Amidst Deception

The sunlight kissed every inch of Appaloosa, all across the homes and hides ponies woke to a blinding new morning. One pony however was too spent to move a muscle, especially not his left foreleg. He tossed a stinking rag off of his snout and went back to snoring. One part of him had woken up before his mind could catch up, as a mother’s hoof cracked at the door Braeburn anxiously tried to pat the lump in his quilt down.

He gave up trying to subdue the beast and instead hooked his leg over it. His mother opened the door, she had a tray of tea upon her hooves, and she set the ornate pieces of china down and sat on the end of Brae’s bed. Brae twisted and jostled his legs from beneath her generous rump and as he freed his legs from the weight his fifth leg made a daring dash for freedom.

“Surely tea can’t be that exiting” the flabbergasted matriarch of amber coat commented. Braeburn tried desperately to resume his hooked leg pose but failed immeasurably. Next through the door was a skinny sand-stone stallion. He haltered at the door as if he had a rider and they had tugged hard on his bit. The pater tried to avoid the awkward stare of the eye without a face as Brae’s member penetrated his quilt. Braeburn slammed his hooves down on his mattress.

“Can y’all just get out of my room?!” He cried in protest as his nirvana was spoilt by the prying patron and the curious matron.

The couple looked at each other and laughed wholeheartedly.

“It’s his room now is it? Well, well, well, some ponies these days” the pater jested. The other looked on in astonishment at her son before she turned and left the room.

The parent whom still dwelled in the dank sweltering tomb of a room marched up to his progeny and smacked him hard across the glans. “Don’t ever let your mother see that thing again! I will not stand for this attitude you have developed recently, now put that thing away and keep it there!”

Brae was successfully silenced by the bruising of his gluttonous extra-leg. His father waited by him, expecting a response, all he got was a covering of vomit around his fetlocks. Braeburn tossed over in his bed as to not look at his ball-busting father. He made a few fake snoring sounds until he felt the judgemental stare no longer.

Overlooking Appaloosa>

Up early in the sanded prairie a young buffalo calf stretched her athletic limbs before she peeled back the animal pelt ‘door’ and met the new day head-on.  She trotted along to the viewing platform atop the cliff’s edge and watched things unfold below. In the wake of the morning, fillies and colts were readied for schooling and sent with lunch packed to the only school in town. Drunken miscreants fell over themselves and pleaded forgiveness from their blind-to-it wives.

Something most Appleoosians would not appreciate was the twinkling, shining, reflective grains of sand as they shone the rays back like the glass they will one day be. As the light piqued the intrigue of small scavenger birds and larger predatory birds, the day fell into swing.

The response that trailed from the calf’s lips would change the relationship she shared with her father forever. She stole another glance down to the hustle and bustle and decreed. “who do I pray to? If ponies pray to their alicornous goddesses… then who answers my prayers?”

Thundering searched his mind for an answer befitting the question but nothing arises. He turned his protégé around and held her head fast.

“Out there are the spirits of our forefathers and forbearers, they watch and guide us from the guiding wing of the great eagle.” Strong-Heart was unperturbed by the rapturous thinking of her father, she broke free of his grip and stared into the scavenger skies.

“Where is this eagle? All I see are buzzards and vultures.”  The honoured pater was thrown aback by his charge’s blasphemous sentiment; he closed his eyes in solace and returned to the clan circle.

Little-Strong-Heart resumed her scanning of the quant city scene which unravelled below. She pivoted her head over to one side before her vision was blocked by a rakish old gentlecolt. He had rested upon his knee a sorry-looking banjo that had seen better days. He was casually slumped at the observer’s paradise, his mottled legs hung long over the deep chasm. He brought the instrument up for use and strummed a chord up along the frets. He sounded awful, like a cat giving fellatio to a helium balloon pump, the screeching unbearable.

POING

Another string snapped on the banjo and it was placed respectfully down on the edge of the steep escarpment. Jeremiah turned to the calf. “Beautiful morning don’t you think?”

This was one of the few opportunities Little-Strong-Heart attained to speak to the settlers; she tilted her head and hung it low as she approached the stranger. As she drew closer her confidence blossomed until she very purposefully cleared her throat. “Were you talking to me?”

Jeremiah looked up to the weary calf with an expression of harmlessness and innocence; he twisted around and shot a hoof forward. “The name’s Jeremiah Thicket, I used to run things around here.”

The hoof remained extended, never to be shaken. The caramel stallion refused his offer of a hoof-shake and smiled. “Maybe our people’s customs differ, however you say hello?”

Strong-Heart contemplated conversing with the not so much a stranger and flicked the feather bound around her pole “we say how… Only kidding, I think we wave or something like that.”

Jeremiah absorbed the information easily and regurgitated it in the form of rapidly waving hoof. “Howdy!” He beamed.

Strong-Heart poked at the worn instrument to only be gifted by a further ping and the last string snapping upon it.

The old stallion retrieved his prized possession and cradled it up against his chest. “What call was there for that?”

The brash notion of carelessness was not well received; the little calf spoke impertinently “why are you carrying around the old heap anyway?”

As soon as the sentiment reached the silver-back’s ears he died a mite inside. He cherished his memory closer than before, he averted his gaze from the little bloody-minded calf, and Strong-heart did the same, a divide formed.

Some time passed on the ridge on the plateau which swallowed the sleepless town below. From behind the old sheriff came a stifling grunt, he turned to the disturbance and before him was a well-built buffalo. Chief Thundering Hooves gave out a stare which could frighten the very spikes right off of the cacti. “What business do you have here? These are our homelands.”

With a reluctant sigh, Jeremiah raised to meet the steaming nostrils of the chieftain. He held on with all his might to the instrument he treasured, the buffalo chief cocked an awful glare and swiped the banjo from Jeremiah’s arms.

Thicket spun around and leaned all the way down, but before his hoof could reach the splintered mass, a massive weight bore down on him. Some early risers of the clan came to show support to the commander and chief, they soon arrived in swathes; they positioned themselves along the outskirts of the encampment.

“What’s the hol’ up?” Jeremiah challenged, his hoof finally clutched the banjo, but his once found common ground with the buffalo was now assisting in his crushing demise. Thundering took the pressure off of the crone’s back and made a grab for the banjo. Jeremiah held on as well he could but the sheer physical prowess of the chief prevailed, granting him the spoils.

Jeremiah wheezed through his efforts but eventually returned to his hooves. Thundering reared up to present his victory to his clan; they adulated him, even his daughter, quick of mind, joined in the insanity. The sight of the bedraggled caramel stallion tickled a hard-to-find nerve on the chieftain, he broke out into laughter. “Did you see how he feared me brothers? He positively urinated all over himself at my very presence!”

Thundering Hooves needed to keep up certain bravado to ascertain the loyalty of his brothers, it was not just a term of respect after all, and indeed every last buffalo there was a progeny of Thundering’s loins. Little-Strong-Heart was first to cease the inane hyena like behaviour, she begged that the others followed suit but none would be as neutral nor as humble as her.

A couple of fraternal buffalo brothers skipped merrily on by to where they tended to their longing stomachs, they would spend most of their lives trying to satisfy a hunger that could never be quenched. A fuming young calf broke out from the ranks and raised a question to the chieftain. “How can you be so ignorant?”

Thundering gave the question no space in his mind, not that there was much mind to spare in the first place, he blew warm air from his nostrils and turned away. Strong-Heart reasserted herself and confronted the belligerent dictator, once her clean-souled father, and looked him painfully in the eyes. “You say you fear the change when it is you who has changed. Why do you still hate your hoofed cousins so much?”

To say Thundering Hooves was proud was the understatement of the century. He looked within himself to perhaps find some semblance of his past life, but underneath his cold exterior lay the same cold soul. He cursed in his mind and threw a harrowing glare at his youngest. “If you love them so much, then go be with them.”

The Pear Household>

A jovial mare stood proud in the shower. She spread her legs and wiped a loofa through them. The events of last night were still a hazy blur to her; she blushed as she drew a line in the misted shower screen, a hoof rested on her mouth as she grinned at the sensational feelings from the night before. She was not so dumb, not a bimbo Brae would usually go for, and she was actually a student of art at the royal Canterlot Academy.

She swung back the screen and took a tepid step out; she caught a hazed reflection of her being in the washroom wall and almost broke down into tears. Constance, besides being a beautiful mind, was a manic depressive. If it weren’t for the most eligible bachelor in Appaloosa’s advances she would have slit her fetlocks, straight up river, long before. Constance’s mother Patience cooed at the door “Constance? My little pear blossom, are you in there still?”

A silence clung in the air. Constance’s heart jumped as a spider scuttled across the shined tiled bathroom floor and disappeared into her strewn out attire. Another voice percolated through the hollows of the door “time to come out now Constance. There are others in this house you know.”

Bartlett Pear was not a stallion to mess with, he was honest to goodness now, but in his hay-day he was revered for his shortness of temper. The stallion, sometime later, still ushered clout with his every word “Constance Pear! You get your hide out here this instant!”

Patience was a meek specimen to behold; she was frail at even a tender age, which was probably why Bartlett was so protective over her. The door lulled open and Constance, posed in a sort of an anguished crawl, crept past her guardians. The atmosphere was so thick it would've crushed the family if chance came to be.

Bartlett stepped across the landing and planted himself on his daughter’s drenched tail. “And where do you think you are going? You were told to never let that depraved little cretin near you.”

“After he broke your heart I thought you would have been done with him.” Patience swatted her husband’s hoof from atop Constance’s flank-proximate locks. “Don’t you dare manhandle her Bartlett; she hasn't put a hoof wrong.”

Bartlett returned his hoof in shock; he curled it over and rubbed it sensitively. “She’ll never learn if you pussy-foot around her Patience! She needs rules, otherwise she’s gonna run amuck like this every other day and we’re the one…”

The father’s rant was cut short by a meek hoof slapped across his mouth; the owner of the hoof stood her ground. “Everypony has to make their mistakes; we weren't so different you and I.”

Bartlett pawed his burning cheek and turned his attention to his portly daughter, he thought back to a time when he was up to no good and a certain somepony pulled him out of the gutter. He swallowed a hard lump of pride which had formed in his throat. “Fine, I can’t control who you like, I guess you do have to make your own mistakes… er umm I meant decisions.”

Constance brightened up to the new insight into her parents’ chemistry; she threw a gentle smile to her folks and went about her morning business.

Once out of the door the mare let out a deep uncontrollable sigh before she danced off through the thick lashings of grass which grew in troves about her home. In great contrast to the dustbowl which engulfed the vast majority of Appaloosa proper, the Pear house hold stood proud in a rare green oasis. It didn’t take more than a few minutes before Constance had reached the home of her love. She clapped a hoof against the door and waited patiently, the body she craved was still wrapped up in his sweaty sheets, and she called up to his window. “Don’t keep me waiting Brae!”

She peered up to Braeburn’s bedroom and saw his face peeking from below the sill; another face however joined him on the bed, another mare. Constance didn’t know what to think, she cracked her hoof up against the door again with a greater sense of urgency. A stallion finally answered the door, he was nearly the same colour as her love, he shared the same befitting hat, he shared the eyes of Braeburn as well, but he was somepony else.

“Yes, can I help you?” The stallion greeted. Gillyflower Apple was as meek, if not more so, as Constance’s frightfully underfed mother. He wore a Tannersee Bolo tie, to mark his birth place, as well as a rather aged ten-gallon hat. Constance gifted the tired father a friendly glance before withdrawing back into herself “is umm… is Braeburn in?”

The stallion looked to be physically checking around himself, he spied up the stairs and craned his neck around the front room doorway before he shook his head. “No such luck.”

Constance was prepared to leave it at that, she then recalled the face watching from the window, she confronted Gillyflower and prodded him upside the chest. He fidgeted with his tie as he regained his composure. Constance pried further. “Are you sure? I saw him from out here, why are you covering for him? Why… I saw another mare up there! Is he playing me for a fool?” She cried as she uttered the last damning syllables before she scanned her eyes over her body and walked away.

“Another mare…” Gilly exasperatedly spoke as he rushed up the stairs to the bedroom.

Braeburn groaned at the pleasant release of bodily fluids “oh my, Gem Emerald, you’ve done this before.”

The door blasted open and the limp mare companion ensconced herself under the covers. Brae recognised the ghostly figure at the door through his glazed-over eyes; he lazily attempted to retract himself from the copulative situation he had found himself in. Gilly stormed to the bed and threw the sheets off, to his horror and disgust his son’s friend was sucking greedily on the end of a dark lengthened object.

The mare squinted in reception of the salty Hors d’oeurves she gleaned from her early morning snack. She opened her eyes and planted them on the stranger in the room. She swallowed hard, a gushing of fluid spiralled down into her stomach, before she panted and rolled off of Braeburn. She threw a hoof and sent it to embrace her warm squeeze but she grabbed nothing but thin air.

Gillyflower dragged his son from the defiled linens and throttled him against a chest of drawers. “I told you to keep that thing out of my sight! That’s the last straw! You can no longer stay here son! Now get out go my house!”

The cum-soaked mare who was incumbent, exhausted on the bed, licked her deprived lips before kicking back her legs and disbanding the mattress.

“And you, I think you’re as much to blame as my boorish boy.” Gilly directed at Gem, he launched a purity hoof ring which thusly smacked against her moist rump. “Have some fucking self-respect!”

Brae was slumped against the dresser still, his pride was in tatters, Gilly was soon joined by his wife.

Bailey Apple was a sight to behold, she was always dressed to impress and still retained a good figure after birthing a foal, even one born with such an inherently bulbous head. She stood united with her husband and sent the message home that Braeburn had broken his promise.

Bailey approached her semi-aroused charge and looked him listlessly in the eyes. “You broke another heart, Brae Burnington Apple; you were given so many chances.”

Braeburn froze at the mention of his full name; he coldly stared back into the faintly faded faces and scoffed at the sentiment. Gilly stroked his hoof through the angelic dark-blonde locks of Bailey’s mane. “I won’t tell you again son, pack some things, have some breakfast, but don’t let me see you unjustly smug face here again.”

Braeburn thawed through his rage, he snorted hot air and smiled gladly at his parents. “Y’all wouldn’t throw me out. Mum might have, but you definitely haven’t the balls! You’re a sorry old stallion!”

The Appleoosian Apples were all earth ponies, no extravagant lineage at all, and as such they had simple morals and a simple mantra that a pony daren’t stray from. One moral above all drove the decision for Braeburn’s expulsion, ‘thou shalt respect thy mother and thy father’.

The promiscuous stallion had desecrated so many other unwritten laws, he had abused the trust his parents once gave him, and he had burned his bridge home. Just as Braeburn brushed past the threshold to the outside world, a force tugged at his tail. He turned to investigate, his mother was there. She held out a small trash bag of odd clothes. “Good luck sweetie” she chirped.

Braeburn didn’t gift her any of his energy as he ungratefully snatched the bindle and wondered aimlessly into the foreboding world.

The Pear Household>

A little less than ten minutes before, a distraught mare returned to her home on the lone patch of grass. She gained solace in the arms of her mother, Patience, and gleaned not a word from her father, Bartlett. The stallion tried his hardest to not make light of the situation, he knew the ways of Braeburn well.

“We tried to tell you.” Patience said, her warm embrace loosened. Constance took another stern look at her form and deduced the cause for her rejection.

“I’m not like all the other mares!” Patience stroked a radical streak of golden mane back behind her daughter’s ear and nuzzled her softly on the pole.

“That’s because you’re unique.” Constance pinched a chunk of her slightly bulbous self and let it wobble a moment.

“I’m fat! That’s why I’m different, I’m a hippo!” She loathed herself so strongly that she grasped a measure of her cholesterol filled folds and pinched them harshly in her hooves.

In the midst of the conversation Bartlett had left the room unnoticed, he returned with a shotgun slung over his withers. Patience nearly fainted at the sight; she steadied herself on her sturdy daughter’s whimpering form. Bartlett sat down next to his mares and rested the double-barrelled hell paying weapon on his lap. “Was he cheating on you Constance?” She didn’t reply for she could barely assemble a sentence.  “Constance? Constance my dear, if he hurt you, tell me with whom.”

Again not a word protruded from Constance’s quivering muzzle. Bartlett leaped aloft and slung the shotgun back over his shoulder, he gave one last serious look to his daughter and wife. “Whomever he cheated with will have to wait, I’m gonna send the fear of Sombra into that little bastard!”

Braeburn dragged his hooves along the sanded path until he walked headfirst into a familiar, gun-toting, face. Braeburn tilted his head to absorb what had only just been revealed to him from the glaring sun and his own fatigued eyes. Bartlett held the muzzle of the cannon right up against the butcher of Appaloosa’s skull and cocked back the safety. He squeezed lightly the trigger, in preparation for the blood splatter he closed his eyes, and then there came an organic thud as a body hit the ground.

Braeburn crouched, gripping on to the luminescent locks of Gem’s mane. She had rushed in to save him; her lustful mind-set drove her to take a bullet for her one night of magic. Perhaps she had tried to disarm the other stallion, she was still now. Bartlett dropped the gun out of shock, not from the act itself, but because of the aftermath. The stiff body underwent a warped transformation, the skin once so bright peeled to reveal a heart as black as coal.

More fibres of skin peeled away and surrendered to the side to reveal more of the black under pelt of the mare. As the tissues of her back folded away a pair of butterfly wings flicked out, they shook rigidly before they fell still also. The petrified statue of Gem flinched frigidly but was most assuredly dead.

Little did Braeburn or indeed any of the ponies know, the creature with the crooked horn, cloven hooves, diaphanous wings, and dulled eyes was none other than the nightmare they had all been fighting to remove from their slumbers. For before them, crumpled and disfigured, was the irrefutable form of the changeling creature that had been something of a plague five long years ago.

Briefly, in the Attacanter>

After a long trek down the side of the mountain, Jeremiah gasped for air. He had heard the gunshot in the one-horse town and walked as fast as he could manage to seek out the source. He arrived at the crime-scene late, ponies gathered all around the curio. Some onlookers sported lengthy manes and styled tails complete with quaffs, some were ordained with saddle bags and alike for the morning errand run, some simply lacked any distinctive features and blended into the masses. They all gawped in awe at the feat impossible.

Some darted their eyes around to the other faces which looked as clueless as they, some visages around wore a feigned look of intrigue when in truth they were all afraid of the unknown. Jeremiah found a path through the mire and saw the cold-dead eyes of the mare he has once seen singing in the choir.

She still had threads of flesh glued to her face, the only thing that marked her apart, but everywhere else was rotted stagnant flesh. From betwixt the black pelt was a skeleton of disfigured bones, and in between each joint were torn tendons and torn seams. There was only a sprouting of mane left on the dead mare’s head. Jeremiah looked on in horror at the vision of nightmares.

He waved for ponies to give him space, they complied and made a route for him to use. He tugged at the lifeless hoof attached loosely to the thing below. “She is only a serf.”

 Ponies all around shared a collective gasp; the creature had been hiding in plain view and had been feeding off of the fair Appleoosians, was possibly only the beginning of something worse. Braeburn was not privy to the nature of the shadowed beasts, but even he was alarmed by the chance of there being worse to come. It took some time to sink in, but when it did, Brae was mortified.

He vomited profusely onto the shimmering sand. His only thought at this time was that he had become intimate with an ugly-twisted creature. He wretched at the notion of the angled, spiteful wizened lips of the changeling around the tip of his…

A face in the crowd shouted over the gargled lunch. “Hey old timer, how do you know about these things?”

Jeremiah patted Braeburn on the shoulder before he squared up to the naysayer. “I was alive and kicking when Chrysalis first attacked our pleasant lands, I have a certain understanding of the creatures. They feed on, nay, they crave emotion. They can assume the image of any other living being and they eat off of the love the being receives.”

 A murmuring of quickened voices dully roared in the crowd as they discussed theories and inklings they might have had. A couple go to ask further questions but they shied away. Finally Braeburn wiped clean his muzzle and cajoled Jeremiah’s gaze over to the withered corpse. “You said she was a… what did you call it again?”

Sheriff Thicket soured at the ignorance of the stallion; he bit his tongue this time “I said she was a serf, the lower class of the changeling forces.”

Braeburn posed defensively next to Gem, he registered her cold-dead-eyes again and reiterated. “I meant, what is worse than the changeling?”