to get up. When she’d lazily complied, he stretched, found his journal, and opened to a fresh page.

Day two

Put down a new kind of Rose. It’s called a warebeast, or some such. Wild Carnation told me. That’s Primrose’s real name. Not sure why she had a fake one.

Didn’t know manes could smell like fruit.

He looked outside the window above the hay pile, quill in mouth. Ponies were shuffling out of their doorways and down the streets into the gray morning. Some pulled fruit and vegetable carts, to be set up in the marketplace for the noon hour rush. Others, wearing suits, dresses, hats or shawls, trudged to their shops and offices to repeat the daily routine of their livelihoods. First watched them a while, then put his quill away and headed into the house.

Once he’d finished in the washroom, he remembered Bellows’ instructions to follow his nose. It wasn’t difficult. Sharp cheese and oranges had mingled with the ambrosial scents already tugging at his stomach. The hallway that led deeper into the warren of alcoves and crystal doorknobs was lined with ornate credenzas, each one bearing its own enigmatic iron sculpture. The dark wallpaper displayed a faint tartan design, broken here and there by the frames of frowning portraits.

The muffled voices of a mare and stallion filtered through the finery. Wild Carnation and Bellows were arguing. Worried that he was the subject of their ire, First hurried onward until he rounded a corner and found himself in the kitchen.

“Yeah, you can stay here and hammer out my next order,” Bellows grumbled. He was leaning forward over a table set for three, glowering at a cross-legged Wild. “Shouldn’t be too bad, just thirty-five broad-axes for the lumberjacks up on Warped Heights. By the way, they conscripted the last blacksmith that didn’t deliver. For three years.”

Wild waved his ill-concealed warning away with a hoof. “So get your apprentice to help. Oh wait, you don’t have one because you’re a prickly … oh, hi, First!”

“Good morning, ma’am,” First replied, lingering at the edge of the room. “Should I come back later?”

“No, no, please! Sit down. Eat. My dear brother and I were just having a small disagreement.”

Bellows snorted. “Yeah, we disagree as to whether I should spend the next thirty-six moons chopping trees down with nothing but my hooves and willpower.”

Wild tossed her mane, trying to make it look like she was straightening it. The scent of peaches wafted briefly. “I’m trying to convince my dear, wise, oh-so-dedicated sibling here that there are more important things in life than wood and metal. Unfortunately, his head is made of one or both of those.”

“At least mine isn’t full of random trivia from the post-Fall darkness!” Bellows retorted. He took an angry bite of orange, rind and all.

“And now you’re forgetting your manners!” Wild shouted, before replacing her snarl with a smile. “First, please join us. The esteemed stallion of the house is going to lead us in what I’m sure will be an elegant devotion before we break our fast.”

First slunk into the chair that had been saved for him, exercising every caution to avoid jostling the table that had been laden with a pyramid of whole oranges, wheels of aged cheese, steaming loaves of bread and fried eggs. Three glasses of orange juice rippled as he sat. Bellows huffed and extended his hooves to him and Wild.

First glanced at the work-worn hoof. When he saw Wild touch hers to her brother’s, he followed suit. Bellows cleared his throat and spoke:

The deer all have walked free,

The spiders, they did weave their homes,

The wolves to their dens have returned,

And the owls from their branches cease to roam.

The night now is done; we await the next one:

Thank you for giving it to us, o Selene.

Wild smiled at her brother before turning to First. “Do you say anything similar? Just, you know, professional curiosity.”

First shrugged. “Yeah, Da and I always say, ‘Thank you Night Princess for letting us live another day’,” he rattled off with perfunctory speed.

Wild thought for a moment. “I guess that makes sense,” she said. “Caretakers never know when they’re going to be called to be stars in Selene’s dark veil.” Her smile turned wistful.

“S’ppose that’s true,” First agreed. He nibbled at a slice of cheese, wincing at the potent, though pleasant tang. “Speakin’ a’that, never seen a Rose like the one last night. Usually they’re folks we buried. What was it?”

Wild and Bellows shared a quick glance. “We’re not exactly sure,” Wild began, “but we have some theories.”

“Go ahead, tell him,” urged Bellows.

Wild bit off half of a buttery chunk of bread and ground at it, gathering her thoughts. “So … there’s more to the story I started telling you last night,” she said after she washed it down with a gulp of orange juice. She leaned in as if to prevent anyone within earshot from hearing what she was about to say. “I think I’m being tracked.”

“Tracked?” First asked.

“Yes. I believe it’s because I’m doing some tracking myself. You see, there was nothing I hated more than that abomination. I knew I wasn’t strong enough to kill it, if that word even applies, so I considered the next best thing: find whatever magic created it and destroy that.” She took a bite of her eggs and chewed, gazing into the past. The silence stretched just a bit too long before she resumed. “I started with the Greywater. My cache of Lore records—every Lorekeeper has their own store of ancient scrolls and writ to study and safeguard—had plenty to say about the Cultivation, and I was dead sure the well dated back to that cursed time. This kind of research is a lot like a puzzle, you know? The genealogy we covered yesterday is part of it; piece this fact with that one, make sure the dates line up, watch for contradictory versions of the events and weed out the false leads.”

“Nintey-nine percent of them are false leads,” Bellows muttered.

Wild ignored him. “The more I researched, the more one name stood out among the traitors. And in the end, only one lie at the center of the tangled lines of history and reasoning like a spider surrounded by dead flies: Baal-Kaas.”

Bellows shivered. Feeling a primal loathing at the sound of the name himself, and fear corkscrewing upward like cold liquid metal from his very bones, First marveled at the sight of the powerful stallion trembling. As it left Wild’s lips, it dredged at his memories, lifting foreign whispers like filth from a swollen river bed.

“Who … who were they?” he managed to ask.

Wild steadied herself before continuing. “It has to do with the Mystery of the Nine Stars. So much goes back to that. Even the Cultivation, I’m sure of it. Haven’t been able to prove it though. Sorry, I’m throwing words around.” She took a sip of orange juice as if she were a tired scholar at the end of a day-long lecture. “He tended the waters of the Garden: the measurement of the arcs, the gradients of the streams; the height of the waterfalls and their orientation to catch the rays of the sun and moon to make splendorous rainbows; which of the reflecting pools had fish and which didn’t; these were his duties, and he oversaw them to perfection. He took direction from Joyous Grove himself, as did all of the most gifted groundskeepers, to ensure that the vision of Selene was realized.”

“Until she was shunned by her own people, and her vision failed,” Bellows interjected. He nudged First. “Listen to her go, bud. She’s in full-on Lorekeeper mode.”

Wild nodded, her face serious and downcast. “Until her Fall. Until the great dream became a nightmare and all was lost. Many of the laborers, in their impervious loyalty, followed Selene on her Tartaran path. They remained laborers—oh yes—but came to see the whole world as their garden, in the same way that Nightmare Moon saw Equestria as her rightful dominion. A thousand tears for the telling of the tale! It is said that at the very moment of her Fall, all the flowers were poisoned: where their petals once shone with life-giving moonlight that inspired both genius in mind and love in heart, they withered in endless decay, bearing fell magic to bind the dead and raise them. The charmed apples—delightful to taste—that could sustain the mightiest stallion all day with a single bite, would now turn good ponies to mere horses, mindless and mad. The beasts that gave gentle companionship became monsters, and the sweet waters that could heal any wound became the surest path to the grave.”

It was all First Fruits could do to continue eating, so rapt he was by the images Wild’s words painted. He felt, more than saw them, as if they were the fabric of the dream that underlay the waking world. Even Bellows had gone silent next to him, his big lanky presence warm and tense.

Wild wasn’t finished. “Tell me, First, are there any strange flowers to be found in your father’s Sanctuary?”

First bowed his head, searching memories that after only a day’s journey seemed indistinct from his imaginings. “Now that you ask, yeah, over the way into the garden there’s a trellis of white roses that I never thought looked right. And they don’t die in winter!”

“That’s right. That’s because they aren’t alive. At least, not like you and me.”

“You mean that …”

“Yes, First. The smallest flower, the merest drop of water is all it takes. That was the Cultivation. That was their plan: disperse the tainted seeds of the Garden to saturate the whole world: to turn the very earth against the living. The Greywater, I’ve come to be convinced, was one of the ‘gifts’ of Baal-Kaas. The local histories say that ponies or animals that drink from it don’t die. They suffer. They rot alive until all they can do is scream.”

“W-why?” First whispered. “Why would any pony want that?”

Wild shook her head. “Baal-Kaas is just a title. Took me a while to figure that one out. It means “root of agony” in old Ponish, or something like that. His real name was forgotten centuries ago. The point is, I think he’s still out there. I think he’s still alive, like your white roses.” She waited for her words to sink in. “Somehow, he’s responsible for the werebeast, which tells me he’s become more active in recent years. And somehow he knows I’ve been looking for him, and has been looking for me in turn. Now that you’ve slain his creation, he’ll be trying all the harder to find me.”

“So what do we do?”

“The Wayfinder I mentioned to you last night. We need her. All I know is that her name is Sundew, and that she lives in Frogmire. There’s a small community that keeps mostly to themselves in the swamp and surrounding peat bogs there. Few travel in or out. I’ve spent almost the whole morning trying to convince ‘sunshine’ here to come with us.” She pointed at Bellows, who rolled his eyes in reply.

“Could we just go and try to find Baal-Kaas ourselves?” asked First.

“I would, but I have no idea where to start. Also, I have to confess, I have an ulterior motive. The last time a Caretaker, a Lorekeeper and a Wayfinder have been together in the same room was several thousand moons ago. We’d be making history.”

Bellows drained his orange juice and slammed the glass down in resignation. “Sounds like there’s only one thing for it, then,” he growled. “We need to talk to Sundew.”

Hope

Wild Carnation smirked, leaning back in her chair and tapping her front hooves together. Outside, the sun had risen high enough to filter through the curtains in the adjacent dining room, which was furnished more like a museum than as a place to accommodate guests. A group of ponies was talking in the street beyond the papered walls, happy to bandy the day’s news and marketplace deals.

“Ah I see,” she said. “All in, now that there’s the prospect of a little glory. Gotta say, surprised but not surprised.”

Bellows shrugged. “Maybe. It’s more the prospect of my baby sister flanks up in bog water that settled it.” He folded his hooves behind his head and waited.

“I am not a baby,” Wild snarled. “And I’m two years older than you.”

“Whatever,” said Bellows. His smile crinkled as he tried to suppress it. “So Frogmire wetlands is a big place. Happen to know where to look for the town, if one can call it that?”

“I have a general idea,” Wild answered, glaring from under her bangs. “We can ask the locals.”

Bellows stood up and stretched. “Sounds great.” He brought his dishes to the sink and started running the faucet. “Good plan. We’re going to need some … persuasion … in case the natives aren’t keen on cooperating. You having any more, bud?”

First had been looking back and forth at his hosts during their exchange. “No, sir,” he answered.

Bellows nodded and grabbed a stack of cheese slices. He tossed them into his mouth and spoke as he chewed. “Plus, if Baal-Kaas really is tracking you, there’s a decent enough chance he’ll find you. I can bring along one of my pointier pieces. A lance? No, we’re going to need to do some chopping. A glaive! Best of both worlds. That’s the ticket.”

“‘Persuasion’? ‘Do some chopping’?” Wild laughed. “What are you of all ponies going to do? You don’t know how to fight!”

“I don’t have to know, my skeptical sister. I just have to look like I know. I mean”—he extracted a heavy mezzaluna blade from a wall hook and flexed—“would you mess with me in a dark alley?”

Wild shook her head and stood to clean up her own dishes. “All that anvil pounding has knocked your brain loose.” She grinned at First as he gave her his plates, only to frown as the sight of him distracted her from her train of thought. “First, I’m afraid I’ve been entirely selfish. I forgot to ask you whether you even wanted to come with us.”

Bellows stopped scraping unfinished egg and bread crusts into the trash can and turned.

First had, he realized, been assuming he would be traveling with them, so caught up was he in the tale Wild had woven. But nowhere in her plan was the resolution of his journey; the defeat of whatever monsters awaited him at what was to be his sanctuary. Now that she had asked the question, he found himself at odds with his own destiny.

“I … uh …” he stuttered.

Wild swept her mane out of her face, waiting for his reply. First remembered how miserable she had looked standing above the Greywater, covered in blood, enduring the touch of Baal-Kaas’s hideous creation. He remembered how she hadn’t hesitated to bring him, a complete stranger, to the safety of her brother’s forge. He couldn’t accept the thought of her trekking off into danger with no real protection.

“I’d be happy to travel with you, ma’am. I’ll do what I can against whatever the foe might send our way, at least as far as Frogmire.”

Bellows patted him on the back. “Never had a doubt, First. Wild, about how far is it? Thirty miles, give or take if I recall. Is that right?”

“Yeah, about that,” Wild answered. “The main road is likely underwater this time of year, so we might have to circle around a bit”. The dishes clanked as she dumped the frying pan into the sink. When the countertop had been cleared to her satisfaction, she turned and pushed her chair in.

“’Circle around a bit’,” Bellows echoed, eyebrow raised. “Tell you what. Let’s spend a day here, make sure we have everything we need for the road. Thirty miles can seem a lot longer if you forgot your waterskin. Besides, I want to have a look at our Caretaker’s shears. They could use some touching up. OK if I give them the treatment?”

First had never thought about how his tools looked, let alone whether the layer of rust and decayed matter that had collected on them over the years interfered with their function. “Yes, sir,” he replied.

Wild gave his shoulders a quick squeeze with her foreleg. “First, let’s go into town to buy what we need for the trip. That’ll give Captain of the Guard here enough time to work his magic. Then we can all leave tomorrow morning after a night’s rest.”

“Sounds good, ma’am,” said First, trying to blot the scent of peaches out of his mind.

***

Wild and First spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon wending their way through the disorderly grid of wagons, carts and tents that comprised the Lowlands Market, and select shops that vended from the stone-and-wood lower floors of the town’s modest office buildings. Wild led them to the stands that sold hardier fruits and vegetables that would keep in the late springtime heat, and oats and nuts to provide energy over the miles to and from their destination. Cantaloupe, apples, sweet potatoes, red peppers, and small burlap sacks went into Wild’s oversized saddlebags. From the indoor shops she picked out insect repellent, waterskins, three tents, matches, and a length of rope. “To pull Bellows out of the bogwater when he falls in,” she explained to First about the final item.

After a late lunch of fruit salad and biscuits under the umbrellas of Wild’s favorite café, they returned to the forge. As they rounded the corner, they caught sight of Bellows leaning out of the shop window. He waved them onward with a long, wiry foreleg.

“Come on in,” he called, grinning. “Want to get your opinion on something. Both of you.”

Wild made a sawing motion across her neck to silence him. Checking the corners of the street, she beckoned First to follow her into the alley they had used to enter the shop in secret.

Inside, Bellows was fondling something like one would an infant. An arc of metal was cradled in the crook of his foreleg, brilliant to blinding in the sunlight that shone through the window above the hay bed. “First,” he called, petting the luminous curve as if it were a favorite puppy. “Come on over and take a look. Let me know what you think.”

First went to him and stood at an angle to avoid the intense gleams the object threw off. As Bellows held it lower for him to inspect, he discovered that it was a blade, but one unlike any he had ever seen. The mirror-like surface was a pale blue, like moonlight on snow. The apex of its curve was engraved on one side with nine stars encompassing a crescent moon, and on the other, the same moon embraced by trees, flowers, and animals at play. As hard and First looked, he couldn’t make out individual lines in the images, so fine was the patterning.

The dull spine of the blade was grooved and bored through in the center, but to what purpose, he couldn’t fathom.

Wild caught up to them and gasped when she saw it. “Bellows, is that … was that what was hiding under all that filth? This … First, your shears are artifacts of the rarest kind! I can hardly believe it.” She ran a hooftip over the pictures captured in the metal. “The Nine Stars! There are only five known artifacts left that depict them: most were rigorously sought out and destroyed or defaced. Let me see the other side.”

Bellows let her turn it in his grasp. “It’s the Garden!” she cried. “First, did you know these were here?”

“No, ma’am. My da told me they were just sickle blades that had the handles broke off. Never saw underneath the rust and stuff.”

Wild laughed. “Well I can tell you that these are worth a hundred thousand sickle blades to the right Lorekeeper. No, more than that. These were forged in the High Sanctuary at the zenith of its power, judging by the tint of the steel. Before the schism.”

“I see you’ve been paying attention to my lessons on alloys,” said Bellows. “Go on. You know who wielded these.”

Wild nodded. “They are the holy tools of a Caretaker who completed the journey from new to full: one who was granted Lunation. Not that anyone really knows what that meant. But the images signify something more: they may be didactic. Quaint, I would say, but there is only gravity where the Night Princess is concerned.”

“What does ‘didactic’ mean?” asked First.

“It means whoever made them was trying to teach us something,” Wild replied. She peered at the perfect illustrations a while longer. “Do the others have more of these pictures?”

“Sure do,” said Bellows, still beaming. “Though they’re different. Different scenes.”

“Incredible. First, do you mind if I take these back to my house tonight so I can reference them against the lore? If I can find even one passage that mentions them conclusively, it may bridge several gaps in our understanding of the first years following the Fall. It may even solve the Mystery!”

First looked to Bellows, who shrugged. “I don’t see anything wrong with that, ma’am,” he said. “Maybe you’ll find out somethin’ important.”

“Thank you!” said Wild. She stepped forward to hug him, but remembering her promise, stopped herself and backed away. Bellows coughed to hide a chuckle and gave her the blade.

Wild gathered the others and added them to her saddlebags. “I’ll see you two tomorrow. Wish me luck!”

“Don’t stay up too late!” Bellows called as she went back out into the alley. “I’m not carrying you if you pass out on the trail.” As the door closed he turned to First. “Guess you get an upgrade at Hotel Bellows, bud. Guest room is yours. Hope my sister didn’t trash it.”

“I don’t think she’d do that, sir. She’s a good mare.”

Bellows laughed. “I’ll let that slide since she isn’t here. By the way,” he said with a wink, “I wouldn’t have let you two go by yourselves. I just can’t help riling her up.”

***

First’s nightly dream of his sojourn in the malignant forest felt different to him this time. The tangled limbs of the trees were as foreboding as ever, and the dark sky pressed just as heavily on the mist that enshrouded the muddy litter of leaves and fungus-eaten woodfall. Angry whispers cut through the miasma at every rub of twig against branch, mingling with the sharp patter of water falling from the oily leaves above, like icy tears shed by giants. He wandered as always amongst the abominations that kept guard, searching in vain for a prize the nature of which teased him from the rim of his memories. And as always, the timbre of the insinuated voices turned one by one to despair, building up their single-noted crescendo as the great eye appeared in the brilliant moon.

Joyous

But there was an undertone to the howl this time; an inhalation of flowers in the noxious breath of the swamp, or an upturn in one or two of the voices that played at something long disbelieved. There was a word for it, he was sure.

He stopped and stared up through the curtain of diamonds falling from the trees. For the first time in his life the eye turned to him, and he realized that this dream might not be his own.

By Name

“So did you figure it all out last night?”

The thicket of tools and weapons in the forge’s racks were as silent as the dawn that was breaking in the morning hush. Wild Carnation was tying a harness around Bellows’ barrel, a wry look on her face, while he watched the twists of her nimble hooves at the buckles. A staff half his length, tipped with a broad, burnished scimitar, was balanced in the crook of his foreleg. He looked up at her when she didn’t immediately answer.

“No,” Wild sighed, flipping her unkempt mane over her shoulder. “First’s shears are tools of ineffable sorrow and bitter joy; the same as could be said of the Mission of all Caretakers. There’s no more to be found than that. And the glyphs … I tried to view them as symbols centered on the Nine Stars, and looked for any incomplete translations or sequences of images in the Chronicles, but this set appears to be unique. The only mystery I solved was that of the small one that First wears on his muzzle. That’s just for gathering sheep’s wool. Since we have only eight images in total, that might mean one of these artifacts is missing. Or maybe not.” She sighed again. “I don’t know.”

She cinched the final clasp at Bellows’ shoulder. He gave an approving nod, and worked the butt of the pole into a reed-woven couch that he’d attached to the harness, canting it so that the blade jutted several feet in the air.

“How do I look?” he asked, turning in place to preview every angle.

“Like a Royal Guard that was booted out of the service after failing parade drills,” said Wild. “You’re seriously going to strut through town with that? We’re supposed to keep a low profile!”

“Whatever,” Bellows replied. “Big stallion plus big weapon equals stand aside. You don’t need any long-dead scroll writers to help you solve that equation.” He slipped a cut of cloth off of a barrel top and began threading the glaive’s long haft through a row of loops that had been sewn to one side. “Check it out: two hoops with one jump.” He let the felt banner hang in clear view. It displayed a muscular, dark grey foreleg holding a hammer above an anvil. “Figured I could get a little advertising in while simultaneously distracting the general populace from the fact that I’m walking around on a sunny day in modern Equestria sporting a replica pre-Fall battlefield weapon.” He worked a burr loose from the blade. “Finely crafted though it is.”

Wild gave him a brief, exasperated glare. “Whatever yourself. All ready, First?” she asked, hefting her supply-filled saddlebags onto her back.

“Yes ma’am,” he replied. He had packed his own bag while the two of them had devised how to fix the glaive to Bellows for the trip without it tipping forward. His shears, bound with fresh loops of twine, were buried deep within and out of sight. Cinnamon watched the preparations from her perch behind his mane, her tail sweeping left and right in a square patch of sun.

“Excellent! I think that does it. Are we forgetting anything?”

All three looked around and took mental inventories. Concerned only that his banner was adequately visible, Bellows shrugged and went to the alleyway door. “Remember the schtick, ‘Primrose’,” he called back. “All new sale, bonus thrown in.”

“Yes,” Wild groaned. She trudged after him as he dipped the glaive’s wicked tip below the doorframe and shimmied outside. First gave the interior of the forge a final perusal, and, seeing nothing where it shouldn’t be, followed the two of them into the morning mist.

The first few minutes were quiet. It was too early for the workaday risers to have ventured out onto the streets. The trio passed by vacant brick doorsteps, some bearing emptied bowls of cat and dog food, others with their iron railings draped with the overflow of last night’s laundry. Sounds of pre-dawn routines coming to a close murmured from behind the humble portals.

Ponies began to emerge from their homes as the three crossed into the center square. Colts and fillies filtered away from pairs of adults to blue signs that had been posted where the streets broke into the open cobblestone space. There they clustered, babbling and scrapping as they waited for their minders to lead them safely to school. Smiling parents watched them bound down stairs and chase after each other in the broadening daylight, and gave their morning greetings to their neighbors.

First started at the sight of the crowd, his eyes darting from one strange face to another. It was a larger gathering of ponies than he’d ever encountered. He could feel Cinnamon tense between his shoulder blades.

Now surrounded by townsfolk, Bellows reached up to unfold an errant corner of his banner and called out, “Hear ye, hear ye: three-day sale going on at Bellows’ Forge! Top-notch deals! Ten percent off all ironwork. Garden rakes to decorative gates; doorknobs to key fobs: it all has to go!”

“Save those bits, folks!” Wild chimed in. “Place your order today and receive a discount on your family’s genealogy, courtesy of your favorite historian, Primrose! Half off for five generations back. Get your horseshoes hammered while you get to know your great-great grandma. What a bundle!”

A mare holding a baby colt strode up to keep pace. “How do I place an order?” she asked.

Bellows flashed a winning smile. “Thank you kindly, Fennel,” he answered. “Leave a note in the mail slot at the Forge. Items, quantities, and how soon you need them. Minimum wait time of one week: I’m heading to Oreload Valley for raw stock. Might take me a bit to get back.”

“I’ll do just that. How about you, Primrose? Should I stop by your house next week?”

“Yes indeedy!” Wild grinned. “Where did we leave off during our last session? Your grand-uncle Trousers, if I recall?”

“You remembered! That’s quite the melon you’ve got, Prim. You’re sharp as a tack, I always said.”

So they proceeded through town, Bellows high-stepping with puffed chest and banner flapping against the clouds and sun, Wild waddling beside him exchanging niceties with the local townsmares, and First moping behind them, flinching and averting his gaze every time it fell on a filly or mare as if he’d been bitten by gnats. They made it to the far side of the square, where the streets narrowed and zigzagged into the tight-packed frontispieces of the business district. The buzz of the crowd faded behind them, dulled by the intervening stone and glass.

Through the gate of the low town wall they went. The rising sun hung just above the blurred line of the mountains, forcing their gazes down to the level of the road. Ponies passed by with tips of hats and friendly, half-mumbled ‘good-morning’s on their way to deliver their carts of produce to the market. The farmcolts and fillies who sat among the tumbling pumpkins, silk-headed corn and crates of milk bottles whispered to each other at the sight of the hoof-and-anvil banner.

First surveyed the tilled fields and colonies of animals that drifted by as he passed. They were more expansive and better equipped than anything he had seen before. The cows butted their muzzles against the grass in pens twice the size of his father’s yard, and their troughs of silage were tended by what looked like dedicated teams of farmhands. He imagined that these sprawling operations had been here since the time of Canterlot’s founding, and had served the Princesses from the time they had arrived from the Land of the Alicorns. The Night Princess herself may have dined on pumpkins grown from these very acres.

He turned to Wild, who appeared to be lost in thought. She had spoken now and then of old mysteries; the forgotten stories of Selene, and the Nine Stars that all well-knew attended the moon, he recalled. Somehow he was part of it; generation by generation, the consequences of the evil that had happened ages ago had guided every moment of his life. He found himself wondering what more she might be able to reveal.

“Ma’am?” he ventured.

“… which ended in post-Fall year forty-three, seventh moon … right,” Wild mumbled as if bookmarking her musings. “Yes? First, was that you?”

First cringed, upset that he had interrupted her train of thought. “I’m sorry ma’am, but some things you said before got me curious, and I thought maybe we could pass the time easier if we talked.”

“Careful what you wish for, bud,” Bellows said with a grin. “Once that dam’s crack opens, there’s no filling it.” He winked at his sister.

“Your fake spear is drooping, sweetie,” Wild replied with her most cheerful smile.

Bellows stamped a hoof. “It’s not a spear. I told you, it’s a—”

He nearly tripped as the heavy scimitar arced downward and jammed into the dirt in front of him. A wagonload of farm fillies rumbled by, giggling as he righted himself.

Wild returned her attention to First. “Sure, honey, what would you like to hear about?”

“Well, um, I know you weren’t able to find any history regardin’ my shears, but let’s say they do tell of somethin’ to do with the Nine Stars adrift and girded. Maybe, if you’re willin’, you could say some more about those, and a little of how my family and Joyous Grove were involved.”

Wild regarded him a moment, one eye narrowed. “‘Adrift’ … ‘girded’ … First, did you mean to use those words?”

“Probably. Might have heard ’em used when there was speakin’ of the moon. Da used to talk such like, when I was younger. Can’t really remember.”

“Interesting,” was all Wild said before reverting to a troubled silence. They began walking again after Bellows had scraped the dirt from his banner. Just when First began to think his request had been forgotten, Wild spoke.

“The first decade or so after the Fall is jumbled in the lore. The order of events can’t be sorted with the information we have. Names, places, dates: nothing is strung together true, in a way anyone can make sense of. History, like ponies, has a hard time remembering unpleasant things.”

The image of his dead mother snarling from a hole in the ground flashed in First’s mind. Bits and pieces of that night followed: how needful the rotten mare’s lunges were to bite and rend; the snap of her neck as he bucked her; the mane he used to play with as a foal, ruined and dirt-clotted. That he had forgotten the battle until now led him to agree with Wild’s claim.

“Around the time of the Fall, nine stars appeared in the sky, surrounding the moon,” she continued. “When Celestia banished Selene there, they began their dance, wandering in the darkness, sometimes slowing and becoming fixed in place to form a pattern, only to drift away to roam again. You’ve seen them. The Lorekeepers have studied these patterns for centuries. The best we’ve been able to tell is that they repeat … like a message of unfulfilled longing for what they frame … and that they are magical configurations belonging to a fundamental binding of almost unimaginable power. I’ve observed them myself, of course. I can almost make out the lines between them, and what I see is … is pained … desperate …”

“Ma’am?” First asked when Wild didn’t complete her sentence.

She jumped. “Sorry. It may be I’ve fallen into the trap of reading my own story into the constellations. Where was I? Yes. You may remember I mentioned that there are branches among the Lorekeepers; different sects that followed different interpretations of what little there is to piece together. Early on, like first century, one such enclave resolved to devote all their studies and energy to researching the Mystery, and so formed an Order of the same name: The Order of the Nine Stars.”

Wild paused to let a caravan of cows pass by. They eyed her as if scolding her for dwelling on a forbidden subject. She let loose a shiver as the last ropy tail swished past them.

“They were a secretive lot; proud of their choice of subject matter. We all believe our life’s work is the most important, don’t we? They knew the Mystery haunted all the Lorekeepers as a central enigma, and that all dabbled in it to an extent.”

Wild shuddered again, her face growing dark. “Some say that they solved it. Like so many things, no one knows whether or not that’s true, but we do know most went mad, and that all were corrupted and broke from the Missions to join the enemy in sowing fell magic throughout the world. The Cultivation probably couldn’t have happened if it weren’t for them, at least not as effectively as it did. So many lives lost.”

First let the final bitter statement stand as he gathered the courage to push further. The road now was empty for miles, up to where it curved behind a hill. Hoping the lack of eavesdroppers would ease the tension, he spoke again.

“But Joyous Grove put ’em in their place?”

“Joyous Grove,” Wild repeated, looking up to the cottony folds of clouds and into the sunlit corridors of her knowledge. “All who serve know his name. It is said that before him there were none who possessed Earth Pony magic as great as his, and that after him, there will be none greater. If he willed any tree or plant to grow, it would, for the very soil would change to provide what was needed. The touch of his hoof could heal all but the most mortal of wounds, whether of pony or beast, and cause water to well from the deep aquifers. His command was light and wonderful to fulfill. He could make of any desert an eternal oasis.”

First felt a swell of pride despite himself. His ancestor was famous among those who toiled in the night. Hundreds of years after his time, ponies still remembered him.

“It was Joyous Grove, the Moonseer, who founded the Missions,” Wild continued. “It was he who taught the groundskeepers to be Caretakers, and infused a part of his boundless magic somehow in their work. Likewise he devised the tasks of the Lorekeepers and Wayfinders. But once he had seen the High Sanctuary created and strong against the enemy, he disappeared. Or he may as well have. After that no extant history attributes any new activity to him.”

“You said he was close with the Night Princess?” First asked.

“‘Close’ doesn’t begin to describe it,” Wild replied with a hint of a smile. “Some traditions claim that they were united beyond friendship. One or two even insist that they were together in the way of stallions and mares, but those who concentrate their gaze upon the Moon Brilliant, such as myself, know these to be mild blasphemies.”

Bellows chuckled, but said nothing. They proceeded through the easy quiet of the remaining morning to where the hill had obscured their view of the road. Halfway around its bend they were met by a narrow stone bridge that arched above a muddy ribbon of deep, rushing water. Five lean figures lounged at its foot. A single Pegasus flapped on restless wings above them.

First stopped. The sound of his hooves grinding against the gravel brought his companions to a halt, and alerted the malingerers to their arrival.

The foremost broke off skipping stones across the surface of the creek. “It’s Scrawny, and he’s brought his mommy and daddy. Hey, there’s a toll to cross this bridge.”

Before anyone else could speak, Wild stepped forward. “How much?” she asked.

“Fifteen bits.”

“And one cat!” the Pegasus growled. “I need a new winter cap, and that furball’s hide will do perfect! Yeah, that’s right, I’m talkin’ about you, you murderous little sofa stainer! Don’t think I forgot!” He pointed a hoof at the strips of white gauze scattered across his face, then at Cinnamon. She blinked back at him, unimpressed.

First tried to unscramble his panicked thoughts enough to retrieve his memories of the past few days. This wasn’t part of the plan. The leader’s name was Pomp, he remembered, and Shriek was the Pegasus. They were traveling thieves, it seemed, blocking the way at every crossing and demanding a toll. He didn’t need to see their scowls to know they weren’t happy with him after how things turned out last time they’d met.

Wild gave him a nudge. “What do you say, First? I can give them the money. How do you want to handle it?”

“Well,” he said under his breath, “I’m thinkin’ if we give them what they want, they’ll just keep expectin’ it from ponies, but I don’t know if we can persuade ’em to leave either. Maybe …”

“Let me take a crack,” said Bellows as he stepped forward. “Look, lads,” he called out, “maybe you didn’t catch what was going on here.” He gestured at the point of his weapon with a few quick dips of his muzzle.

“What is that?” laughed Shriek. “Did you find some dragon’s toothpick and decide to wear it? I mean, is that supposed to be your costume? Wait, I get it: you’re a drunk fence post!” He swooped down and snatched the banner from behind the blade, which began to tilt downward again.

He somersaulted upward and out of reach. “Sweet! I can use this as a bathroom mat. Nice and soft on the hooves.”

Wild had had enough. She stamped to within hoof’s reach of the swaggering ringleader. “Pompous Circumstance! Is that you? Lemon Loaf’s colt?”

The burly colt looked from side to side at his partners in crime. “Y-yeah. What about it?” he answered, a quaver in his voice.

“Lemon is a client of mine. We have tea together almost twice a week. I’ve been working on her family tree for … oh, what is it now … half a year? What if I turn around right now, trot to her house and tell her what you’re up to? That her son is making a disgrace of himself, robbing colts and mares, for what? To add another stuffed Celestia doll to his collection?” She gave him a knowing look.

Pompous deflated like a balloon. “She’s … she’s the Princess. They’re hoof-made …” he attempted. His friends turned to each other, confused and mumbling. Some were holding back their laughter.

“Move along now,” said Wild, “and maybe I won’t bring it up at my next session with Lemon.”

His head hung low, Pompous began trudging in the direction of the town. The gang followed after him, no longer formed in rank. Shriek shot off to the safety of the clouds. “I’m keeping this, though,” he shouted, flapping the banner. In moments he was out of sight.

“See that? No fuss, no muss,” said Wild. She rounded her back to settle her saddlebags.

First gaped at her. “How did you do that, ma’am?”

She shrugged. “Just a small proverb from the Lore: ‘when someone gives you trouble, call them by name.’” Without further explanation, she cleared her throat, tossed her mane, and waited for Bellows to collect himself.

They crossed single-file over the stone bridge and resumed their journey. First asked no more questions, reflecting instead on Wild’s subtle victory over the gang of thieves, and the history she had shared from her seemingly bottomless reservoir of tales. Bellows marched onward in the lead, head high as if nothing had happened to cast doubt on his plan.

Five miles passed, to First’s estimation. He began to see pools of water dot the level green of the grassland. Their still, untroubled surfaces captured the bright whites and vague blues of the sky, so that he could almost trick himself into believing that they were portals to another world where everything was upside down. The farther they went, the more frequently he spotted them, now linked in twos and threes into small, shallow ponds. The gravel of the road had become slushy with mud and slow sheets of water flowing from one side to the other.

They were not alone. The grass roared with the songs of frogs and grasshoppers. Giant crickets, as long and thick as a foreleg, ambled on stilts through the tunnels between the tufts of vegetation. Moths, snakes, toads and newts leapt off the trail and into the green living walls at the sound of their approach. Wild had claimed she was being tracked. First wondered what else might be crawling through the watery terrain, homing on the thud and grind of their hooves. He scanned from side to side, expecting something to lunge at them at any moment.

What was not a mystery was that the flies had become a nuisance. Wild stopped them to dispense the repellent, smearing the pungent gel over their flanks, shoulders and necks. It helped for a while, but eventually encouraged the whining pests to attack the unprotected parts of their bodies, and First found himself resorting to the ancient methods of flicking tail and ear. “Wish I’d brought a sickle instead of this heavy thing,” Bellows grumbled. He snorted, shook his mane, and continued on.

In another few miles they reached a point where the road dissolved into a patch of mud of unknown depth. The sun, now well into its descent, soaked their skin through the humid air like a wet blanket. Pausing again, this time to share a cantaloupe, they considered a hoof-beaten side trail that seemed to wind between the shimmering ponds, which had come to divide the landscape into narrow ribbons of dry land like veins of green iron in stained glass. In the distance, smoke arose in columns below gray windmills, and the sweet, complicated smell of smoldering peat tingled their noses.

“Well,” said Bellows, “you’ve been right on the money so far, Wild, annoying as that is. I suppose now it’s time to consult the locals on how to find your Wayfinder friend?”

Wild nodded. “Couldn’t hurt,” she replied. “Just try not to fall in. I don’t think your spear floats.”

They stepped onto the hoof-trail and began to follow its winding, treacherous path through the waterlogged world. The blinding reflections from the miniature sea made it seem they were suspended in a sunlit void, with no way to tell up from down. They may as well have been ants climbing grass blades that reached forever into the sky. First marveled at the strange plants that lined the trail: bulbous, fleshy stalks full of spines and water, orchids tangled in the undergrowth, and everywhere, sparkles as countless as the stars; specks of light at the ends of every tiny red hair that sprouted from low starburst flora, overlain with trapped, dying horseflies and beetles.

As they approached the nearest windmill, a stallion who had been digging turf and arranging it into rows of bricks to dry stood from his labor, stretched his back until it crackled, and hailed them. Wild went forward to greet him.

“Hello!” she started, flashing a smile. “My name is Primose, and I was looking to interview some of the residents here for the Canterlot Herald regarding the challenges of managing life in the marshlands. Do you happen to know anypony in the area who is especially hard beset that I could speak with?”

The stallion took in her words like he’d been slapped in the face. “Well you sure do talk a million bits, don’t ya? Ponies call me Ol’ Mossy when they call me. If yer lookin’ for a real hard pony, Sundew would be your mare. Good luck though. She don’t see nobody lest they’re from the Frogmire, and sure as sugar she don’t talk to ’em.”

Wild shared a look with Bellows and First. “She doesn’t talk?” she prodded.

“Not a word. She can’t. The superstitious folk that live in the woods back her way say she’s cursed. I think she just ate some a’ them sticky flypaper plants when times were lean and it rotted the tongue outta her head.”

Primrose held a foreleg to her chest. “That’s terrible! Well, I have a quill and paper for her to write on. Do you know where can we find her, by any chance?”

“Sure, if yer willin’ to swim a stroke or two. Head back to that last mill over there—yeah, that one with the broken flap I gotta fix thanks to the storm that blew through last week, blast it all—head back there and you’ll see some trees. Short ones, ’cause the soil’s bad. Follow the trail there for two miles. After that you’ll have to do the dog paddle. Nice meetin’ ya, Miss Primrose.” He chuckled to himself, picked up his turf cutter, and bent down to sink it into the ground.

Wild waved Bellows and First forward. Once they’d joined her, they proceeded on past the windmills and into the thicket of stunted trees. The path was no less dangerous than in the open bog, offering plenty of chances to roll an ankle on a loose tuft of grass and tumble into the foul swamp water. To add to the danger, the sun was making its final arc down to the horizon, and the waning light was broken by the twisted trees that had been able to grow no thicker than saplings in the thin, uncharitable earth.

The last mile through the darkening bog was almost unbearable. The flies had risen up in clouds that dove, stung, and bit whenever the opportunity presented itself. The travelers took long pulls at their waterskins, flinching and tossing their heads whenever one of their attackers got through. Still they stumbled on until they reached a point where they could not proceed. The trail ended in a narrow pond that encircled a far, forested shore like a moat for as far as could be seen in both directions. The coffee-colored, gritty flood dropped away in an underwater cliff, with no hope of seeing the bottom, let alone touching it.

As she hiked her overstuffed saddlebags on her shoulders high enough to keep them dry for the impending swim, Wild caught sight of something across the murky channel. She gasped, and tapped Bellows and First to get their attention.

A lone pony stood on the opposite bank. Her straw-colored mane and coat matched her eyes and tail, which hung limp despite the omnipresent flies. Her back and legs were covered with them. If they were biting her, it was clear she could no longer feel it, for she stood as motionless as a statue. She was watching them, and they got the impression that she had been watching them for some time. She raised a hoof and pointed at the surface of the water to their right.

Bellows walked to where he thought the imaginary line from her hooftip ended. “Hey, check this out,” he said. He stepped into the water and began to cross. “See, I float just fine,” he called back.

Wild and First followed suit. There, dividing the silty marsh oxbow was a sandbar, spanning clear from one side to the other. They hastened after Bellows and made it to the far shore.

After shaking off her hooves, Wild went forward to speak with the unsmiling mare. “I am Wild Carnation,” she said, “Lorekeeper of the Order of the Moon Brilliant, and this is First Fruits, a proven Caretaker of the lineage of Joyous Grove himself. We are looking for Sundew, a Wayfinder of no small fame in service to holy Selene, and were told she lives in this area. Have we found her?”

The mare turned from her to First, then to Bellows, her question obvious.

“My brother Bellows,” Wild affirmed, “an ally to the Missions. He crafts implements used by Caretakers throughout Equestria.”

“Best blacksmith in the Lowlands,” Bellows said with a bow. “My sister here says you’re a Wayfinder. If that’s true, then us all meeting here is a big deal.” He unslung his glaive and laid it gently on the ground. “So is it? Are you Sundew?”

Their host beckoned them with a quick gesture of her hoof, turned, and walked into the forest.

“I think she wants us to follow her,” Bellows whispered. He trotted after her like a colt following a carrot cart. Wild and First joined him.

“First,” Wild said as they walked, “can you feel that? When she looks at you?”

First nodded. The strange mare’s gaze had caused something deep in his stomach to churn. It was a feeling like finding a chest of ancient golden bits in his backyard, buried there for years without him knowing, or of finding a cache of gems under a floorboard in a dream. “Yes, ma’am. She’s special, no doubt. I feel like I’m already her friend.”

“Me too,” said Wild.

The forest was cool and quiet. Ahead, the sun was half sunk in its bed, its final rays struggling to break through the screen of branches. The saplings of the marsh had yielded to massive pines, hunched close together and clothed in hanging moss that billowed like curtains to veil away the light. Their clean, piquant odor likewise cordoned off the insidious vapors of the swamp. A mourning dove called down from the bearded boughs, waited, and was answered by an echoing partner. Behind them the moon climbed inch by inch, one side still shadowed in gibbous anticipation.

The trail broke into a clearing. As First stepped out from the darkness of the trees, he thought his senses had failed him. He sank to his knees. Within the glade was a garden more beautiful than the golden treasure promised by the calm gaze of the mare he now knew could only be Sundew.

Patches of moss, each its own radiant color of the rainbow, were arranged at the feet of aged stone columns, which were embraced by diaphanous vines that glowed pale blue in the shadows. The scent of their sweet flowers struck First like voices cheering, welcoming him like a merry herd from a long-forgotten past. Birds of every kind darted between the surrounding forest and the water that pooled in natural bowls that some ancient river had carved in the bedrock.

First fought hard against the urge to cry. Every petal was perfect. Every stone was placed where it belonged. Among them, he belonged.

In the center of the garden was a statue of a crowned mare, her forelegs and wings outstretched as if to shelter the whole world, her horn held high and pointing at the night’s newborn stars. Her eyes were closed. First could only guess at what she was dreaming, but the crescent moon that adorned her chest left no doubt as to who she was.

Sundew lay down on a bed of pine needles beneath the statue’s wings, a wistful smile playing at her lips. The flies had dispersed as if unable to abide the garden’s overabundant beauty. Fireflies now orbited around her, alighting in her mane and tail and dancing a hide-and-seek ballet around her head. She held out her forelegs to First, and to Wild, who had chosen to let her emotions play.

As if by force of gravity they went to the statue. The triumphant songs of the frogs and night birds lifted as the two approached and sat on their haunches next to Sundew beneath the protective wings. She nodded, bidding them to raise their hooves. They obeyed at once, and seeing each other as if through the haze of a dream, touched them together to form a circle.

At that moment the moon broke free of the horizon. Its light doubled in strength, filling the garden glade with sober brilliance. It was then that First truly saw what Sundew had created. The statue was a fountain, channeling some subterranean spring to flow up and out from beneath its lidded eyes. The silvered water flowed like endless tears down the solemn stone face, to feed the luminescent blooms and all the animals and birds that came to drink.

“The moon ascends in wisdom and joy! We are blessed this sacred night!” cried Wild, her rapturous voice building the spell’s momentum. “In turn your children bless you, o Selene of boundless love!”

At the sounding of her last word, Sundew broke the circle and stood. Alarm twisted her features. She stamped her hooves as small huffs and whines escaped her throat.

Something splashed in the distance.

The forest went silent.

A Message

Cinnamon rose into a low crouch, her claws extended just enough to dig into First’s skin. The gentle touch of a hoof caused him to turn, only to be captured by Sundew’s strange, not-quite-golden eyes. They were not unlike his father’s, calm and reassuring before a battle with the Roses, or his mother’s while she taught him another prayer to say as the moon rose. Sundew was speaking with her iron gaze, and so urgent was her intent that he almost heard the words:

Get out your blades.

He nodded. Dropping his saddle bag to the ground, he worked it open, drew out the bundle of moon-kissed metal, and began slipping his legs through their twine loops. Cinnamon disappeared into the hushed, twilit mounds of moss that surrounded the base of the weeping statue as he bit into the gritty hemp that secured his muzzle shear.

“Anybody else hear that?” Bellows asked. He was facing the direction of the path they had used to cross through the forest, having guessed at the source of the sound.

“It’s what I’m not hearing that concerns me,” said Wild. “Where are the animals?”

She took a few uncertain steps toward the trail where it led into the thick copse of pine. Her ears twitched and turned. There was another sound; a phlegmy, vomitous cough followed by a second splash.

Sundew strode forward onto the trail with a quick glance behind her. Bellows and Wild made to follow, but she raised a foreleg to stop them and gestured to First to join her. When he’d trotted to her side, she led them all ahead and under the star-and-inkblot mosaic of the canopy.

The trunks of the pines passed by like a crowd of ponies frozen in place by a cockatrice’s curse. The flakes of their bark skin hid spiders, pressed flat beside motionless moths and ants. The skin of the dead, it seemed to First. Sundew walked at a brisk pace, her eyes never wandering from the trail, even when sheets of hanging moss brushed over her head and left green trailers in her knotted mane. It was then that First noticed how her ribs furrowed the coat of her barrel. She could have been a Rose, in the dim, strangled moonlight, in search of food that would never satisfy her, but for the remembrance of the warmth of her guiding hoof.

A twig snapped off the trail, deep in the press of the cowering trees. Then another, behind them, followed by an utterance that bridged a foreign middle ground between a click and a wet, stuttering croak.

“Look, the birds are coming back out,” said Bellows. “That was a woodpecker, right?” He scanned the moss-burdened boughs for darting wings.

“Shush for a second,” hissed Wild. More twigs broke, closer by than the last. All around them the bed of pine needles was rustling below the gray, scaly, tangle web of the lower branches. In the few places where the moonlight pierced the canopy, there was movement, here and gone again as something—many things—slunk in and out of the darkness.

The group quickened their pace to a trot. Ahead, the violet horizon glowed through the thinning trees. They had almost made it to the shore of the pond. First knew that Sundew was leading them there for a reason; a place to hide she had prepared for herself in emergencies, or just an open area in which to maneuver and fight.

Before they could reach the safe harbor of the meadow that edged the pond, something slouched into their path. They skidded to a halt on bunched pine needle skates.

Its deformed face broke into a moonbeam like a gargoyle totem pushed through the sheen of a waterfall. Brown, cracked skin flexed over rigid muscles, taut over a skull half bare, half clothed in patches of scalp still sprouting threads of pale, scraggly mane.

“That smell …” said Wild with an intense grimace. “It’s a bog body!”

The wind shifted. First was assaulted with the compounded odor of diseased fish and rotted vegetable matter. The thing made a noise that might have been a word, had years buried in the timeless silt of the swamp not emaciated the flesh of its cheeks and tongue.

“Pleesh …”

It opened its mouth until the tendons of its mandible snapped, and began to shuffle forward as if to ram its dull, blackened teeth into Sundew’s chest.

Just as it made its final lunge, she reared and flicked out her forelegs. Her sharp, work-hardened hooves boxed the creature’s head, shattering its depopulated jawbone and twisting its neck into a permanent bend that would have landed a living pony in a permanent hospital bed. Not waiting to make sure it was no longer a threat, she bolted for the shore. First, Bellows and Wild kicked into a gallop behind her. At the sound of their hooves pounding the earth, the forest erupted into a cacophony of marshy croaks, underpinned by exhalations of fetid air through collapsed throats.

Dodging more of the fen-born monsters as they flung their stained bodies onto the path, the four broke from the trees and onto the grasses of the meadow that skirted the shore. The green carpet was troubled, trodden down by what looked to be hundreds of hooves, scattering in as many paths. The stench of corruption weighed the night air down in filthy chains.

Bellows stooped to retrieve his glaive. “They’re just corpses, right Wild?” he said, steadying the weapon in its couch. “If these are the Roses your lore books ramble on so much about, I’m not actually all that impressed. No offense, First, I’m sure you’ve had your scrapes but—”

A multitude of skeletal forelegs shattered the calm mirror of the pond. The foremost pair plunged through the froth, dug into the earth, and propelled a slug of mud-coated flesh into the air together with another withering wave of stench. It crashed into Bellows muzzle-first, its knobby teeth piercing the skin of his shoulder. He dipped to the side but caught himself from falling, and gripping the shaft of his weapon, swiveled hard in place to bring the blade around in a scything arc.

It severed the flailing forelegs as if they were so much snakegrass. His quick pivot slung the creature to the ground, where it twitched like an upended beetle trying to flip itself back onto its feet. Before it could right itself and renew its attack, Bellows rotated the stained edge of the scimitar to point downward, raised it, and brought it down in a guillotine motion with an abbreviated leap.

The metal cleaved into the saponified skin, splitting the front half of the wriggling corpse all the way to the dirt. The inner surfaces released a wash of fluid that reeked of a gut-wrenching scent of fish forgotten in a summertime shed, revealing desiccated knots of matter that had once been organs.

“Ugh, nasty, but I mean, just use basic mechanics I guess. Nothing to—”

During the brief struggle, Sundew had taken a proud stance, her chest puffed out, her head held high and haughty. Wild saw her pose, and after a few discerning moments, called out, “To Sundew! Herd up!”

Seeing Sundew’s defiant posture in the face of the horde of dead, First and Bellows rushed to join Wild at her side. Sundew wrapped a foreleg around First’s shoulder, and pointed through the throng of bodies. There, where the trees thickened to a riverine jungle, was a stone post shaped to look like the trunk of a tree. The lichen that covered its sides in thick sheafs gave it away, but would have camouflaged it in the jades and browns of the daylight. A copper bell was fixed at the top, green and pocked with age.

First knew what she wanted. He had to clear a path to the bell.

He sat back on his haunches and crossed his blades in preparation. Sundew’s foreleg was like a warm moonbeam across his back. He was aware of Bellows watching their left flank, and that to his right, Wild had drawn her sacrificial knife. Neither of them was a match for the scores of foul-smelling Roses that were advancing on them from all sides. He would have doubted himself as well, were it not for Sundew’s calm resolve.

“Your servants are gathered in sight of the moon, o Mother of Stars!” he spoke. “With your will, none will come to harm.”

He felt Sundew’s mane shift against his neck as she nodded, and the gentle push of her hoof as she urged him forward.

The first two he met he felled with ease, letting them spring and split apart against his outstretched blades. The newly honed edges cut through their hairless hides like the bite of Old Mossy’s turf cutters sinking into the spongy peat. First gave his forelegs a whip-like snap to force the bodies downward at the end of the cuts. With their two halves splayed out and draining pus onto the grass, there was little they could do to cause further damage.

He had to sidestep as a second group fell at him. His sickle caught two at the knees, and as they dropped to the earth, he came down across their necks with his other hoof, sending the heads bumping down the slope toward the pond. Sundew pushed against a third that stumbled between her and First, corralling it to make it an easy target for the Caretaker. A sideways kick with his hind-leg shear cut through its barrel and into the spine. Its rear half tipped forward as it tried to leap free, dragging the front half backward with it.

They inched toward the bell post, step by step, cut by cut. As they approached it, a low but steady light became visible in the forest off to the side. The glow was recessed behind the outline of a door, and revealed the edges of an earthen hut built against a massive stump of a fallen tree. Behind him, First could hear Wild and Bellows hard at work dealing with their own battles. He chanced a quick look their way. Wild was ducking and weaving, darting surgical strikes at the creatures’ joints with her knife. Bellows swung his glaive in wide arcs beside her. It sliced through bodies until it lost momentum and dug into ribcages and thighbones, forcing him to yank it free and wind up another swing. Dark, rancid fluid gurgled out of an ever-growing number of stumps and gashes.

“They aren’t that tough, but there are a lot of them!” he yelled, catching sight of First’s appraisal.

“I think they’re bodies of ponies that were interred in the bog,” Wild called over the chatter. “I’ve heard it’s the practice in some parts of Equestria; a way of returning to the waters. It goes back centuries. I don’t know. I can only guess how many there are. I do know something is animating them. We need to find it and stop it before there are too many to handle!”

What once was a filly launched itself at her throat, forcing her to flatten herself to the ground. It flopped onto the grass behind her. Worm-ridden plant matter spewed out of its mouth as it hacked out a garbled mess of broken words, scrambling to rise and lunge again. Wild swung her knife up below its muzzle and pulled back. The head opened like a clam yielding to the piercing beak of an eagle, spilling the prize of its secret, tender organs. As the halves separated, a black, slippery mass slid out of the slender neck, wriggling and shedding flecks of slime.

Wild spotted fins at the tip of the monstrous tongue. “What the …?”

“Hey, I think I see a cottage or something over there!” Bellows shouted.

Wild tried to stand to get a look, but slipped on the morass of filth that the torn bodies had released onto the tortured meadow. Bellows pulled his glaive free of a fallen corpse and helped her up. “Listen, any minute we’re not going to be able to stand in all of this swamp rot,” he said. “I’m going to draw as many as I can off you three; get myself into the hut so they can’t surround me. Regroup there once you ring the bell.” Before Wild could think of an argument, he roared a battle cry and galloped toward the muted orange glow of the hut’s door. His weapon’s blade skewered a line of the milling creatures, carrying them forward with him as he charged inside.

All of the attackers behind them converged on the hut. Wild staggered her way to First and Sundew, who had been holding their ground while she conferred with Bellows. “First,” she said, trying to keep the panic out of her voice, “we have to hurry and ring that bell! Bellows is distracting them. He can’t fight that many for long!”

“Yes ma’am!” First replied. He lowered his head and began to hew left and right, throwing any that were directly in his path back and down with quick headbutts and slashes with his muzzle shear. Sundew kept pace, shoving those that made it through First’s opening attacks off balance so that the Caretaker could finish them.

Free from the danger of being encircled from behind, they gained the timeworn bell. Sundew leapt to it, leaned against its stone post, and began to strike the old copper cone with her hoof. The hinge creaked as blue flakes of corrosion crumbled loose from where the crown was fused to the yoke’s axle.

A terrified yelp came from the direction of the hut. The light from inside was blotted out by bodies squirming to get into the doorway. There was a series of thuds, and they could hear Bellows cry out again, “Help!”

Wild ran and joined Sundew at the bell, swatting it as if she wanted to break it off of its perch. Her blows rained down with Sundew’s heavy whip-strikes until the bell cracked loose and began to toll. Its voice, though damped by layers of green rust, rang out through the surrounding forest, enough to echo from the forest’s stream-cut valleys, animal dens, and whatever homes the denizens of Frogmire made in the swamp.

A second bell sounded in the distance, lower in tone, followed by silence. Another rang in the deep wilderness and was joined by others, until all around them the forest sang with chimes of every pitch and rhythm. Satisfied that the signal had been received, Sundew descended onto all fours. Wild did the same and rushed toward the throng of bodies lodged in the doorframe of the hut.

“Bellows, we’re here!” she yelled. She rammed her shoulder into the compressed clog of flesh that had become jammed in the narrow entrance. When the writhing bodies didn’t move, she grabbed a hind leg and pulled. It kicked in reply, and with a loud crack, broke off in her hooves.

She tumbled backward. “First, please!” she called. “We need to get inside!”

First arrived with Sundew and fell to the work of cutting through the wall of heads, limbs and defoliated tails. His gore-slickened blades made quick work of the trapped enemy, carving them into indistinct slabs at almost geometric angles. A few final swings and the blockage tumbled loose. Sundew helped Wild drag the larger pieces out of the way, and the three of them rushed inside.

Wild screamed. The interior of the hut was in shambles, a table overturned against one wall. The floor was scattered with paper, books and personal effects that slowly drank up the pools of black fluid that were spreading below a landscape of dismembered limbs and ruined cadavers. A line of bog bodies was nailed to the wall like a shish-kebob, still oozing and flailing to reach their prize.

Bellows lay in the center of the room. The monsters had clamped onto his legs in twos and threes, hugging them as they flexed their rounded black molars against his shoulders. He struggled under their combined weight, able only to sweep them a few inches side to side. Others had piled on top of him. Their flanks swayed in the air like bees clustered on a rose while their misshapen skulls dipped, twisted and chewed in a chorus of mealy-mouthed engorgement.

Years as a Caretaker had hardened First to violence , but the sight of a living pony in pain—a friend—had rooted him in place. The world was reduced to the unfolding carnage and a blossoming despair. Those creatures that had dug through the leaner meat around Bellows' barrel had found his ribs, and were pulling at the exposed bones as if they were dogs digging up a stubborn mole. Their dull teeth made for slow, sloppy work. After the rare, deep gulp of blood and gnawed-off muscle, they would raise their ecstatic faces upward and mutter before descending again to the stallion's prone side. “Feesht … feesht,” they croaked to each other, smiling on the smorgasbord over which they presided.

Bellows cried out at every new wound they opened. His desperate eyes rolled toward Wild. “Please, help …” he groaned.

First stepped forward and raised his shears, but Wild stopped him. “No! You might injure him more. We need to be careful!” She sunk her knife into the nearest back; the knotted spine of what in life had been a mare. It paused its foul supper and turned. All of its teeth were visible where the lips and cheeks had rotted away. Strings of brown slime, mixed with her brother’s blood, trailed from the barren, grinning muzzle.

“Feesht!” it rasped, seeming to laugh with delight, and returned to its meal.

“I can’t,” Wild cried, hammering her knife into its back again and again, “I can’t get them off of him! What do we do? What do we do?"

Sundew turned around in circles, sniffing the air, her ears pricked and swiveling. Something caught her attention. She pointed and waved them outside.

Forms and shadows were darting through the moonlit underbrush. First saw a net fly out of the gloom to snare one of the creatures still wandering among the savaged mounds of the fallen. A stallion crept up to it with a rock, and with a rough grunt splattered its head. At the other side of the lea, a spear whistled from the cover of the bushes and lanced another through its neck, pinning it to the earth.

Sundew nodded. She searched the battlefield, peering into the thin mist that blanketed the earth and filtered through the dewy branches. Finding what she had sensed, she jabbed her hoof across the pond.

Two incandescent eyes shone in the darkness above the far shore. They were not like coyotes’ eyes, which merely glowed bright with the reflective light of lanterns and lamps. These were the riotous green of swamp gas flame, bubbling and baleful. They glared back at where Sundew stood, fixed in place like pole stars amidst the chaotic assaults and brutal resolutions of the waning battle.

There was a noise like First had heard before the attack had begun; a belch, followed by a tortured, racking cough and a dunk of something into the water. Before the ripples in the pond’s surface had dissipated, another cadre of searching hooves sprouted forth toward the moonlight.

Sundew had pointed the way. He knew what needed to be done. He hurried to the sandbar they had used to cross the pond. A few quick splashes brought him face to face with a Rose more bizarre than any nightmare could have produced. What little was recognizable as its head was devoid of flesh, save the bottom half, which gaped low and wide like the mouth of a burlap sack. The neck and legs seemed to have been patched to the torso, which itself bore deep slashes that would have spilled any living pony’s innards. Every gouge in its threadbare skin was caked with dirt. A yellow ribbon, faded and soiled, fluttered from its scalped mane.

Wild galloped up from behind. “First!” she gasped, struggling to catch her breath. “Wait up, you don’t know …” She caught sight of the new abomination and took a few, tentative steps forward. “Ha … Hazel? How?”

The loose-lipped maw opened wide. Instead of a reply, it disgorged a load of imp-faced eels with a shuddering wail of pain. The air became saturated with the stench of fish.

“It’s the last Caretaker of the Lowlands,” Wild moaned, “the one the werebeast took from us, remember, First? Hazel? That’s the ribbon she was buried with. I remember seeing it when I was a filly, when the Lorekeepers buried her in secret, thinking it looked like a dandelion. That it’s wrong burying a flower.” The sorrow in her voice turned to anger. “This is the work of Baal-Kaas! He did this to Hazel; violated her eternal rest to send me a message.” She pounded the ground with a hoof. “That he knows me! That despite all my attempts at staying hidden, he found me. Those eels … I saw one inside one of the bog bodies. That’s the source of the magic that’s infecting them. Please, First, put her out of her misery!”

First gave her a quick nod. Avoiding the puckered purple sockets that had once housed the eyes of a devoted mare of the Missions, he walked forward and cut until the largest piece of the creature that remained was smaller than an apple core.

The unnatural sounds that had been defiling the sanctity of the night came to a sharp halt. The Roses climbing out of the pond fell as one, collapsing to slide backward down the slope of the shore. Wild dashed across the sandbar, bounding over the now-harmless mounds of dead matter to the hut and her stricken brother.

First paused to study the remains of the unfortunate Caretaker, and when he performed his victory salute, it was as much for her as for the moon and its Mistress. He stood and made his way across the pond, which, now free of the curse of Baal-Kaas, was content once more to keep hold of its dead.

Sundew met him at the entrance of the hut. Her face was long and tired. She gave his shoulder a gentle pat as he passed her.

When he stepped inside, he saw Wild on her knees, weeping. Bellows lay motionless in the center of the room, buried beneath a pile of smiling, rigid corpses.

Author's Note

For reference

... With a Metaphor

A procession of words intended to comfort Wild, or to distract her from the silent, bleeding pile that lay at their hooves on the dirt floor, sounded in First’s mind without reaching a resolution. All did little but remind him that he was an unprepared colt in an ever more dangerous world; a colt with a farmer’s reckoning who had no clue what a grieving mare needed to hear to ease her sorrow. He shuffled his hooves and gave Sundew a sheepish look.

The hermit rose on weary, mud-streaked legs. Rooting for a moment in a collapsed frame of wood that had once been a corner shelf, she withdrew a roll of parchment, an ink bottle, and a quill. As she was digging the items free of the wreckage, a cadre of haggard ponies filed into the hut. Taking a look at the heap of bodies, most placed a hoof over their hearts. Others hung their heads and mumbled blessings in a dialect dotted with unfamiliar words.

Sundew unfurled the parchment a respectful distance from where Wild sat and began to write. The ponies who had joined them fanned out, giving room for a trio of white-maned elders to enter. The scratch of Sundew’s quill on paper mingled with Wild’s stifled cries, and the sibilant slumping of the inert bog bodies as the marsh folk dragged them from atop Bellows onto the floor.

First winced as the taut faces tore away from the stallion’s coat to reveal horseshoe semicircles of bite marks, patterning the muscles and joints a bright, inflamed red. Some came away toothless, leaving brown stalks of broken incisors around gouges in the flesh like fungal growths on carrion. First noticed clumps of hair in the matter stuck to his shears with an accidental glance, and shuddered at how like the bunched skin around Bellows’ injuries they were.

Sundew finished writing. She waved First forward, taking a place beside Wild as she set the scroll down for her to read. She wrapped a foreleg around her, and with a tip of her muzzle, invited First to do the same. He eased down and complied with her unspoken request, careful to keep the sharp edge of his blade well away from either mare. He felt Sundew’s hoof begin to soothe Wild’s back in slow circles as he read over her shoulder:

Do not krye. Ðe doktors shall wyrk upon hym. He shall be well yn tiȝme, but hys skars shall be deep, and remaȝn wyþ hym.

Whether out of relief, or of being reminded of her brother’s valor, Wild wept harder, and burrowed her muzzle against Sundew’s chest. The older mare completed the hug. Finding no contradiction to the strict rules of his upbringing, First did the same. Within the gentle frame of their support, Wild’s pained lurches and hiccups subsided by degrees into calm, even breathing. First caught Sundew’s eye above Wild’s bowed head. They had fulfilled another one of the Missions’ laws, and he could tell Sundew had learned the same ones he had been raised to uphold, either from her own parents or by virtue of whatever mystical ways were open to Wayfinders. He heard his father’s voice repeat it in his mind.

The downtrodden are to be comforted.

The elders, who had been inspecting Bellows’ wounds and eyes and teeth, signaled to the younger stallions. Four of them left and returned with a stretcher cobbled together from saplings and strips of bark. They each grabbed one of Bellows’ legs and heaved his heavy frame onto the sackcloth strips that had been stretched between the poles.

Wild raised her head to watch them take positions at the four corners and lift. Those who were not occupied with her brother’s evacuation were busy clearing the twisted bodies from the scattered bric-a-brac. A group that had been yanking at the glaive tumbled into a heap as it came free of the knotted mass of roots that formed the far wall.

“We’ll see him again, right?” she asked, her voice still thick with sorrow.

Sundew nodded. First backed away to create enough space to speak to Wild face-to-face. “I’m just guessin’, but your brother is strong as a bull. He got nipped a bit, no question, but I seen Da get worse from Roses and come back fightin’ stronger than before.”

“Really?” Wild said, rising to her hooves for the first time since she entered the hut.

First gave her an exploratory smile. “Sure as sugar.”

“The boy says sooth,” one of the elders affirmed. His silvery mane was strung with acorns and wintergreen leaves, and melded into his wild white beard like a winter waterfall raining on a river’s ice floes. He trod up to them on trembling hooves.

“This mighty stallion shall live indeed, as Lady Sundew has perceived. The waters of the bog are ever clean, even as the magic that disturbed the nether-folk was not. I say: the waters abide no disease, and so no plague abides in them.” He wiped at Wild’s wet cheek with a lock of his mane. “His salt ocean is drained, which is a greater danger to his life. We shall tend him the span of three moons, or two if Lady Sundew’s prayers to the Night Princess are heard and indulged.”

Sundew withdrew from Wild’s side and began to restore order to her scattered belongings. She flipped a table formed from a scarred slab of tree trunk back onto its feet, her hooves crunching clay fragments of broken dishware. Sniffling hard, Wild joined her, sweeping the starred pieces to the side where they couldn’t pierce their tender frogs.

First poked at a vase of water lilies that had spilled onto the brim of a sun hat woven from the reeds of the marsh. Now that noxious odor of fish had receded with the removal of the bog bodies, other scents—deeper infused in the tangled root wall and packed straw of the thatched roof—emerged like animals of the forest rustling again after the passing of a wolf: wood smoke, earth, mane hair, and something like bread.

A delicate bottle rolled out from the fallen wall shelves and bumped against his hoof. Inside, a single piece of jewelry tinkled against the glass: a silver chain strung with bangles shaped like each phase of the moon. Feeling the weight of someone’s gaze, he looked up, and saw Sundew almost smiling at him.

The weight grew a thousand fold. First blushed and made an about-face to survey the battlefield. It would be a tactical oversight not to search the area for stray Roses, he considered. There could be severed forelegs that had been missed in the dark vegetation, inch-worming their way to spots that would be shadowed during the day, waiting to trip them up and crack their skulls, or worse, lie dormant until nightfall to force their way down their throats and choke every pony while they slept. He trotted outside to hunt, away from the more subtle dangers of the hut.

The swamp folk had set torches in a rough perimeter, each guarded by a pair of lean warriors. They had focused their watch on the misty world outside the reach of the flames’ glow, unmoving, unflinching, with spears at the ready. The water’s edge received their greatest attention; no fewer than fifteen stood in a breathless formation with their weapons’ tips pointed at the treacherous pool.

First took note that the stallions were not much greater in stature than he was. The muscles of their legs and chests were hardier, to be sure, but in height they might have been mistaken for colts his age. It was simply the nature of their clan, he mused, or a lack of food available in the swamp. His grandmama had grown up in hard times, after all, and had been only half the size of his mama. Beginning to feel an ache in his own stomach, he dipped his head to the ground and sniffed.

A foreign scent caused him to recoil. Even in the midnight gloom he could see that the grass of the shoreline meadow had died, its vibrant greens turned a pale, sickly brown in the weak light of the torches where the fluids of the creatures had spilled from their wounds. Beyond the disappointment of another small victory for the enemy, the sight of the blighted earth nagged at First’s mind for a reason he couldn’t place.

It was then that he heard the distant sound of a cat crying.

“Cinnamon!” he called, cantering in a circle. He stopped at each point of the compass to listen. The wails grew louder further from the pond. There was only one place that made sense for his missing partner to be.

“Ms. Carnation, Ms. Sundew! I’m going to the Garden!” he yelled at the hut’s door as he galloped into the outskirts of the pine forest.

The moon-dappled boughs sped past in streaks of gray and brown. The bog bodies had been busy even here, he discovered. The reek of rotten fish returned, and he began to find them, their maws cracked open wide where they had erupted in sprays of black slime onto the tree trunks. In some places they had stripped the bark away, as if to bare the trees’ hearts in order to drench them in their poisonous filth.

As he approached the Garden, he could hear Cinnamon’s cries above him somewhere. She must have climbed up and away from danger when the creatures attacked, he reasoned. She was tough, but knew when she was outclassed.

When he broke from the trees into the enclosed circle of the Garden, the first thing he saw was Cinnamon hunkered low on a lofty branch on the far side. She was shivering in a patch of moonlight, her tail pressed flat against the upper stem of the great pine’s crown.

Cinnamon had been with First her entire life, and by now he could tell from the timbre of her cries when she was afraid and when she was not. So he knew there was no pair of jaws waiting to snap her up on the ground below her. She was angry, and more than a little sad.

He looked around and understood why. The Garden was in ruins. The hind ends of bog bodies poked into their air like obscene flowers where they had torn ragged holes in the perfect greenery and buried their skeletal heads. Their viscous bile had soaked into the ground around them, and turned all of the surrounding moss and flowers the same shade of gray-brown.

The statue too had been defiled. The mouth had been broken, leaving a hole full of sharp points of stone like misshapen fangs. The poison that the creatures had vomited into the earth had seeped into the subterranean pool that fed the fountain as well, so that the once-silver tears that fell from the eyes of the Night Princess now were blackened streaks of corruption oozing down her face to kill everything it touched.

There was a tremor in the ground. Two sets of hooves slowed to a halt beside him. Unable to look away from the horror of the desecrated remnant of paradise, he heard a long, loud hiss like a stifled scream. Sundew dropped to the earth and buried her head under her hooves.

The Nightmare and the Idyll

A breeze blew across the glade. The way that the odors of rot wafting from the statue’s gush of slime mingled with the fading scent of flowers magnified the obscenity of the ruin. First felt the broken curves of the pure, solemn form in the marrow of his bones. It was another turning of the wheel of night and day; a part of the soul passing into memory, yielding to the next season the only way it ever could.

It was the weight of that thought that bore his gaze down and away from the spectacle at last, to fall on an unmoving Sundew. She seemed much smaller than she had when she led them to the warning bell, her tawny shoulder blades and ribs bunched and sharp like a pile of fallen forest branches. Her hooves still covered her ears and face, and from below them, a voiceless keening sounded; a whisper edged with sorrow, screamed into the earth.

First undid his shears and let them slip free. He knelt, remembering what he’d learned not a few minutes prior in caring for Wild’s dismay, but knowing too that this situation was different. This was a pain he himself felt, one that struck deep at the nature of Caretakers and Lorekeepers and Wayfinders, and their kinship under the moon. The toil of his friend’s hooves had come to naught. He pressed his cheek against her drooped ear, losing the battle not to cry.

“My heart …” whispered Wild. She joined First, stumbling down to lay her foreleg over their fallen guide, unable to cease her gaze or her disbelief at the garden’s ruin. A solitary firefly wavered at its edges, its light signaling long, waning pulses. It bobbed too close to the surface of a poisoned clot of moss and went dark.

A shiver from Sundew broke the destruction’s spell. “This is horrible,” Wild said as gently as she could. “Did it take you long to create? The garden?”

Sundew raised a hoof and brought it down to thud against the earth. She repeated the motion, tolling out a steady rhythm. Twenty-two times it fell, First counted.

Wild had taken notice as well. “Twenty-two. You’ve been working this ground for twenty-two moons?”

Sundew looked up and shook her head. Tears glistened in trails from her unpainted eyes.

“Twenty-two … years?”

The tired head dropped back behind the walls of its foreleg fortress. It nodded slowly within the dark, bony confines.

Wild stroked Sundew’s mane for a while. First watched her, mulling the gravity of what he’d just heard while imagining his father’s sanctuary being ravaged the way the hidden garden had. He was afraid that if he spoke now, his words would fall short and his new friendship with Sundew would be over.

It was Wild who spoke instead. She stood, and taking a few restless paces into the reeking glade, kicked at a tuft of dead moss. The vegetal skein tore away to reveal its roots: a mass of white, frenetic worms.

Her neck bowed downward in shame. “I’m so sorry. This is my fault. If I hadn’t brought Baal-Kaas’s vengeance here, you would be dreaming in peace tonight under Selene’s wings in your special place.”

Sundew heaved a raw sigh and began to rise. First slid back and joined her. On the far side of the clearing, Cinnamon was hopping down the haphazard spiral staircase of limbs that fanned from the tree she’d used to flee the attack of the bog bodies. She bounded down from the lowest bough over the arches of the roots, and skirting the slime-soaked earth that surrounded the statue, ran to the ponies to leap at First’s chest.

He caught her in one cradling foreleg. “Cinnamon, girl, did you see what happened? You’re alright. We got the Roses. All of ’em.”

Cinnamon responded by rubbing her whiskers against his scarred neck. As he hugged her closer and felt her trembling subside, he caught Sundew observing them. The fire had not yet returned to her eyes, but there was a spark, and an alacrity to her movements that hinted at yet unquenched anger simmering beneath her defeated bearing. She turned in the direction of the forest, tossing her mane for him and Wild to follow.

As soon as he saw the yellow firefly light illuminating the doorway of Sundew’s cottage and what lay beyond, First could tell that the swamp stallions had been busy at work. The slumped pile of debris had been cleaned from the floor, and to his amazement, even in the chill darkness of the early morning hours some skilled craftstallion had rebuilt the corner shelves and set what items had not shattered back on display. Passing the sentinels stationed at the inner perimeter, he caught the wag and scrape of the business end of a broom sweeping the last of the wreckage out over the doorstep.

Inside, it was like the battle that had nearly cost Bellows his life had never happened. A low table made of freshly sanded wood beams now stood where the big stallion had lain beaten. A carpenter was still stooped over it, his eye level with its plane. He gave it a perfecting caress with a scrap of sandpaper and stood wearily up, smiling at his work. The songs of the grasshoppers rang in through the single, paneless window while other ponies tidied the far corners.

“What … the …”started Wild.

One of the laborers turned an ear, his face still daubed with red battle clay. He set a bag of acorns into the drawer of humble pantry cabinet he was re-shelving and strode toward her. “The folk of Frogmire hold Lady Sundew in great esteem,” he explained. “The wisdom she deals to us has changed lives, with proof, and always for the better. We repay her no matter the cost or the hour. And your pardon; I am called Acorn Whistle.”

Sundew gave him a gracious nod. Rearing up against the wall, she poked her muzzle into the twisted sinews of the roots and drew out what looked to be a wrinkled tulip bulb. The red-masked warrior saw it and knelt, wide-eyed. One of his companions ran to fill a water kettle and hang it over the hearth’s guttering flames.

Sundew strode to the fresh-sawn table with her prize. Setting it on the fragrant surface, she traced an invisible word in the air with her hooftip in the direction of the bowing Acorn, who was still enthralled by the dirty nodule. Catching her sign and entreating look, he leapt upward, retrieved her writing supplies, and deposited them reverently in front of her.

She scratched a few moments with her quill and held up the parchment for them to read.

A jewel of ðe Oaks, plucked from ðe branches ðat spreade alle þrouȝ ðe sod below.

Wild smirked. “An Oak’s jewel? It could be the second you’ve found.” She nudged First’s good shoulder.

First consulted with Cinnamon, who had no explanation for him. He gave Wild an expression like he’d run out of bits at the market and shrugged.

“She means a truffle,” she replied to his unspoken question. “And by the looks of it, one of the extremely rare Mare’s Eye variety. The fungus that produces them exists in only a few forests in Equestria, and only yields fruit every thousand moons or so.”

First inspected the black, flakey bulb with newfound awe. Cinnamon reached up to perch her front paws on top of his head to peer down on it as well, sniffing after whatever faint scent it may have been adding to the already heavy vapors of sawdust and dirt. Their curiosity earned them a furtive smile from Sundew.

The warrior who had set the kettle to boil extracted it from the hearth, and after one of his companions had placed three glass jars on the table beside the truffle, he filled them with steaming water. A third stallion stepped forward bearing a basket of herbs. With a painter’s precision he placed thick layers of fresh mint leaves on their surfaces.

“I’m sure there are chefs in Canterlot and Manehattan who would fight each other to the death to win this for their larders, if one were mad enough to auction it or something,” Wild continued as they made their arrangements. “Believe me when I say that it’s worth more than your average dragon’s hoard.”

The last items to be laid out were sprigs of lavender. The stallion who had dispensed the mint balanced one across the rim of each jar. Below, light green wisps began diffusing downward into the brew.

“I’m not sure, but it appears as if they’re preparing a ceremony of some sort,” Wild whispered into First’s ear. “Kind of like when we perform our Devotions before meals, maybe?”

Sundew bowed to each of the three warriors in turn. Taking up her quill, she scratched out a few more words and raised the parchment once more.

We must dyspel ðe evyll of ðis niȝt. Restore what was lost to us.

“There’s a way to restore your garden?” Wild asked.

Sundew’s quill swirled out more fluid strokes.

Ðere ys. Yn remembrance, and yn cheere of good companȝ.

Her smile was full of pain as she took the truffle in her teeth and sipped from one of the jars, letting the tea flow past it. Once she’d drunk, she returned the truffle to the table and bit off one end of a lavender sprig. Letting out a long sigh, she sat back and closed her eyes.

“Please, honored friends of Selene, do as Lady Sundew did,” Acorn entreated. He motioned to the two remaining jars. “Long ago it pleased our Mother to add the delight of her favorite flower to her Paradise. We taste of it when elders or children pass away, but oft it is taken in times of great loss as well, to remind us that the bitter comes with the sweet.”

Wild hestitated. “You too know of Selene’s Garden? Strange … you speak in the way the old books are written. Are you all Caretakers somehow?”

“No, none among us has that fate,” Acorn replied. “The knowledge that has been passed down has it that in days of old, the Lavender Concourse was a reward for the groundskeepers who excelled in flowercraft. All the blithe acres unto the horizon in a secret dell were frosted green below flames of mauve and violet. Joyous Grove himself designed it, as with all the Garden’s wonders.”

Wild gave First a look, but said nothing that would interrupt Acorn’s telling of his secretive tribe’s history.

“It was the happy lot of our far forebears to tend and to mend the knolls of the Concourse, lost to us for thousands of moons. Even now we search for it, believing it near at hoof. We have always searched.”

He fell silent, as if sifting through his memories to hear some ancestral whisper of the hiding place of his people’s corner of the lost Garden. After a few moments’ reflection he gestured again at the jars. “But please. Lady Sundew does all things for a purpose. The mint makes of water, tea, to make us more than mere horses, and the lavender reminds us of our place, but it may be that the Mare’s Eye shall impart some special virtue of its own.”

First watched as Wild mimicked Sundew’s ritual, then did the same. The truffle’s flavor mixed with the mint like a flock of pheasants breaking from the underbrush in every direction. His thoughts chased the odd savors down their varied paths, leaping between airy memories and down into murky wooded remnants of dreams. He saw his hoof reaching for the lavender of its own accord. There was a crunch, and a prickling on his tongue, and a moment later the wild images were threaded with twists of sorrow and elation.

More thoughts surfaced in the dark melee, words spoken in mares’ voices. He recognized Wild’s, but there was another, deeper and more noble. He thought, with a pang of compassion, that it could be Sundew’s.

The three of them were together in the forest of his dreams, the pregnant darkness pressing in from all directions like they were suffocating in the vile depths of the marsh. They were marching in the trackless mud, sure of their destination, but sharing the same mix of awe and fear. Roars and crashes rose up all around them; loud, deep gagging coughs and breaking of long-dead tree limbs. Through sheets of rain he saw Wild turn toward him and speak. From her mouth came words of an ancient tongue in Sundew’s voice. On hearing them, Sundew herself stopped and pointed at the beam of moonlight that had broken through the storm to fall on his engraved blades. First looked up, eager to see its source.

The eye of Selene bore down on him from a brilliant moon.

A hoof brushed his shoulder; a real one, and not that of a phantasm from the land of visions. He opened his eyes and saw Sundew by his side. She nodded, tracing arcs along both of his forelegs and his muzzle.

“First, I think … no, I know she wants to see your blades,” said Wild, rubbing her temples. “Stars above, she needs to see them now! Where did you leave them?”

“By her garden at the end of the path. I didn’t want to hurt her when I …”

Before he could finish the sentence, Acorn Whistle bolted out of the hut, and in less than the time it took for Cinnamon to bathe her paw, returned with all five of the slime-slickened weapons. He let one of the sentries dump a bucket of water over them and wipe them clean with a giant leaf of an elephant’s ear plant that was growing by the door. Inspecting them with reverence, Acorn gathered them up and arranged them in parallel curves on the table beside the jars of tea.

Sundew caught sight of the images etched into the luminous metal. Her eyes widened, and she trotted forward to take a closer look.

“Have you seen these pictographs anywhere before?” Wild asked her. “Do you know what they mean?”

Sundew pointed to one: a reptilian, slitted pupil staring out in hatred, then a second; the crescent moon surrounded by its miniature trees and fields that Wild had spied when Bellows had first revealed them at his shop.

Sundew wrote again on her parchment.

Ðe Niȝtmare and ðe Idyll. Ðe Garden, whych ys her soul, was ðe Idyll. We alle know ðe Niȝtmare. Such ys lyfe: a niȝtmare and an idyll.

She let them read. While they struggled to make out the words of her archaic script, her hoof began to work at the dirt floor, digging gouges into the dust. All that surrounded her could feel the heat of her anger radiating stronger as the seconds passed. Snorting at last in controlled fury, she scrawled a final, ink-trailed line at the bottom of the page.

On ðe morrow we venture forþ to take ðe heade of Bäl-Käs.

Children of Selene

First pored over the lines and whorls engraved in the shears’ shimmering flats, reading them as he would a letter, but failing to recognize what Sundew had discerned. The images had been dormant for all but the last few days of his life, like grass beneath late winter snow, hidden from the springtime sun. Now, layer by layer, the secrets were being peeled away. It was one thing to find the symbols buried for so long under rust and blood, but quite another to know what they meant, even in part. Yet they spoke nothing of his sanctuary. It was not to be found in the ruined garden of Frogmire; that offered nothing but despair. The life-ending poison well of the Greywater, with its strange, lone Rose roaring against the backdrop of the moon had also been a false lead, fortunate though he’d been to have met Wild Carnation and Bellows. As he watched Sundew continue to scan his blade in stern silence, however, he felt that the path he’d been wandering might now have a sign and an arrow.

“Lady Sundew,” he began.

The mare gave him a slight nod as she gingerly lifted one of the shears by its tip to peek at the underside. Unsatisfied, she picked it up to get a better angle.

“I been travelin’ with Ms. Carnation here and her brother to help ‘em find this rotten gourd Baal-Kaas. They wanted to see you first, you bein’ a Wayfinder. Sure enough you seem to know all manner of things. Any chance you can figure where my sanctuary is?”

She turned to him, gripping the blade with a fierce expression, then went back to the table as if her zeal had made her remember that she couldn’t speak. Quill in mouth, she wrote.

Ðy dreame. Ðou seest ðys each niȝt? Muk and terrors, darkness and kraven trees, and ðe weepyng yë of holy Seléne?

First went to her side to read. “Yes ma’am.”

What doþ ðys dreame speake to ðee?

“Don’t know for sure, to tell you the honest truth. She’s searching for something, or some pony. I walk for a while. That part is the same every time. I walk, and then I see her peepin’ down from the moon, sad as a funeral. Then the rain comes … rain falling through her light, and I get the same feeling I get when I’m about to cut down the Roses.”

And what ys yt, ðys feelyng?

“It’s like she’s … she’s opening the way. The way I should go. Don’t know how else to call it.”

Sundew sat back on her haunches as she smiled and hugged the shining implement to her chest. After a moment of private reflection she continued writing.

Ðou art a Karetaker veryly, ðere ys no doubt. Y tell ðee yt ys ðe same for me, when Y am wyþ ðe spyryts of ðe land: when Y peer ynto ðe Deep, and o blessyngs, ðe Mother of Stars openeþ ðe way, ðere ys little Y kannot see.

“You can talk with spirits?” blurted Wild, who had been reading alongside First.

Yn a sense. Ðey do not speake yn wyrds, but yn knowledge certaȝntees. Yt so happed ðey told me of ðe praȝer of Joyous Grove: ðe wyrds ðat gaȝned hym ðe favor of Seléne forever. ‘Open ðe way’. So he answered when She posed to hym Her vysȝon: ðe Garden, to wyt, wyþ hym as Her Archytekt. So ðey ecko þrouȝ alle tyme, yn byrdesong, yn ðe solemn, wyze whyspers of tree braunches, and yn ðe soules of we who love Seléne.

Wild was shaking her head. “Before I met you, I wouldn’t have believed it … spirits … but how else could you know what it’s like, when I tie together two disparate branches of research that explain the events of an entire century, and it’s like … I always saw it as a new pathway being opened. It’s the same for all three of us, but different!”

Sundew smiled wider. Laying a hoof on Wild’s shoulder, she added more to her silent dialogue.

Ðe spyryts also told me of Bäl-Käs, ðe Roote of Korruptȝon. Y knew of hym too from hys murderous assaults on my folk. Ðe proude warriors of ðe Frogmyre fyȝt, but have learned ðat to hyde ys beste.

Wild stamped her hooves. “Oh … I hate the thought of these good ponies being tormented,” she huffed, “but part of me is so glad I didn’t bring this upon you! Please, tell us where we can find him. I will have no rest from his monsters until he’s put down, and the sight of your poor garden won’t leave me. Its destruction can’t go unpunished!” She leaned over to catch each word as the response was inscribed.

Ðou hast an objekt of power wyþ ðee. Mayhap yt kann help.

“An ‘object of power’? I don’t have anything but my knife and some food for the trail. First, do you know what she could be talking about?”

First made a mental tally of the gear he’d carried with him since he’d left home. Some of it he’d lost along the way, but a few items remained. Of these, only one had seemed to possess any hint of magic.

“Mr. Whistle, could I ask you to head out one more time and find my saddlebag? Should be near where you found my shears.”

Acorn gave a quick bow and galloped out of the hut once again, understanding without being told that without his weapons, First would be taking a risk trying to retrieve his bag himself. As the orange-tinted darkness closed around the stallion’s short-cropped tail, warmth began to spread near First’s heart. He had found friends who were willing to protect him, and in Sundew and Wild, guides who no matter where or when he met his destiny would know what to do next.

In as short a time as it took him to retrieve the shears, Acorn returned carrying the forlorn saddlebag slouched over his barrel. He picked it off of his back with his teeth and set it on the floor at First’s hooves.

“Thanks sir,” said First with a nod of gratitude. Rummaging for a moment with his muzzle, he slipped the tightly-wound map from among the jumble of his other supplies.

Wild helped him unfurl it and weigh it down with two of his blades. “First, you didn’t tell me you had this,” she said with reverence as she squinted at the page’s tiny black marks. “That insignia at the top … that tells me this was created sometime in the second century. Not by a cartographer in the High Sanctuary—the crest is wrong—but definitely in one of the prominent satellite convocations. Is this another one of your heirlooms?”

First shrugged. “Probably. Hadn’t seen it before Da packed it for me,” he ventured. “When I took my dunk into the river, it came out none worse for the wear. Figured it had some kind of spell on it. Da said it was drawn up in the old times.”

Sundew scratched her mane. Setting down the shear she’d been studying, she went to the collection of kindling next to the hearth and gathered a foreleg full of the finer twigs of the pile. The whole gathering looked on as she laid the fragile load on First’s map and began to swirl the knobby curves under the flat of her hoof. Now and then she would pause, as if working through a difficult calculation, then change her motion from clockwise to counterclockwise or add a twist at the end of the revolution. Before their eyes, the tips of the twigs began to connect the crescent moons that marked the corrupted points. They spread like roots from sources scattered across the miniature inking of Equestria as it was in the years after the Fall. When Sundew withdrew her hoof, all could see a point of convergence in the center of a plain near where Frogmire now croaked and chirred from its secretive waters. Its moon was accompanied by a rampart surrounded by nine stars.

“Baal-Kaas,” whispered Wild. “That’s … in the Everfree Forest. Not far from here!”

Sundew’s hoof began to work against the table. Having sawn a deep groove in its edge, she gave it a final pound and scratched out a line.

Y shall kleave hys kyrsed heade from hys neck.

First shuffled forward and cleared his throat. “Beg your pardon, ma’am, but you were sayin’ …” He trailed off as she started to write.

What ðou seekest, and ðe quest whych ðy kompanȝon wysheþ to komplete, are one yn ðe same.

“You mean First and I are meant to continue together?” asked Wild.

Sundew pressed a hoof to her own chest, then Wild’s and First’s.

“All three of us,” said Wild, her voice low and harboring rapid thoughts. “Wayfinder, Lorekeeper and Caretaker. How else could it be?”

“This is truly a most wonderful and auspicious hour!” Acorn trumpeted. The stallions that had remained to listen to the conversation stomped and cheered with him. “I am honored to witness this reunion of Selene’s laborers … the first of centuries! May our Mother bless you in abundance!”

Sundew’s quill swept over her page. When the feather fluttered back to the table, she clasped the steeped Mare’s eye bulb between her hooves and proffered it to Acorn, who read her message.

She blesseþ ðee for ðy fayþfulnesse. Ðys now belongeþ to you, ðe trybe of Frogmyre. Plant yt amongst ðe oaks yn ðe deep marsh, and mayhap yn years longe hence ðy kyn shall reap a harvest.

Acorn knelt and took the gift. “Your ‘mayhap’ has always been our certainty,” he said. “Never has there been a time when your portents have not prospered us. I will ensure it is done, and come to safeguard you on your advance upon the enemy with two of my near cousins. Winter Green, Leaf Rustle, are you willing?”

Two of the company who had been marveling at the map from the opposite side of the table circled around and bowed their respect to Sundew. “The strife with the nether folk this night was like a delicious morsel,” said one, “and now my appetite is whetted for more. It would be my joy to see these three safely to the den of the Hateful One, and to fight him as their defender.” The image of a swirl of autumn leaves on his flank told First he could only be Leaf Rustle.

Acorn clapped each on their shoulder and continued. “I could not bear the thought of Lady Sundew traveling into the jaws of danger—skilled though you are, First Fruits, in the ways of battle—with no stallion of Frogmire beside her on the path. Will you accept our offer, Lady?”

Sundew pondered his proposal until she grinned and gave her final edict.

Y shall! Leave us rest for what remaȝns of ðe niȝt, o chyldren of Seléne!

First was awakened by the creak of saddlebag straps being cinched. Through the peepholes of his eyelids he recognized a blurry Wild checking the stability of her burdens, a look of panic coming over her face as the bulging sacks began to slide to one side. Sundew was writing something to an alert Acorn, who stood beside her, rumbling grunts of assent as he read. If First didn’t know better he would have thought they’d been conversing all night.

He rose and smiled at Wild. “Mornin’,” he said, and helped her right herself.

“Good morning, First. Get some breakfast! We’re leaving in a few minutes, right after Sundew is finished with a couple things. One of which is a lesson I’m highly looking forward to: she’s going to teach us signs! More or less a necessity where we’re going. No time to be writing out beautiful calligraphy in middle Ponish when Roses and bog bodies and who knows what else are breathing down our necks.”

First did a quick search of the hut and found a bundle of rhubarb that had been prepared for him, with a jar of tea steaming next to it. The absence of other offerings was a sign that everyone else had already eaten. He crunched down on the meaty stalks. The faint light filtering through the window hole revealed that only those who were to make the journey to the place that had been divined by the map and Sundew’s magic remained, with the exception of one stallion of lean stature wearing a traveling cloak.

“… and whom should I call on when asking for this mare?” the newcomer asked Sundew. Unable to avoid eavesdropping, First went to the tableside to read her response.

Y have not been gyven her name, but ðe ymage of a rose tender, and furrouws aliȝned yn ðe yarde of an olde Sanctuary of peculyar hystory. Gyve ðys myssyve to her, and tell her ðat she ys worþy of far more ðan what she beleeveþ fate haþ meted out for her. Tell her ðat she ys not meant for roses ðat she ys no Karetaker, and ðat Y know ðe reason she kannot speke.

She extended a folded slip of paper. He took it, and nodding his understanding, tucked it into a small bag he held slung around his neck. Sundew pressed a hoof to his shoulder and let it slide along his cloak as he turned and departed, as if to leave him with the lingering, warding impression of her touch. Outside, he began to trot toward the trees, then to gallop.

“Sounds like there might be another Wayfinder out there,” explained Wild. “Only she doesn’t know it, and doesn’t have any pony to guide her. Sundew might have an apprentice waiting for her once we get back, if whoever gets that letter takes it seriously.”

Sundew smiled and beckoned the two of them closer. She tapped her hoof rapidly on the dirt floor three times, then wrote a word for them to memorize:

Danger

“Ooh, lesson’s starting!” Wild almost squealed. “First, pay attention!”

The two of them, together with Acorn, Leaf and Winter, sat huddled around Sundew until they grew dizzy from the swarm of words and corresponding signs that she imparted to them. If there was any theme to the silent vocabulary, it was one of immanent disaster and how to avoid it, whether it be of an undead persuasion or otherwise. They began to repeat the words they’d learned a few minutes prior as the list grew and the sun peeked over the horizon, retreading old ground if any were forgotten. Sundew put down her quill only when they had absorbed too much to be able to pair new gestures with their meanings. With a sigh full of resolution, satisfaction and a hint of concern, she lashed out one hoof. It was the last sign she had taught them:

Let’s go.

The company marched through the door in single file, but quickly adopted a formation that suited the peril they anticipated. Sundew, as their navigator, took the lead with the map. Acorn kept pace beside her, armed with a light spear and a scowl that itself could pierce the leathern hide of their enemy’s creations. Leaf and Winter formed two points of a triangle behind them. Slings loaded with lead nuggets swung from their jaws, ready to flick out at the first unnatural sound. Wild took her place in the center of the triangle, knowing well that she would be the most vulnerable if they were ambushed. Her sacrificial knife was clenched between her teeth.

First was the rearguard. He had donned his shears only as a precaution: while he wasn’t expecting to need them until nightfall, there was no telling what new evils would seek them out as they approached the stronghold of their foe. The map had directed the first leg of their journey south, back through the marsh toward the Lowlands, but away from any path or hidden spy. Cinnamon rearranged herself behind his neck. He inhaled the humid, earth-tinged air and wondered at how unlike the treeless fields and lone farmhouse of his upbringing it was.

Frogmire at dawn was a soundscape of the doings of life. The amphibious residents for which it was named exulted in the shallow edges of tea-colored pools, raising their trills, shrieks and rasps toward the whitewashed ultramarine sky above the treetops. He had been up at this hour most days of his life, whether to pick potato bugs off of the crops, feed Cinnamon, or dispose of defeated Roses, but he had always carried out his early morning labors in the quiet of whispering grain. He peered into the resonant undergrowth. Although no hostile eyes returned his gaze, he was surprised to see a pattern in the lay of the land. Channels had been dug to direct the water around long, raised islands. He and his companions were walking along one such ridge.

Winter caught sight of his appraisal. “We of Frogmire are farmers once more,” he told him, “as we were before the days of the Garden. Before Joyous Grove called upon us, we tilled and harvested these lands as any pony does, although in days of yore this was no marsh, but fertile fields fit for the plow. Now we trade in mint and teaberry, and in the pigment of the Redclay frogs that make their home here.”

“We make our crop to grow along the dry rood we’ve worked betwixt the waterways,” Leaf added, sweeping a foreleg at the mist-enshrouded pools. “Seed and pollywog ripen side by side. All the easier to gather leaf and peeper when they’re grown.”

“Makes sense to me,” First replied. “Good way to get around, too.”

Wild’s ears perked up. “Joyous Grove recruited you to be groundskeepers?” she asked.

“He did,” Acorn replied. “That much is known, and not legend. He invited all ponies who tended the lands and the waters—from north around the horizon again to north, from mountainside to valley deep—to join him in creating the Gardens of our Mother’s inspiration. Our people agreed when they were told the purpose of Selene’s great endeavor.”

At this, Sundew looked back. Her smile was broad, but not happy.

Wild almost bowled Acorn over as she crowded close to him. “You know why the Gardens were made?”

Acorn hung his head, his pace slowing. “Alas, no. That has been lost. We have only a saying that was passed down—“flame by day, glory by night”—and know that our people were filled with hope at what they heard. So much so that in time their labors earned them the keeping of the Lavender Concourse.”

“Flame by day … glory by night,” Wild repeat, puzzling over the ancient phrase.

Sundew stopped them and gave Wild a meaningful look. She pointed at the pinprick of light that was growing in the east, then at the moon still hanging at the opposite rim of the twilit sky.

“Sun and moon?” Wild asked.

Sundew shook her head. With downcast eyes, she turned and resumed walking.

Onward First followed into the blossoming morning, becoming ever more conscious of the omnipresent gnats, and of Cinnamon’s itchy warmth on his back. He called for a short break, during which they all stopped and took turns sipping tepid water from the skins that Wild had been lugging in her saddlebags. Sundew showed them the map. With a hooftip she indicated that two-thirds of their trek remained.

Another ten miles passed, or so it felt to First. The ferns and dripping junior maples that drank from the marsh were joined by venerable pines as the land inclined. The channels of Frogmire’s aquaculture receded, and great boulders began to poke through the leaf litter like the broken foundations of primordial castles once inhabited by giants.

The way Sundew led them took a sharp left. Through the thinned trees First could make out a distant spine of rock and drab grass.

“I … I think that’s the Greywater,” mused Wild.

Sundew gave a nod and began to sign.

It is. Outpost of Baal-Kaas. We enter Everfree.

The Frogmire stallions shared a look. Acorn jabbed the tip of his spear toward the dark green canopy that waited to receive them at the ridge’s north end. “Woe to the poisoner of waters,” he growled. “His time is coming.”

Sundew placed a hoof on his chest, then curled it upward in an unmistakable gesture.

Strength.

She smiled as she led them uphill and into the dark, twisted limbs of the Everfree Forest.

First recognized this particular treeline from when he had discovered the Greywater and its grim secret. As he passed below the gnarled crowns of the diseased conifers, it all began to click. The well-worn path they were on, lined with the shattered ribcages and broken leg bones of Wild’s sacrifices, had been used by the werebeast to hide its prey, and perhaps as a means of returning the victims of the grotto’s curse to its master. Now that the creature had been destroyed, it was all the more likely that this entrance to Baal-Kaas’s domain was being watched.

He checked the bindings of his shears. The knots were firm and serviceable. Night was still far off, but he was prepared for surprises.

The gruesome path wound up and down over the tortured terrain. The company struggled to find stable surfaces for their hooves, resorting to scrambling up sheer rock faces every few hundred strides while being heckled from above by foreign, unkind birds. The heat was no less uncomfortable here than below in the waterlogged turf of the swamp. First found himself envying the werebeast’s wolfish agility.

Just as they were about to rest below the overhang of a fallen megalith, the land evened out again, and the path became a corridor of grass between impenetrable walls of tree trunks. It widened into a meadow dotted with pink, blue and cream wildflowers; an island of beauty in the midst of a hostile jade and ochre sea. Determined to meet their enemy before he had the chance to impede them, Sundew urged them forward.

First scanned the shoulder-high grass from side to side. If there was ever a place to launch an ambush, he considered, this was it. An ox could have hidden in the dense vegetation.

As he was scouring the surroundings, Winter called out and pointed. There, one half buried within the inscrutable ranks of the trees and the other sprawled across the field, were remnants of a structure unlike any he’d seen before. It had once been a merry house, decorated with what might have been mistaken for candy swirls. Its greened, mold-mottled walls sagged inward like the gangrenous skin of a dying mare, and bones, not wood, formed its broken joists and studs.

Troubled, Sundew knelt down next to an exposed boulder and pressed herself against it as if listening for the heartbeat of an unconscious hospital patient. After a few moments she arose and acted out rapid-fire signs.

Bad place. Violence and despair, over and over. The spirits ever flee here. Move fast away. Beware the ground.

“Is it one of Baal-Kaas’s monsters?” asked Wild.

Perhaps, or perhaps victim, Sundew signed. She beckoned them to follow. Once they had resumed their formation—tighter than before—she proceeded at a quicker pace.

The trees were closing in again. Just before they were enveloped once more by the forest, Acorn gave the signal to stop.

“See? Lady Sundew’s foreknowledge does not fail. Behold,” he said, and pointed to the left of where they were walking.

A pit had been dug to ensnare anything emerging from the trail from beyond the meadow. Its bottom was lined with sun-bleached wooden stakes. Tangled among them were skeletal remains of a pony.

“My Lady, the danger grows,” said Acorn. “Let me and my kin take the lead to scout for such traps.”

Sundew grimaced while she mulled over the proposal, but in the end nodded her consent. Leaf and Winter strode forward and fanned out with Acorn.

It was well past midday, and the air had at last cooled to a tolerable swelter. They had plunged deep into the Everfree, out of sight of the meadow and its latent horror. Wild now kept even with Sundew, who seemed to have become more agitated despite the respite from the heat, while First remained a few steps behind them, readier to spring to the defense now that a threat had been revealed. Leaf and Winter rotated ahead at their flanks, probing, listening, and moving on. Acorn was far ahead out of sight, determined to flush out anything that might bring harm to Sundew and her friends before it had a chance to catch them off guard.

When he began to scream, it became clear that their tactics had failed.

The proud stallion’s kinsfolk rushed forward to bring aid, heedless of their own safety. Sundew, Wild and First followed close behind. When they reached the source of the pained cries, they realized that they came from above. Acorn was dangling upside down from a rope in the center of a mass of vines covered with thorns as long as dragons’ teeth. Around him, corpses of ponies and animals hung in various stages of decay.

“Hold still, cousin!” shouted Leaf. He cast about in desperate search of a way to bring the hapless stallion safely to the ground.

“Please, do not struggle!” Winter called as blood began to drip faster and faster on his head and barrel. “We shall help you!”

“Do what you can!” Acorn hissed. Gasping against the sting of his wounds, he steadied his breath enough to continue. “Lady Sundew, it may be that … I am slain. You must not let … the foe catch us here at nightfall. Go on … go on with your brother and sister in … the moon. The spirits shall surely guide you.”

Sundew looked for signs of dissent, but found only deep concern. She signed out a question.

You wish this?

“Acorn’s words ring true,” said Leaf. “We cannot both guard him and you should the enemy come upon us like this.”

“We shall find a way to release him,” added Winter. “It is but a simple trap of rope and counterweight. We shall cut it and catch him.”

“What if it gets to be late and you still haven’t freed him? What if there are more werebeasts?” Wild posed. Her hoof was grinding a pinecone to dust against the ground.

“Then we shall deprive them of their heads,” Winter replied. His grin was dour, but reflected steadfast self-assurance.

It was enough; Sundew had decided. She took one last look at the map and waved First forward to take the lead. She and Wild fell into triangular formation behind him. Before prompting him to proceed, she directed a few final signs to First.

You are the champion of Selene, and shall not fail. Spirits say path is clear. Now make haste.

First nodded. “Cinnamon girl,” he said, “watch our backs, OK?”

Cinnamon stood and turned to face the way they had come. With a yawn and a stretch, she settled back down into a ball. First took off at a trot.

More miles passed in a foul sameness of indistinct trees and toothsome vines. If there had been no path, all directions would have looked identical, with no way to tell where they had begun or where they were going. The feeling of imprisonment weighed on them: to stray from the thin strand of dirt they trod would be to be lost forever, but every sound they made heightened their fear of drawing the attention of nightmarish monsters made more sinister by their imaginations, lying in wait further along the way. Yet they dared not stop to eat or drink, or talk through their plan, lest they be caught out in the darkness.

They hurried on because there was nothing else they could do. They hurried despite the growing burden on their minds and bodies, so that when they stumbled across the shattered threshold of the great ruined Sanctuary, they had little strength left with which to fight.

The Highest Virtue

First wobbled to a halt. His legs felt hollow, like tree trunks that had been eaten from the inside by termites. Sundew and Wild were resting on either side of him, their ears pricked to catch the telltale snap of twigs on the trail, or the grinding of loose gravel on flagstones that had been laid down in the times of the kingdom as it was before the Fall.

There was only silence. Shade by shade, his eyes became accustomed to the low light of the full moon. What he had thought were the parapets of a castle, built in the old way of interlocking stones dug from the fields, he now realized were just the outer walls of a much larger stronghold.

“Anything back there, Cinnamon?” he asked, inclining his head back toward the path through the Everfree.

“Mhinghk,” she sounded. Nothing, he gathered from her lack of concern.

He knew that despite Cinnamon’s calm, he needed to prepare for battle, no matter how exhausting the last frantic miles had been. A survey of their surroundings revealed that they had entered through a gap in the defenses of the Sanctuary, or so the clues that had been spared time’s slow spell of concealment suggested. Stones the size of mares’ heads lay in piled slopes below the edges of the blown-open wall, and some were embedded in the earth in a haphazard spray pattern deeper within. Thick layers of lichen and moss clothed them like the uniforms of gray-skinned elves that had fallen in battle.

The keep and its towers within slouched under the weight of centuries. The mortar that had cemented the building stones had crumbled away to be replaced with a dirty skein of abandoned cobwebs. Spiny-limbed trees had fallen and shattered parts of the perimeter wall, creating other breaches. More had grown through the roof of the keep and crashed down in turn like shipwreck masts. Even in broad daylight, the Sanctuary would be buried in the thick shade of the overgrown forest, a solemn bulwark extending deep into the wild labyrinth of roots, vines and braches. Yet for all its age and strange architecture, First felt it to be familiar somehow; like it was a memory of home flickering from the visions of forgotten dreams.

There was a commotion behind him. Sundew was rummaging in Wild’s saddlebags. She pulled out a tangle of daisy heads and grass, worked them into three clumps and signed.

Death all around. Heavy in air and land and stones. Eat to remind of life, like lavender of Frogmire, and gain strength, else we be lost.

They did as she bade them, savoring the sweet pollen and crisp, juicy blades sheared from the meadow by Sundew’s hut. The flavors brought First back to his parent’s yard the prior summer, when his mother was still alive, and the time they had sat drinking iced tea waiting for the sun to set and the moon to come up over the wheat fields. Easier times. Sundew smiled at him and nodded.

Their strength refilled somewhat, they resumed their search. A shadow as black as the eyes of a vulture consumed them as they crept below the arch of the keep’s main gate. The slumping stone did not fall on them as they passed, but the weight crushed down on their spirits nonetheless. It felt to First like guilt did on the heart; like when the night held neither stars nor moon, and there was no sound other than his own thoughts telling him there would be nothing but chores and murderous Roses waiting for him the next gray day, and the day after.

Beyond the gate, they found themselves enclosed in the chaotic remains of a courtyard. The inscrutable maw of the keep proper stretched wide at the far end of the stone-littered grounds. Rows of weather-worn huts lined the walls to either side, the dwellings, perhaps, of servants or scribes that toiled here long ago, now decrepit and devoid of help or knowledge. A tower had fallen across the open space above, and together with the criss-crossed mesh of parched trees that had toppled inward, shut out the night sky’s luminous glow so much that the once-open space may as well have been a catacomb.

First motioned for Wild and Sundew to stay where they were. He strode to the edge of a half-collapsed water well and pushed a desiccated branch over its rim with the tip of one of his shears. The span of a few strained heartbeats later, there was a splash, followed by an angry hiss and a plume of noxious steam.

“If there’s anybody here, livin’ or dead,” he called, “come on out. We come to resolve our disputation.”

A cough, or a laugh, echoed from the far end of the wreckage. With the absent mien of a long-dead, nameless corpse, a specter appeared in the dim crepuscular gloom of the keep, its skin bald and pale white as bone. Where its eyes had once been were two puffs of gaseous light, faint and dull green like the fleeting fires of the swamps. Gnarled roots trailed from its forelegs. They writhed, probed and dug at the barren mess of the earth as it limped forward.

“Are you the master of this Sanctuary?” Wild demanded. She stepped to First’s side. “The one who made the werebeast and the Greywater? Who terrorized me and the folk of the Lowlands from time out of mind?” As loud as her questioning was, she couldn’t hide the tremor in her voice.

This time there was no mistaking the laughter that boomed from the ancient being’s throat. Its mouth opened to show sharp, cracked teeth, as glassy black as obsidian, and spoke in words made crooked by an antique lilt.

“I am Baal-Kaas, the Wretched Root! Or so I was named by those whose lives I destroyed. Destroyed and remade. For isn’t that the way of things? There is no flower that was not the death of its seed. Isn’t that what shining Selene taught, Wild Carnation?”

He turned to Sundew. “A Wayfinder. Sundew of Frogmire, blessed with an inkling of the old gift, but as silent as the dead, like all of her Mission. I tell you, your little piece of the Garden was incomplete. Do you like it now?”

Sundew stamped forward and reared. She shook her mane like a crazed lion, bringing her hooves down to crash against a mound of debris.

Baal-Kaas only smiled wider. “Yes, it was I who made the Greywater to spring forth, under a gracious blood moon and the gaze of the nine Wanderers many years before your grandmothers’ grandmothers were born. Those who chanced to drink of its elixir now sing sweet music to the Lady of Dreams forever. Would you like to hear them?”

He reached a hoof toward one of the keep’s walls. Roots burst through the floor, snaking through the flaps of cobwebs and into the gaps between the stones. Like a wolf’s paws tearing apart a wounded deer, they pried open a rough edged door.

Screams and wails surged over the courtyard in a wave of raw desperation. Low red torchlight spilled from the hole as well, providing a hazy view of dozens of misshapen forms beyond, struggling and convulsing in torment. The stench of fish and rotten flesh seeped across the ruptured ground like an undercurrent of hot filth in a lifeless river.

“Why?” shrieked Wild. “Why would you want this?”

As if arising to answer her, werebeasts began to clamber out from the dark barrows of the huts. Nine giant behemoths with glyphs carved into their foreheads and arms rose from the black portals, all gnashing fangs and bulging sinew, loping on long limbs toward them half-upright. The stumps that had once been their hooves had sprouted many-jointed claws that gouged the earth and twitched in the polluted air.

“For the same reason that I fashioned these sacred avatars from the Caretakers that came to put an end to me over the countless moons: so that they might be eternal in Her eternal night.”

The foremost of the great monsters picked up a boulder, and with the force of a charging bull shattered it with a swing of its claws as if it were a hen’s egg. Another rammed its shoulder against a massive bole lying diagonally against the roof of one of the huts. Both wood and bone snapped, and the two pieces of the log toppled down.

The werebeast raised its wounded limb. The pale flesh of its chest crawled, and with a muted pop the leg returned to its socket. All nine blasted out a roar in discordant unison with the suffering thralls of the keep.

Their master pointed. “You misguided fools, you indeed have found Baal-Kaas! It is I who deliver the message of the spirits of the land, the only one they tell: all life fails; all shall be with them forever in death.”

First touched Wild’s shoulder and gave it a gentle pressure to ease her behind him. With her out of range of the werebeasts, he trotted to within a few paces of where the creatures waited and relaxed back on his haunches. He spoke in a loud voice over the pain-filled noise that resonated from the keep.

“Is that the truth? Well I’m First Fruits, and mayhap I’m here to prove you right.”

Baal-Kaas raised a hoof to his doggish ear. “Was that wit from a boy no older than morning dew on a marigold’s petals? You believe that you can accomplish what none have been able to do in ten centuries; what hundreds of naïve, untaught heroes have tried. You believe that because you are a branch of Joyous Grove’s far-flung tree that destiny serves you. Yes, silly little boy, I know who you are. You have no idea who I am!”

“Yer just another Rose to me,” First replied. Cinnamon hopped down from his back and bounded to the top of a pile of rubble where she went into a crouch, ready to pounce.

He crossed his foreleg shears, raised them to the few patches of starlight that shone through the holes in the false roof, and gathered his thoughts. “Your light is far away tonight, Mother. If I fall,” he started, trying to steady his breathing, “let it be—”

“—Let it be atop a hill of the bodies of your foes, oh Night Princess, my depthless well of serenity, until all the poison of your fault be bled away.”

First stared in shock. Baal-Kaas was sitting like he was, his forelegs crossed over his chest.

“Does my prayer surprise you, young one? I was a Caretaker once, like you, full of righteous zeal to right the great Wrong. Appointed by the Architect himself. And I fought dutifully, felled many a terror that wandered out of the changed Garden, until the Nine Stars were perceived as they truly are. Shall I tell you the secret? Shall I tell you what the Nine are, or rather, who?”

“Don’t listen First!” Wild cried out. “Whole convocations were lost to the Mystery!”

“They were saved!” Baal-Kaas exclaimed. “The Order solved it here, you know, in this very place. So many years they spent digging the earth for artifacts, pondering riddles, inhaling the dust of old useless books they went blind reading, traveling to the four corners of the kingdom to speak to half-dead ninnies, while the answer was right here within these walls. Hear me now! The Nine were foals, children sacrificed to enact the holy spell of transformation you call the Fall. The Night Mother consumed them, flesh and blood—salt and iron to bend the lines of power to Her will!—so that She might tear her sister down and bring night eternal. And Joyous Grove, your forebear, your pride, gathered them up for her.”

“Liar!” Wild screamed. She began to cry, scowling through her tears. Sundew covered her ears and shuddered.

Baal-Kaas flourished a hoof, and spoke almost with pity. “Children, you shall die tonight.”

The werebeasts charged. The nearest lunged for First’s throat, grunting in hunger. Noting that its attack showed no more intelligence than the one that had haunted the Greywater, First rolled backward, and as its claws swung across like an ogre’s club to cut him in half, he caught the blow in the crescents of his foreleg shears. The blades sliced through dense muscle, tendon and bone, releasing a wash of reeking fluids that stung to the touch. Before the dismembered beast registered that one of its tools was gone, First leapt up what remained of its arm, and ramming his shears into the slimy folds at the back of its neck, severed its head. He dug his hind leg blades into the meat of its shoulders to steady himself as its flailing body stumbled.

From his perch, he spotted three of the monsters converging on Wild and Sundew. Wild bore her knife in her mouth, giving warning swings when a claw or a muzzle got too close. Cinnamon was hacking at the scalp of another, yowling and spitting.

“Hold on,” First called to them, “I’ll be there in a—”

A jumble of claws wrapped around his barrel and plucked him into the air. He squirmed, unable to do more than nick the knobby digits.

“First, no!” Wild shouted.

It was the last thing he heard before the world turned to livid agony. The talons of the werebeast’s other limb were inside him, below his ribs. Inch by unbearable inch, it drew them toward his stomach in a wicked caress. He flailed harder, but only succeeded in working the claws that held him deeper.

From a world away, he saw the one he’d downed pick up its head with its remaining paw and fix it back in place on the stump of its neck. Severed muscles bubbled below slick, taut skin, and the wound was healed as if nothing had happened. Grinning at him, it did the same with its lost foreleg.

The claws that were ripping him apart finished their cut. The creature sniffed at the open lacerations, roared, and bit its oozing fangs into him as if he were a ripe apple.

There were more screams, but to First they’d stopped making sense. The way he was held up in a beam of moonlight as his murderer roared again in triumph didn’t make sense. The blur of the Sanctuary walls as he was flung away to the ground was a mystery too.

He saw Sundew jump in front of him, tall and defiant. There was a short struggle before she was raised aloft, still whipping out her hooves, and thrown against a wall. She slid downward and went still.

Wild came to him next, holding him tight and shielding him with her body from the approaching nightmare, heedless of how his blood soaked her clothes and mane. She too was lifted up, to be slammed headfirst into the dirt. First’s view was filled the sight of her bruised, unconscious face, and the blood leaking from her slackened mouth.

A ball of fur launched out of the darkness. Cinnamon. His last defender, he thought. Her target caught her out of the air, and with a snarl cast her into the black pit of the poisoned water well.

His thoughts were turning slower and slower. He was alone, now. That was it.

“Victory is yours again, my brethren!” he heard Baal-Kaas call out in celebration. “Masterful work, and worthy of your past vocation. Now let him be. Let him suffer for his foolhardiness. Your venom will do its job; tomorrow, as with all the others that came here to thin your ranks, he shall instead join them.” He regarded Sundew and Wild. “As for them, seal them away. They shall be made to drink the Greywater, and spend eternity in the Chamber of Sorrow lamenting their lifelong error.”

First knew he said this only to magnify his despair. He could only wave a weak hoof at one of the creatures as it dragged the still bodies of his friends away. It dumped them inside a hut and blocked the entrance with rocks and broken trees.

The clamor of the tormented souls within the keep subsided as the root-hewn door closed. The grunts of the werebeasts faded from earshot.

He had failed. The ponies he loved would suffer forever. Tomorrow, he would become a monster.

All was quiet. The rank odor of death dissipated, and the sounds and smells of the deep forest returned.

Time passed. The ragged edges of his torn skin burned. Visions began to appear, superimposed on the silent shapes of a past that was as broken and lost as his present. The ring of hedges around his father’s garden of Roses; Cinnamon worming her way under his covers and purring herself to sleep; his mother putting oats and grass in front of him for breakfast in the kitchen; the milestones of his lost life.

Something sparked in the darkness behind him.

Now there was a hint of something else in the air. It was a scent he remembered from his mother’s tea cabinet. Flowers, he thought. Not hibiscus, not rose … jasmine.

Lavender.