Amidst Deception

Long have the days passed since the Caterlotians turned tail and fled at the mere mention of the deadly nightshades. And though the Appaloosians, few they might be compared to the crammed silken streets of the capital, were far from the harrowing events that nearly toppled the cherished procession, they still felt the soul destroying aftermath.

 It had been close to five years from when the hole-drilled queen’s plans were scuppered by something as novel as love. A stallion and his marefriend revelled in this memory, the two of them laughed at the mere mention of the dark-souled changelings. They toasted with glasses of freshly pressed juice in the cool evening breeze, one of them hailed from a family more vast than a certain Ghastly Gorge.

One of the pair broke the choke-hold of silence and sang to his other “do you ever wonder?” The mare across swirled the juice with the motion of her hoof. “Care to wonder about what?”

The stallion pushed his chair back and went to his love’s side; he looked up adoringly in the demeaning likeliness of a loyal puppy. She adored him also, they were after all together in the paling light, and not a soul was wandering the sanded paths. “What were you saying Brae?” She pressed, she followed the rouse her dashing stallion presented and proceeded to pat him on the pole.

He purred at the closeness he shared with her and looked up, his eyes an enchanting emerald display of utter focus. He rested the puppy-dog eyes on the lap of his love and made a gentle nickering on her thigh. She flinched at the motoring quality of his lips as they travelled on up her leg.

“Do you ever wonder what life would be like without love” Brae finally finished his previously fragmented sentence. His love looked back down reposed yet almost embarrassed at the same instance. She almost needed to pause and check her mental calendar as she presumed he was making an April Foal’s joke. Brae, his head still inserted near the mare’s crotch, lifted his gaze. His love paused a little age longer until she finally lost her fight with a teary laughter and exploded.

 “A world without love?” She mercilessly mocked the one she called Brae. “I suppose the next thing you’ll be saying is, what if there is a world without chairs” She continued to berate at her other’s expense. Brae raised an unimpressed eyebrow to the display.

 “I’m being serious Puddin’ Pop, just imagine what life would be like.” The mare didn’t look flattered by the desert based pet name she had been endowed with. She stared daggers at her beau a moment before she rested her gaze on the crisscrossing pattern in the table. She made a noise so quiet a pin drop could be heard.

“I don’t want to imagine that Braeburn. Life without you, it just aint worth living.” Braeburn hadn’t expected such a low-profile reception to his meaningless prose. He bided his time before trying to resolve the tempered air.

“I didn’t mean to upset you Constance. You know what I’m like sometimes.” She obviously remembered the vision of tomfoolery she had snagged and regaled Brae with a smattering of laughter. She laid her hooves outstretched across the table and closed her eyes. In the cool evening breeze her mane whipped over her face, each golden blonde lock cascaded along her features. Braeburn dreamily watched the starry night; his eyes followed the show of celestial delight instead of being fixed on his lover’s outreached hooves. He snapped out of his transcendent habit and slammed his hooves down on top of Constance’s.

SLAM!

She drew her appendages in, shocked at the rather abrupt return of her favour. She stole a brief gaze into the heavens before her gaze flicked back to Brae. “You’re always getting distracted Brae, it makes me worry” She aired her concerns.

Braeburn plucked his timber-hued cowboy hat and planted it in between his hooves. He knew where his love was coming from when she said his attention would often stray. Braeburn collected himself and stretched a hoof into the centre of the table.

“You’re the only mare for me Constance Pear, nothing at all to be getting het up about.”

Constance felt the rekindled fire of their love but also a liquescent fire in her marehood. She grinned haphazardly before escaping the awkward silence and retreating to the little-mare’s-room. Braeburn sank in to his chair and caught sight of the majestic theatre of epic proportions which was to never end. He wished his relationship could resemble the simple infinity that the heavens portrayed but alas he knew things weren’t built to last. As he spied miniscule galaxies and the minutest parsecs of space he couldn’t help but feel small and helpless. He took a quick check over at the conveniences metres from where he sat and pondered what it was exactly mare’s did in the porcelain dungeons that made them spend an eternity inside of them.

Brae repositioned himself and reposed his outreached hoof as the door creaked open. Constance bashfully reclaimed her seat and glided a hoof towards the one already perched on the crisscross of metal down below.

“Did you get lost in there?” Brae jested while flexing his aching outstretched hoof. The mare across the way found this joke to be a shade on the insulting side and slammed her hoof down on to Braeburn’s.

SLAM!

Brae’s cheek burned cherry red as he pawed his hurting hoof. Constance seemed lighter than the air she breathed that night, though her opinion of herself was as damning as ever.

“I was meant to be on a diet! I was supposed to be losing weight! Braeburn!” the doubtful mare whined, clapping her hooves as thought to achieve some sort of immediate solution from her colt-friend’s mouth.

“You’re beautiful to me Connie! I don’t care what your magazines and such parade! You are perfect to me in every way!”

Brae had uttered the words that Constance did not want to hear. These words confirmed what the self-loathing mare already thought. Constance coiled one hoof over the other where in which she made a pillow unto which her doubtful head sank.

“I’m fat!” Braeburn was squeamish to this manner of conversation; he pried himself free from the binds of the chair, sneaking behind his lamenting marefriend. She was to be truthful a little on the large side. Brae tugged back the chair from beneath his love and caught her as she fell. She turned back to him, a mixture of anger and sadness bled from her captivating amber eyes. Brae raised her up so high others might have thought she were a shining star.

“You’re weightless to me” he swooned. He let the pearlescent beauty return to her hooves and then himself settled back at his seat.

She gave him a certain look, one that derived a sort of hunger in his mind. Brae wasn’t in to drugs; he didn’t drink all that much either, but one thing he couldn’t deny was he was hooked. But whether it was love or lust was up in the air. He dove over the crisscrossing tapestry and returned a puppy-dog stare up to his mistress. Constance, still erect, tightly fixed her hoof around Braeburn’s and rushed off down the sanded lane.

Overlooking Appaloosa>

Elsewhere a herd of buffalo grazed off of an oasis of green in the expansive yellow plain. Some returned to the warm burning fire which stemmed from the centre of the tribal homestead. The smallest of the buffalo remained perched on the cliff’s edge, she watched the sleepy town below, and she imagined how things might have been. The little buffalo with the strong heart then beamed her gaze to where her brothers grazed and left the cliff-side precipice alone for the night.

The fire invited the denizens in the tundra-like desert evening like moths to a flame. The chieftain praised a something he saw in the fire, a spirit he confided in, a voice that only he could hear. He chanted rough incantations into the dancing light show of violet and orange until the night grew too cold for even he. The little buffalo approached the beacon and basked in its glow.

“Two city ponies are still awake.” She informed. The chieftain snapped from his trance-like state and cocked an uncaring eyebrow to the runt’s remark.

“Why do you watch them Little-Strong-Heart? Do you long to be there instead of here?” A few pairs of eyes rested on the pair speaking at the fireside. Little-Strong-Heart kicked sand into the flames, a plume of golden haze jettisoned from the inferno. She in some way knew his words had merit, she envied the townsfolk and their different ways, she often dreamed of what it would be like to live by a new roster of rules whilst she played audience to the dazzling light show in the sky.

“Do you think they see the same sky?” The inquisitive calf extended a chiselled hoof towards the heavens. The chieftain stumbled both over his words and over his own self.

“They don’t appreciate it… they are too busy… life in the town is far too hectic for one young calf like you.”

Strong-Heart cursed her birth rite, she was outland borne, but she was also a soul split between two separate paths. She bowed her head and chewed at a remote patch of green. She ground the shrubs between her teeth, the lump of tasteless sludge then slipped down her throat. Strong-Heart bewildered her onlookers as she fell to her haunches in submission.

“I bet it’s romantic, the night sky I mean…” she proposed before a peppering of salts rushed into the fire and thusly formed another great plume of multi-tonal splendour.

Thundering hooves was from a long lineage of chieftains; his father before him saw the first eclipse across the lands, and many generations before that, his ancestor first stampeded on the sacred grounds that the buffalo called their home. He pulled a scowl at his daughter’s wondering eye.

“The sky would be romantic down there, but none who live there see it.” Strong-Heart bounded back up to meet the ungracious face of her father.

“Are you saying all the settlers are blind?” Thundering relaxed his forehead and rubbed it tenderly with his hoof.

“I am saying they do not see the true beauty of nature for they only seek to destroy.” A few loose necks gifted Thundering hooves with a boost to his ego as they gestured to commend his infallible knowledge. The tiny calf stole a demur look over to where she perched and watched the town.

“They aren’t all the same you know; those ponies down there could teach us so much.”

Thundering’s displeasure at his daughter’s betraying train of thought eked out a side of him he sought to keep under wraps “When they want more land they will kill us, every last one, they will have weapons we cannot imagine and they will have blood-lust only matched by the manticore and ursa beasts.”

Little-Strong-Heart had broken away from the congregation, using her father’s damning speech as a decoy. She scurried for the peak of land where she observed the world below and pointed a hoof to a couple, alone, out in the cold evening air, they had been sharing a feeling only scoffed at in the clan.

“They’re in love” Strong-Heart whispered back towards her fuming father.

Thundering paced up the edge of one world and the gateway to the next and scoffed further at the display. He didn’t say anything at first, the hopeful calf at his stead pointed out the couple once again “look down there father, does that look evil to you?”

By the time the aged bull had craned his neck the couple down below had rushed away hoof in hoof. He let out a breathy chortle before erupting in a storm of bellowing laughter.

“I see this love you speak of Little-Strong-heart, only it leaves much to be desired!”

Strong-Heart glowered at her father; she then resumed her role as voyeur and glanced at where the couple had been. She was nearly thrown from the cliff by the playful tap of Thundering’s hoof against her rump “They are not romancers, these wonderers you watch, they are simply sex pests”

Constance’s Boudoir>

Constance freed her bed of the littered screwed-up diary pages and sodden tissue paper and presented herself upon it. Brae followed suit and assumed his role on top. Constance gazed up with demur saturated in her eyes; she launched her hooves over his neck and brought his head into her bust. Constance giggled as a hoof crept up in between her legs.

“Oh Brae, we have to be quiet.” Braeburn shifted his yellow streamlined physique along the pearlescent body beneath him. He caught sight of his love’s pursed lips and reacquainted them with his own. He removed the hoof from where it was concealed in her crotch and brought it up to Constance’s face. They shared a salacious moment in sweet embrace.

Constance guided her steed with her eyes, she wanted for him to go down on her that night. The only issue which threatened her plan was the stud atop her was a dolt. He didn’t read her blatant message, he continued massaging her tongue with his and caressing her voluptuous form. They made eyes across the small space between their noses and suddenly something clicked in the fatuous stallion’s head.

“Oh, we’re to be quiet, I shan’t be speaking then” he leered, lowering his skinny yet muscular form down to where his head was in line with her fruity cutie mark. He wrapped his lips around the curious shape and mimicked the same action he had taken to please her mouth.

His tongue felt alien and wrong inside the mare’s virgin marehood, she let a tear roll out from her eye and emitted bizarre lustful moans at the stroke of each subsequent lick. She clung to his tanned two-toned mane and forced him closer to the depths of her marehood. His tongue now lashed at her Pandora’s Box, searching around the inner walls and strange inward and outward protruding structures till he found nirvana.

The mare couldn’t contain her pleasure, she moaned Longley in the rich sensation of tongue against clitoris. The mare stole a sly look down at the stifle of the steed; she smiled as it winked at her, a proud member, standing to attention. He spread her legs to both cardinal points of the bed and upped his efforts on her sensitive area. She convulsed a few times before screaming.

“Oh dear Celestia…”

The stallion left his mouth obediently over her slit; he puffed out his cheeks as if he had just taken a long drink. Brae pulled himself away as a dull tapping resonated behind him. Before him stood a mare and a stallion, both wore a pear reminiscent cutie mark and both shared the same disgusted look. The generous stallion whipped around, he failed to swallow the shot of pear liquor that sat in his mouth. The pater of grey coat reassuringly clutched his wife’s hooves before storming a war path for the wayward stallion.

“Braeburn I presume?” The Pater scolded, his teeth bared. Constance shivered continually on the bed sheets as brae looked the parents in the eye with both his eyes as well as his still engorged member. He tried to speak and spewed out the drabs of sordid solution he had resting on his tongue. The Matriarch screamed and fled the room.

The pater remained; he threw his daughter a disapproving glare and set his sights on the felon in his eyes “Get out of my house!”

Once upon a lonely porch>

In a secluded branch of Appleoosian wasteland lived an old rocking chair. And upon this rocking chair sat the oldest dweller of the desperate lands, his jaw a jowl, his eyes tired, he swayed back and forth in the dying daylight. He chewed on a wad of tobacco to dull his rheumatoid pains. He gazed up into the inky blackness and let out a deep sigh.

 “Things just aint the same anymore, I can hardly remember my golden years.” The old coot battled with gravity on his brief struggle from the swinging chair, once aloft he forgot what it was he got up for and promptly sat back down. He had been there since the first settlers had found and named the dustbowl of a town; he had reaped the benefits of the first Apple Family harvest in the dells and was the first to endure the great pie famine. He pushed back with his weak legs to get things swinging again and whistled a little number unrecognisable to anypony who heard it, and anypony who did ask was promptly shot down. He was an experienced hoof from the times of mining and mare inequality, and as such his behaviour around mares had much to be desired. He scratched an itch on his rakish spine and spied the faint outline of a certain sun-kissed stallion escaping from one of the houses.

The old boot was one Jeremiah Thicket, the once sheriff of the one-horse town. He leaned from his chair and snapped a hoof towards Braeburn “Now you ought to be leaving Miss Pear alone.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, the aged stallion rose from his chair and tucked his cane under his arm. He walked with a hirple towards the youthful stallion “I’m thinkin’ you got caught in the act.”

“Don’t you worry about me, Master Apple; I’m just old and creaky.” Braeburn gleaned some comfort from his run in with the close-to-the-grave stallion. Jeremiah spat a glob of tobacco into a pail across the way, the projectile carcinogen let out a blighting pang as it hit the pail.

PING!

Thicket scanned braeburn’s younger, fitter body “you get yourself home now. If ponies see your fifth leg flapping around they are gonna drive you out of town.” Brae, embarrassed, tucked his head between his forelegs and admired his yet-to-sleep member.

“Oh I see your point.” he choked back laughter, not wanting to look more foolish than he already did. Jeremiah rolled his eyes.

“I can certainly see your point.” The gesture was spurring enough for Braeburn to slink away and hurry for his home.

Overlooking Appaloosa>

Elsewhere, on a sleepy plateau a clan of buffalo dreamed the night away. One small calf however didn’t share in the clan’s slumber. She lay prone at the peak of land, an observatory for the rich diversified utopia that lay below. Little-Strong-Heart knew not the depravity which had taken place in Appaloosa; she was blissfully ignorant of the evils which were commonplace under every gold-dusted rooftop. She abandoned the viewing platform and returned to the silent clan homeland.

Amid the selection of multi-tonal wigwams was the home the chieftain shared with his daughter. Strong-Heart peeled back the cow hide sheeting that covered the entrance and quietly hoof tipped into the vacuole of the den. Thundering, her reluctant father, snored violently atop his bed of straw. The littlest buffalo cautiously stepped over the lump of lowly growling matter on route to her own straw construct of a bed. Once safely clear of any risk of waking her father, the calf folded her legs underneath her and nestled into the fibrous roost.

Again, upon a lonely porch>

The beady eye of the lawmaker had not left him. He rocked in his chair on his hoof-made porch and hummed out a tune so unmistakeably made-up. Upon his knee lazed a sorry-looking banjo, it had missing strings, it had a stink of decay about it, it had once housed a small family of wood pigeons, but it was Jeremiah’s most treasured possession.

He plucked a string which promptly snapped, he tried to stretch the wiry thread back to its housing amongst the other frets along the stem. The fragile old thing was once a highly strung part in a small string quartet that used to play at the annual Appleoosian Harvest Festival. Unfortunately for Sheriff Thicket, the banjo presented a meticulous mend to his rheumatoid caramel hooves.

He allowed the poor-looking banjo to rest on the porch floor; he patted his knees before winching his way out of the rocking chair, and sent himself inside.  He travelled all the distance from one teetering seat to another. He perched his bony behind upon the precarious edge of the chair and screwed a hoof on a small wooden box. The small box burst into life and effortlessly replayed country and western songs from times of old.

Jeremiah tapped his hoof along to the rhythm which sprung from the radio, he bobbed his head a little too, and in some places where he knew a word or two he’d try his hoof at singing. Cats menacingly prowled the streets that night but even their out-of-tune yowls and screeches were no match for the sheer tone-deaf manner with which Jeremiah squealed. The coot heard the protest of the outward-bound alley cats and ceased the radio transmission before he stopped his butchering of classical power ballads and line dancing ditties alike.

The lonely old soul searched his soul as he gazed at a framed photograph on to which cascaded a stream of saline tears, ruined beneath the tears was the last image of Jeremiah’s dear departed wife. Newly retired, the silver-backed stallion spent all of his days dwelling on his losses and his failings of which there were plenty to choose from. He regretted the day he let her from his sight, how she commuted to Canterlot at the same time as the changeling fiasco. He gazed closer into the very fabric of the image “the love of the prince and Cadence thwarted the shadow queen, but the love we had, we still have, could have banished her to the depths of Tartarus itself.”

He placed the photo back to where it had leaned for the last 5 years. He didn’t make use of the bed he had once shared, he feared it like her ghost still lingered betwixt the sheets, so he leaned his head back in the unruly hard wooden seat and blew out the candle which flickered on the side.

The Apple Household>

Braeburn Apple layered the streets with broken hearts; he was what some would refer to as a Lothario. He knew what to say to get mares into bed, he understood the minds of the creatures he lusted after so, he felt no remorse for the hearts that lay split, and he didn’t even write to them to tell them why. At the end of the torturous lane of scattered vital organs sat the proud Apple homestead. Into this stead sneaked the wily, self-assured, flatterer of the many. In through the house the stallion crept, each step practised to miss every squeaking board. Soon Braeburn happened upon the door to his bedroom proper and he twisted the knob. The rapscallion patted his hooves clean of another successful bedroom venture and pulled the sheets over his head whilst he slipped into bed.

Brae reminisced about the sheer volume with which his latest conquest came. He recalled his near inability to keep the salvo of saline sourness in his cheeks and he joyfully remembered the look on her overprotective father’s face. A priceless look, one that couldn’t fail to widen the smile of the steed as he let his heavy eyelids, gravid with the trials of the day, fall so that he could finally end his waiting for the bounty of dreams and the new dawn.

The Pear Household<

On the other hoof fretted a heart broken mare. Constance demanded of herself why a catch such as Brae had picked her above others and why he had then usurped her. She felt betrayed, mortified, unbalanced, peckish, nauseous, angry, and horny all at the same time. She then looked down into her fresh satin sheets to discover a contrasting stain of bloody scarlet right in the centre of it.

She rolled onto her side, vulnerable, and gripped tightly on to her pillow. She eventually left her wallow and set eyes on the washroom across the landing. This was a normal thing, something her mother had explained when it first occurred. She unsheathed a large cotton bung and inserted it thusly into herself. It was truly unpleasant feeling but it was an evil necessary, and a task she was by now well versed in. It still felt wrong to her, to haemorrhage blood at such a rate and not die, but her sweetheart of a mother assured her it was all parts and parcel of growing up and becoming a mare.