The Legend of the Scorched Town
In a valley near Canterlot, just on the edge of the Everfree Forest, lie the scorched remains of a town. Nopony knows its name, or how it came to be destroyed. Nopony, that is, except the Princesses, and they refuse to talk about it. But a lack of information has never stood in the way of a good story, and so the legend of the town has grown to be quite well-known. Imagine, if you will, that we are sitting around a campfire, for the sake of tradition, and I will relate to you the tale.
They say it was a town that rose and fell around apples. In this, at least, there is almost certainly at least a little truth; any who visit the ruins can plainly see that burnt stumps cover almost as much area as blackened foundations. Since there are well documented attempts to use fire to reclaim territory for the Everfree Forest, all of which failed to push the forest back by so much as a foot for more than a couple weeks, we can assume these stumps must have been cultivated for some purpose. It’s hard to imagine that such a large orchard did not play an important role in the town, so it probably was a town built around some sort of fruit at least.
As one might expect, then, the end came with an apple shortage. This poor harvest was supposedly caused by an infestation of vampire fruit bats. Nasty little things, apparently; they suck the juices right out of fruit, and quite voraciously too. Not that I believe that, mind you; there’s never been a reputable sighting . . . I’m ruining the story for you with all these interruptions, aren’t I. I’m sorry. I’ll just stick to the legend from now on.
However, the town did not fall from a famine. Being on the edge of the Everfree Forest, the residents were quite used to dealing with all manner of monster attacks, and quite promptly too. The very day that the bat infestation was discovered, a means was found to clear them out. A local unicorn cast a spell to remove the bats’ desire and ability to eat fruit. Left with no food source, the bats would soon die out, and in the meantime they would be no threat to the orchard. At least, so the plan went.
However, a pegasus had been caught in the backwash of the spell, and come nightfall, she began to thirst for juice. She had received all of the appetite for fruit that had been taken out of the entire swarm of bats, and she devastated the orchard accordingly. By the time she was caught, almost a quarter of the apple harvest had been lost. Worse, she had become some strange, feral hybrid of pony and bat.
The ponies who found her, however, failed to recognize her as an abomination that needed to be destroyed. Instead of sacrificing whatever small amount of equinity might remain in her in order to destroy the vampire fruit bat threat once and for all, they found her to be sympathetic, and by extension began to sympathize with the entire plague of bats they had so recently tried to eradicate. The bats’ ability to eat fruit was returned to them, and removed from the pegasus, and the bats were confined to a plot of land just large enough to keep them from starving as a more humane solution to keep them from attacking the orchard. When nothing else showed up to drain apples, the issue was assumed to be resolved, and was promptly forgotten.
Magic, though, is a very fickle thing, and while the local unicorn community assumed the original spell to have been cleanly undone, leaving no net effect, reality did not share their faith. And so soon strange things began to happen.
The first sign was when, in one night, every store or produce stand that sold fruit was vandalized. It was attributed to wild animals wandering into town from the Everfree Forest, because that fit the sort of damage that had been done. But nopony was ever able to explain why they would so thoroughly destroy anything fruit-related while ignoring everything else. It was, in the end, dismissed as one of those weird events that you just need to roll with. Those sorts of things are said to have been rather common in that area. But this was no random happenstance.
A few days later, ponies started disappearing. Every night, one pony, chosen apparently at random, would vanish from his or her bed. There was never any sign of a struggle, and no number of locks seemed able to prevent the disappearance; in fact, the victim’s house would always have every door and window unlocked come morning. But the strangest part was that this mysterious kidnapper would always leave the victim’s bed neatly made, with a single lily upon the pillow.
Ponies soon came to fear the worst for their missing neighbors, and a panic gripped the town. Within a few weeks, nearly everypony was armed, and several ponies had had nearly fatal run-ins with misguided self-defense. Then, as suddenly as it had started, ponies stopped disappearing.
Not that it was immediately apparent. With most of the town locked fearfully inside their houses except for when they absolutely had to venture out for food, it was hard to keep track of the remaining population. And for those paying attention to the daily noontime food rush (such as it was), it looked like the disappearances had only accelerated. But anypony who bothered to actually knock on doors would find that though the market for food was in decline, the supply of frightened ponies threatening to attack if you didn’t back away from their doors was holding constant.
Faster and faster the number of ponies who would leave their houses dropped, until one day, completely unremarked, the only such ponies remaining were the apple farmers. They did not know they were the only ponies left unaffected, for they had not been to town since it had become clearly pointless to try to sell apples to increasingly deserted streets. And had they known, they would have been at a loss to explain what set them apart. But they were soon to learn.
That very night, they were woken by a cacophony of screeching. Outside, they found a massive swarm of batponies surrounding the orchard. Mostly the batponies were flying in circles around the perimeter of the trees, but occasionally one would swoop in aggressively, close enough to show a familiar face twisted by animalistic hunger, before turning away suddenly just before entering the orchard. The entire town had become vampires, save for this one family of farmers, protected by the vampires’ strange aversion to fruit. And all because a unicorn thought she could take the vampire fruit bat out of a pony.
What happened next, nopony quite agrees. Some say the vampires figured out that they could burn the fruit, and threw burning sticks until one ignited the orchard. Some say that one of the farmers was startled into dropping a lantern. Some say that a unicorn cast a fireball so massive, it instantly incinerated all of the trees and half of the vampires, and set the blaze that would destroy the town from radiant heat alone. However it started, the fire destroyed everything, including the farmers who were to be the last food in the area, and the vampires, except in versions of the story where they all died trying to get through the fire to their prey, disappeared into the Everfree Forest and have not been seen since.
And now? Now, if one believes everything one hears, you can’t so much as stretch a leg in the ruins without hitting a ghost. The farmers are still trying to save their beloved trees from the inferno. The vampire’s first victims, the ones who are presumed to have just died, seek revenge. The vampires that burned have only grown hungrier in death. And the vampire fruit bats, which also immolated in a conflict that had long since ceased to concern them, resent all of ponykind for their fate. Then there’s the piece of Princess Celestia’s soul that broke off when she heard the news, and now wanders the ruins in inconsolable grief, and the nightmare Princess Luna dreamed in the aftermath, which will trap any pony it finds sleeping within their own fears until they die . . . the list just goes on and on.
There are even those who say that the vampires somehow got their own princess, and she now leads them deep within the Everfree Forest, and prepares for when they can return to lay waste to all of Equestria. But that’s just ridiculous, don’t you think?
