First Fruits

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.