The shadows haunted fields of gray dust, laying long atop them for inestimable periods of time. Soft bulges on the monotone horizon imitated the hillocks of Equestrian plains, tiny things that threw their mockingly long silhouettes over craters and ancient crevices. Deep gouges in the shape of a sanctum drew her omniscient gaze across the otherworldly vista, so that she scarcely could see the unthinkably vibrant stars above her head; innumerable in number, pinpricks of color that exceeded the visible spectrum. Below were the gouges, the hiding spots of things nopony fathomed, and they were black, featureless, bottomless. She heard voices from within, shouting at one another in argument.
And the dream was already fading, to moonlight, through a round window and comfortably warm blankets, a body so tired and settled that it felt like all her joints had melted and her bones had turned to string. She let her eyes slide shut, felt their comfortable weight, opened them to look at the bookshelves across from her bed. All the books looked gray in the moonlight, and she smiled at how straight and ordered they were. Her thoughts sloshed about like mud in her head, keeping her for a large part stubbornly asleep. Barely visible below the bed's footboard, Spike's chest moved up and down beneath his blanket, the tiny dragon still except for that motion, the sound of his breath light in the air. On her blanket's star pattern, the nearby telescope threw a rigid shadow.
Great voices in argument, so deep and loud they shook the world: the memory from her sleeping sights slid back from the pit of forgotten dreams it had all but vanished into. And it brought with it the emotion she'd felt as she had flown disembodied over the otherworldly landscape. Turning onto her stomach and pressing her face deeper into her pillow, she put her hooves under the covers and pulled them about her head. She didn't remember what the voices had been saying, where they were, why they were. There had been the thought that the voices were deciding her fate, and the fear of what that would mean. She could feel the dream, a nightmare more disquieting than terrifying, trying desperately to clamber its way back into her memory, and she was afraid if she slipped back to sleep she'd fall into it and find herself once more dropping sideways over a gray desert.
Though she groaned softly in dismay at the thought of moving, the fear of sleep had her pushing herself up into a sitting position in bed. She sat still with her eyes closed for a long moment, sagging under her own weight, and was about to let herself collapse back onto her face in surrender when she heard the muffled clack of a hoof upon wood somewhere nearby. A voice, small even before it filtered through the walls and the floor, said something. Shouted it? Shaking her head slow to try and loosen her sticky, heavy thoughts, watching with half-lidded eyes as her mane swung about her face, she worked her jaw and yawned so deeply that her whole body shivered for a moment.
What time was it? Had someone woken her up?
Once again she heard the hoof hit wood, three times, and a voice bellowing. A few consonant sounds reached her, and the long pauses between them for vowels made her suspect Applejack’s drawl. Muttering incoherently even to herself, she slid to the side of the bed and let herself fall out onto her unsteady hooves. Slowly she eased herself free of the blanket’s clinging edges and began to stumble through her room. Wooden floor and walls with modest decorations, meticulously organized books on shelves or in purposeful piles, and ordered stacks of notes and lists and rough drafts of reports all set as though ancient in the heavy evening air. The white light of the moon cast everything in gray and gave it a dusty feel, and she couldn’t shake the same feeling she’d had above the modestly-hilled dreamscape. A muted sense of distress and confusion lingered as though abandoned in her chest by the dream upon its exit.
She paused next to Spike, looking down into the basket he used for a bed, and gave his sleeping face an affectionate smile. By the time she heard the knocking hoof again, the weight of her mood had decreased at least a bit. But then, how was she supposed to feel, being woken up in the middle of the night and from a bad dream no less?
Spurred to movement by the sound of knocking, she whispered, “Don’t worry, Spike, I’ll get it,” and started away from her slumbering assistant. As much as every part of her body felt mired in reluctant somnambulation, she tried to put some energy into her steps as she made her way off the elevated dais that bore her bed, out of her room and down the stairs into the library proper. When she stepped off the stairs and lit a small lamp, the gray books turning brown or red or blue, she was struck with nostalgia from all-night study sessions long past. Or the few times she’d risen before the sun to sneak in an extra few hours of cramming before a test. It put a smile on her face, and suddenly she wondered if she could spare an hour to read before going back to bed.
A hoof pounded on the library door once more, this time with a bit more fervor, and she heard a small voice with cowpony inflections calling her name in a worried tone. She went to the door and pushed it open, having already concluded who was outside and unsure whether she should be more worried or confused. When she saw the distressed look in Applebloom’s features, she chose the former, and was about to speak when the foal launched into what struck the sleepy pony at that time to be hysterics.
“Twiligh! Twiligh, I was all worried ya were gonna sleep right through ma hollerin’!” Applebloom spun about on the doorstep and spoke lightning quick, her voice thin with tension. “Ya gotta help me Twiligh, and ya gotta not tell Applejack I’m out here so late or she’ll never lemme go visitin’ Zecora ‘gain!”
The way Applebloom’s brow creased her forehead above her large, teary eyes, and the way her frown pulled her cheeks back into dimples were all as disarmingly cute as a confused puppy. So the stress in the foal’s voice was completely lost on Twilight, who was moved to smile fondly at her friend’s little sister and sat back on her haunches. “Well she’s bound to find out whether or not I tell her. Come inside.”
“I can’t, Twiligh!” Applebloom hopped backwards as if dodging out of something’s clutches, and her red bow bounced upon her head. “Ya gotta come on out to the Everfree and help me! Zecora’s-”
“The Everfree?” Twilight’s tone shifted into lecture-mode, “Hey, it is way too late to be going out to the Everfree Forest. Even if I did go with you. The only place I’m going to take you is back to Sweet Apple Acres, and even that’s only if you won’t just come inside and stay here!”
“But Twiiiiligh!”
“What time is it anyway?”
“I’unno! Listen, Twi-”
“No. Time to come inside, Applebloom.”
The foal hopped up and down and put an angry look on her face, “No! Listen, Twilight! Somethin’s wrong with Zecora!”
Twilight did not abandon the lecturing tone, “What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s just standin there starin, and she’s been that way for hours!” She spun again, losing the anger and regaining the more innocent worry, “I went for a visit this aftahnoon and she was fine. But we started stargazin’ when the moon came out and she just froze up!”
“Froze up?”
“Like this!” Applebloom sat down on the ground and turned her gaze directly up, staring at some point in the inky black. “Just like this ‘ere, and she ain’t moved so much as a single smidgeon since!”
Twilight smirked, “Maybe she fell asleep?”
“Her eyes’re open though! Ain’t a pony I know of sleeps with their eyes open! And I tried shakin her and yellin’ at her an everything. I even made a cuppa tea and held it by her nose so she’d smell it and it didn’t work. And ain’t nothin’ Zecora likes more’n tea!”
Sighing and letting her head sag, Twilight wished it were something she could just explain away. “Zecora’s a smart pony. I’m sure she’s fine. We’ll go check on her first thing in the morning, okay?”
“I ain’t comin’ in!” Applebloom hopped up into an action stance. “Zecora ain’t moved in hours and it’s really weird and I’m sure it ain’t good fer her. And I dunno what to do about it and I was supposed to be home hours ago and Big Mac’s gonna scold me bad f’sure. But I ain’t goin noplace but where I gotta to make sure Zecora’s okay!”
“Applebloom, we can’t just-”
“I’m scared, Twilight!”
Twilight Sparkle blinked at Applebloom and frowned. Standing in the warm light of the single lamp in the library, the tiny yellow foal was an island of activity and color in a world that, all around her, was turned slate gray by moonlight. Ponyville was a monotone vista that sat perfectly still, the only hint that it wasn’t some sort of ornate diorama being the breeze, and it stayed that way all the way to the horizon. Between them and the edge of the panorama were bleak shadows, like empty crevices, that marked the Everfree Woods and the tall hills beyond it. And above that the stars were just as vibrant as in her dream, seemingly moreso than on other nights, and her gaze shook as the echoes of fear and disquietude rang again in her chest and head.
Finally, Twilight dropped her gaze back to Applebloom, and she noticed something very serious in the foal’s eyes. Twilight wanted Applebloom to come in and stay at the library; wanted anything but to go out into that still, gray night. But what was she supposed to say? I’m scared? But Applebloom had just said that, and foals had far more excuse to be afraid than those they depended on. Twilight asked herself what would she do every time she had a nightmare as a foal. The answer: run to her mother and say, ‘I’m scared.’ And every time she missed a school assignment back in Canterlot? Run to Celestia and say she was scared.
Twilight took a deep breath and shook her head, “Don’t worry, Applebloom. It’s going to be just fine.”
“But Zecora-!”
“Trust me. That’s why you came here, right?” Twilight smiled at the thought.
Applebloom thought for a moment, and shrugged, “Yeah, and cause it seemed all magicky-like how she’s all frozen. And you’re a magicky pony and Applejack says you’re good at figurin’ thangs. Oh! And cause Applejack and Big Mac would just yell at me and put me to bed and never lemme out for all a’ ever on account a me comin’ home so late. But, yeah, s’pose so. Yup.”
Twilight snickered in spite of herself. “If I agree to go and see Zecora right now, will you come in and stay here until I get back?”
“No way! I gotta make sure she’s a’right! S’what friends do!”
“Or we can just go tell Big Mac all about this.”
Applebloom’s big eyes went a bit bigger as she realized the corner she’d been backed into, and she bit her bottom lip in frustration as she tried to figure a way out. “Aw, shoulda listened to Applejack more when she was goin’ on ‘bout how clever ya was.” She made her way past Twilight into the library.
“Your sister is a pretty good pony to listen to.” Twilight shut the door once Applebloom was inside and headed for the stairs, “Come on now.”
Following obediently, “Ya better do whatcha said ya was gonna do!”
“Of course.”
And then, Applebloom paused suddenly and took on an angry tone, “Even more’n that! Since ya ain’t lettin’ me go back to help her, ya better do ‘nough helpin’ for the both of us! Ya gotta make sure she’s a’right, and ya gotta make sure she’s comf’table an in bed, and she’s happy, and she got everythin’ she needs. Ya hear me?”
Twilight had to hold herself back from ruffling Applebloom’s mane. “You really like Zecora, huh?”
“Course I do! She’s one a ma best friends! And she’s one a the kindest and most... best ponies in all a Ponyville or wheresabouts. And much as Applejack likes talkin ya up, and no offense meant mind ya, I think she may even be smarter’n you an me an all us other apple folks put togather!”
“I think so, too.” She led the way into her room, where Spike was still asleep, and she lowered her voice to a whisper so as not to disturb him. “And I promise I’ll do everything I can to make sure she’s doing just perfectly.”
“I’ll be holdin’ ya to that, Twilight.” Applebloom took on a whisper herself, though also looking about to figure out why she was whispering. When she finally noticed Spike, a smirk lit up her face for a brief moment.
Twilight beckoned Applebloom up the small flight of stairs onto the dais, and furthermore to her own bed. “You can keep the bed warm for me.”
“S’all mussed up.” The foal hopped up on the bed nonetheless, picking up the blanket that Twilight had twisted up in her sleep and tossing it flat. The thing was askew and Twilight was about to help the little pony fix it, but it was demonstrated to be good enough when Applebloom belly-flopped at its center. “S’pretty tirin’ walkin all the way through the Everfree forest an stayin up all day an then comin all the way here, ya know.”
“And it’s way past your bed time.”
“Am I gonna be in a lotta trouble?”
“We’ll see.” Twilight folded the blanket so that it covered Applebloom from the neck down. When she placed a pillow by the foal's head twisted so it was under her. “There’s nothing wrong with worrying about a friend. Next time, you should go to Applejack and let her come to me, though, okay?”
“I didn’t wanna get in trouble.”
“Ssh,” Twilight stepped away from the bed. “Keep on eye on Spike for me while I’m gone, okay?”
“Wait a sec, Twiligh.” Applebloom rolled onto her back. “When Applejack or Big Mac - whichever one of ‘em’s doin it - put me to bed at night, they always gimme a kiss on mah forehead ‘fore they head out.”
Twilight felt a smile pull at her cheeks as she said, “Alright,” and then stepped over, leaned down planted a light peck right between the foal’s eyes. “Better?”
“Eyup.” Applebloom rolled over to face the window.
Shutting the door behind her and heading downstairs, Twilight briefly pondered the wisdom of leaving a baby dragon and someone else’s foal alone, asleep, in the library. But she figured they were both responsible enough to not get in trouble for a few hours, especially since they were probably going to spend those few hours asleep. And, in all honesty, Twilight was worried about Zecora. The zebra that had at first been a terrifyingly mysterious presence to the people of Ponyville but had since turned into a wise neighbor and a great source for knowledge on botany, and had become one of Twilight’s more respected friends. The fact that Zecora chose to live in a place like the Everfree forest, which was not only distant from Ponyville and isolating in general, but also the home to all sorts of wild beasts and a place that did not obey natural laws; well, it had always been a bit unsettling. But it had been easy to trust someone as knowledgeable and wise as Zecora to know what was best for herself.
Twilight grabbed a pair of saddlebags on the library’s ground floor. In one she placed a survival guide for the wilderness, though she wasn’t one-hundred percent sure how much good it would do in a place like the Everfree Forest, where plants grew wild, animals couldn’t be reasoned with and weather just sort of happened, but if one can’t be completely prepared one should be as prepared as possible. In the other, she dropped her copy of “Supernaturals: Natural Remedies and Cure-alls that are Simply Super,” a book which on account of its name she’d never taken seriously until it had proven indispensable in helping to deal with some of the malicious plants of the Everfree Forest.
Almost as an afterthought, she dropped in water, and a compass in case she got lost. Then a sextant and a starchart in case she got exceptionally lost. Then flint in case she needed to build a fire, and a couple apples in case she was out there long enough to get hungry. This train of thought continued until she was trying to fit a fully annotated New Equestrian Atlas and Almanac into the saddlebags and just could not make a place for it. Then, she figured, she was as prepared as possible. Donning the saddlebags and for the first time realizing that the things she’d packed actually had weight and would need to be carried, she unpacked everything except the survival guide and her copy of Supernaturals. And except the water and the starchart. And except the sextant. And-
Eventually she pushed open the door to the library and stepped out, not unreasonably burdened by modestly bulging saddlebags.
The world was still gray. Her eyes went to the moon, noting first that it did not bare the facade of the Mare in the Moon, and second that it was inching towards midnight. After this observation, her gaze sought the stars against her will, like someone with a crippling fear of heights who can’t help but look down. Suddenly she was struck by a sense of vertigo, feeling like she wasn’t on the ground anymore, almost like she was sliding sideways in the gray world. Memories of unbearably loud voices speaking of things she couldn’t know resurfaced. She found herself closing her eyes, her legs turned to unyielding rods.
For just a moment she was like that, then she shook herself and grunted in annoyance, saying out loud, “Just a dream, Twilight. Just a dream that you don’t even remember, and you can’t even walk away from the library, and here you are in the middle of the night.” She looked to the left, “Ready to hike into the Everfree Forest.” She looked to the right, “All alone in the dark.” It would have been nice if there had been somepony around to take pity and go with her, or talk her out of it. She wasn’t so lucky, and briefly considered seeking out a friend to recruit for this trip. But, of course, they’d all just tell her to wait until morning, and she’d already made a promise to Applebloom and gotten herself all worked up with worry about Zecora. After all, what would happen if Zecora really did need help and nobody arrived in time to give it?
Groaning, Twilight forced herself to take one step forward, and then the second step was easier, and a few moments later she was watching her feet in dismay as they carried her away from the library. In her best imitation of Applejack’s accent, she said, “Ah, horsefeathers!” And when that didn’t cheer her up, she muttered, “You are not a smart pony, Twilight Sparkle. You are not a smart pony, at all!”
But on she went.
Two: The Cerulean Sanctum
Just past a thin layer of branches and tree trunks, the Everfree Forest was a wall of black. It looked like someone had taken a wide, thin, bottomless pit and laid it sideways; like a tunnel with only ceiling and floor and no walls. Twilight thought she could see the flicker of gleaming eyes inside, but then she also kept thinking she could hear subterranean voices shaking the ground beneath her hooves, not to mention the occasional horizontal pull of confused, phantom gravity. She whispered under her own breath to nopony but herself about not letting the fear get to her, about leaving nightmares where they belonged, but more than once on the walk over she’d leaned close to the ground and listened for the voices she’d imagined, just to make sure they were not in fact real. They never were.
Twilight closed her eyes for a moment and collected a bit of simple magical energy, focusing it to the tip of her horn and causing it to emit a pale violet glow. When she reopened her eyes, a fraction of a percent of the darkness around her had been chased away by the unicorn’s magical makeshift lantern, but the soft purple light was doing very little to make the world any less gray and still around her. She watched the tufts of grass flick about in the light breeze, smelt the sweet scent of wild foliage, and felt the night’s coolness working its way through her mane to slide along her neck. She shivered, but was glad for the sensation. Any of these feelings, having been absent from the vague nightmare that seemed to be wrapped so tightly about her now-very-awake mind, made her feel grounded and kept her focused.
And gave her the extra boost of energy she needed to, just a moment later, take those first few steps into the forest. She tried not to think about all the terrible things that had happened to her, or that she knew existed in these woods. For instance, the old castle whereat she’d once been confronted by Nightmare Moon, the ancient once-princess of Equestria that had been sealed in the moon for a thousand years; that night had been both terrifying and enrapturing. Not only had she had her first taste of the power of the Elements of Harmony, but she’d set in stone her comradeship with the other wielders of the Elements and destroyed Nightmare Moon, setting free the Princess that had been trapped within. Still, perhaps on this night, in this mood particularly, the memory did not feel pleasant. Bundled together with the recollection of having been turned to stone by a Cockatrice on one trip to Zecora’s hut (for tea, actually) and the knowledge that somewhere in the forest was a mountain-sized Ursa Major and its town-sized cub; it made everything feel a bit colder, a bit darker, and a bit more precarious.
Ironically, the thoughts that were making her paranoid were also the thoughts that were distracting her so that she did not notice the patch of Poison Joke until her hooves were almost upon it. She stopped fast with a high-pitched gasp that was so loud it seemed to cut through the quiet of the forest and leave it all the quieter upon its fading, and stood still for several seconds with her wide eyes looking down at the blue flowers below her. At length, she began to back away. Poison Joke: another of the Everfree Forest’s many thorns. The iris-colored flowers looked innocuous enough, even beautiful -- a few royal blue leaves with a petaled bulb in the center, a handful of stamen decorating it, all supported by a darker, almost yale blue stem -- but malicious in its effects to anypony that touched it. What Zecora had described as the “pranks” that the Poison Joke took its name from had, at the time Twilight and her friends had first encountered them, seemed literally a curse. Twilight had lost the use of her magic completely, and hers wasn’t even the most distressing of plagues. Of course, the cure had been simple. An herbal bath, which Zecora seemed to know how to prepare off the top of her head and which the book Supernaturals contained in its pages. But Twilight obviously wasn’t going to be preparing an herbal bath in the Forest and without her magic she’d be-
Alone and lost in the dark! She took a few more steps away from the flowers and shivered again.
Zecora’s hut wasn’t much farther. Twilight cut around the massive patch of Poison Joke, which was quite a detour, and continued in the general direction she’d been headed. She kept her eyes on the ground as well as the trees around her this time, and she did notice quite a few more patches of Poison Joke as she went, some of which were even larger than the one she’d just passed. Larger, in fact, than any she’d seen in the forest before, and she was sure she hadn’t seen nearly this much Poison Joke on the way to Zecora’s hut in the past. The further she went, the more prevalent the Poison Joke became, until she was correcting her route every few minutes to try and find her way around without getting pushed off course entirely. She appreciated the mild challenge of it, though; it gave her something to concentrate on so that it she didn’t have to think about all the sources of fear that had been weighing her down. And the blue near-glow of the flowers in the almost purple glow of her magic was a refreshing change to the monotone air of the night.
The labyrinth of blue flowers soon became a nebulous puzzle, though. Patches of Poison Joke became swaths of Poison Joke, and Twilight found that the illumination from her horn soon was not enough to make visible all sides of the patches at one time. Her path would be blocked and no clear route forward would be immediately discernible, lost in the shadow of low-hanging branches and the black crevices carved by intruding undergrowth. And as she tried to make her way forward she found one patch reaching out to merge with another, or she found the patch wrapped back behind her and refused her ability to even search more. She had to double back twice, and had even begun to consider that she might have to take her pen and paper and draw a map of the overgrowth of Poison Joke just to get past it. A sense of bemusement settled over her and robbed her of her sense of time, as she wondered how it was that so much Poison Joke had sprung up so quickly. It hadn’t been more than a week since she’d last been in the Everfree Forest during the day, and besides that, didn’t Applebloom just come through here?
The forest around Zecora’s hut was absolutely choking on those flowers, an immeasurably large poison bouquet. The blue Joke grew right up to the walls, right up to the door, and the clearing around the home seemed an unbroken carpet of them except for the small stone rise where Zecora sat alone, staring upward. Twilight stopped, wide-eyed and slack-jaw at the strangeness of the sight. It was oddly majestic, the way the white light of the moon was in this place turned the color of vibrant iris by the overabundance of troublesome blooms, bathing the whole place in a cerulean hue, not to mention the way they circled around the clearing’s sole occupant. Zecora, a gray zebra with darker gray stripes and golden rings about her neck and right leg, seemed almost like a statue, the way she was sitting perfectly still on a natural, rocky elevation. Her pose even seemed like something somepony would carve to seem dramatic, her posture perfect, her back a rigidly drawn line, her neck precisely parallel to her legs and her whole face pointing directly up to the stars. As Twilight watched, Zecora’s open eyes blinked, but in the rest of the zebra’s body there was not so much as a twitch. Judging by how rigid her deeply muscled back and shoulders were, the way her chest seemed hardly to move in breath, Twilight began to almost think the poor zebra had been paralyzed.
Twilight hunched and frowned. The whole thing, majestic as it was for the first few seconds, was quickly striking her as creepy. “Zecora,” she called quietly at first, and then a few seconds later she remembered to use her outside voice, “Zecora! Are you okay?” When there was no response or movement of any kind, not even a noteworthy blink or two from the zebra, Twilight found herself disappointed but unsurprised. Zecora must have been like this for at least three or four hours now. On the edge of the growth of Poison Joke that separated her from her sometimes mentor, Twilight paced and thought.
At the very center of the stone platform on which Zecora sat, right between her front hooves so that it was almost under her body, was a single, tiny bloom of Poison Joke. Its blue petals leaned against the golden rings on her right leg as though sleepy, the stamen like tired tendrils hanging limply in the air. The only flower on the rock with Zecora, its stem was thin and bent, like it was trying to lay down but was not permitted to do so: a royal blue intruder unwelcome on what should have been a gray sanctum in the cerulean clearing. Though as Twilight sat, in calm consideration of her surroundings and situation, the place’s blue light was itself her own sanctum from the still greyness of the night before the Poison Joke, so similar to her nightmare. And Zecora’s body, grey fur and modestly exquisite curves, was like the surface of another world, monotone with stripes that were dark crevices.
In the middle of Twilight’s cerulean sanctum, a silvery shaman so artificially still and hauntingly serene. In the middle of Zecora’s grey sanctum, a tiny blue intruder that sagged tiredly, its somewhat gaunt glow delicate. If Zecora slept, did she have a nightmare of a flowering iris world at sunset? Did that world tremble as her fate was debated as well?
A tiny yellow form marked by a red bow shot out of the forest and shattered the stillness of the scene, “Ya’r s’posed ta be helpin’ her. Don’t cha just stand there, Twilight!”
“Applebloom, wait!” Twilight jumped to her feet, realizing suddenly that she’d begun to fall into a dangerous spell of visceral daydreaming as her thoughts had deepened.
Already in the middle of the clearing, Applebloom spun around to face the purple pony. “What? C’mon now!”
Twilight shook her head, gaped at the sight of the filly standing in blue flowers that went up to her chest and haunches. “Those flowers are dangerous! Get out of them!”
The foal looked down, blinked at the flowers for a moment, then turned and dashed through the rest of them to get to the rock that Zecora was sitting on.
“Applebloom!”
“What!” She hopped up next to Zecora and looked over her shoulder. “Ya told me ta get out‘em and now I’m out’em!”
“I also told you to stay at the library, remember?”
“Oooooh. Uh, yeah. Well, sorta,” she averted her eyes, kicked a hoof idly, “Yeah.”
Twilight kept her tone as calm as she could manage. “You are going to be in so much trouble, little filly.”
“But what about Zecora?” Applebloom gestured with her eyes “Ya can’t help’er from over there. Whatcha lettin’ the flowers get in your way for?”
Turning her eyes to Zecora, seeing her frozen like that, Twilight felt a pang of worry and a bit of some flavor of fear. The zebra’s status was so bizarre that she wasn’t sure how to feel about it and couldn’t bring herself to treat it as an extremely urgent issue. She wasn’t feeling anything similar to panic, and her cooler head had always served her better. Twilight turned what she hoped was a steadying gaze to Applebloom and said, “I’m just being careful. Last time I touched Poison Joke I lost my magic, and I might have to use magic to help Zecora.” Unspoken was that she wasn’t sure the flower would have the same effect twice, and didn’t want to find out if there were worse pranks it could pull on incautious ponies.
“It ain’t ever bothered me none. Why, I walked through plenty’a the stuff on the way over here, and on the way to your place, too. An I’m just fine!”
Twilight managed to frown a bit deeper, displeased at hearing of Applebloom’s exposure to the Poison Joke and confused that she hadn’t been adversely affected. She only let it set on her mind a moment before pushing it aside, though, turning her attention back to the situation at hand. “Okay. I’ll be right over. Just give me two seconds.” She began to survey the clearing and take a few quick guesstimates about various distances and angles. Bending her head close to the level of the myriad stamen of Poison Joke, she ignored Applebloom’s bemused gaze as she figured a few basic shapes and angles and guessed the height of the rock that Applebloom and Zecora sat upon.
A thought occurring to her as she was about done, she popped her head back up. “Applebloom, could you get rid of that flower between Zecora’s hooves?”
The filly’s face changed instantaneously to the most adorable disappointment before she protested in a wine, “Aw, no! But doncha think it’s the perttiest a’the bunch?”
A bit surprised by the protest, Twilight dropped her eyes to the intruding flower once more and realized for the first time that the cause of its apparent tiredness was that it was not rooted; it had been picked from the other flowers and placed there deliberately, likely after Zecora had gone into her paralytic state. Twilight looked at Applebloom again, at her suddenly sad eyes, and imagined the filly had sought out the most beautiful flower she could and left it there as some kind of gift before running off to find help. She smiled sadly at the filly, a bit regretful but not able to unsay what she had, and did the best she could to assuage the unintended slight, “It’s beautiful Applebloom. But can you just move it somewhere else? I don’t want to accidentally step on it.”
“Hm,” Applebloom seemed to accept Twilight’s deflection wholesale, losing much of her hurt and donning a thoughtful expression instead. After a moment, she smirked and -- with just a hint of sadness -- took the flower from the ground, bit off a portion of its lengthy stem and stood high on her hind legs to slide the flower behind Zecora’s ear. She stepped back to admire the placement, and Twilight couldn’t help but appreciate the gesture as well. Besides the affection it expressed, if Twilight forget the poison nature of the blue flower it was rather becoming to the zebra and did a great deal to decrease the disturbingly stony air she’d had.
Applebloom turned to Twilight and gave a very straight-faced nod, “Okey dokey. C’mon over!”
“Alright,” Twilight dropped her head a moment to reconfirm her observations, then closed her eyes and began to concentrate on gathering magical energy. She said mostly to herself, “I sure hope I don’t miss,” as her horn suddenly grew vibrant with the energy. Then that energy released through her whole body, wrapped her, pulled everything to a point at the tip of her horn and shot forward along a variable line that had drawn the hypotenuse side of two separate scalene triangles in her mental image of opposing semcircles exactly one radius distant from the stone’s center on either side. At the most acute angle of those two triangles, the magic energy split down the middle and pulled back along the sides opposite the origin, peeling away the bubble of magic and, with a pop of purple energy, Twilight stood next to Zecora on the stone.
Applebloom jumped away from her in surprise with a shout of, “Great gallopin’ gravensteins!”
As Twilight swayed unsteadily for a moment, glancing about to let her mind take note of and adapt to its sudden new location, she spared Applebloom a squinted eye, “Gravenstein a kind of apple?”
“S’a bakin and eatin’ apple!” The filly answered easily, almost distractedly, “Sweet’r and crisp’r and one’m best for pies.”
Twilight blinked again, her senses finally beginning to catch up to her body, and she gave a wary look at the Poison Joke blooms that were less than a meter away behind and to either side of her. When the breeze caught them, they leaned closer to her, and she watched their swaying very closely and nervously for a few seconds before she was sure they weren’t going to brush against her and inflict some sort of terrible fate. After this, she turned back to Zecora and gave the unicorn a hard look, searching for anything obviously abnormal. She wasn’t really sure what she was looking for. Zecora’s fur had the healthiest shine of anypony she knew that didn’t use chemicals on it, likely credit to her almost shamanic knowledge of the forest’s plants that likely made up her diet. She had very little fat, her body marked more by boney shoulders, hips and face, and a frame of wiry muscle hard-earned from living in the forest and spending hours stoically stationary in odd positions meditating. And... wait.
“Applebloom, is she meditating?” Twilight leaned over to look around the zebra, watching the filly’s brow drop into confusion.
“What’s metal-tastin’?”
Twilight sighed, muttering to herself, “Well, that’s one possibility.” Then, moving so she could look in Zecora’s eyes, she noted that the zebra wore an expression of intense fascination that didn’t seem to fit the scene, or the normal soberness of meditation. The woman seemed frozen in shock. “Still, it would be really unusual for her to begin meditating it in the middle of the night without warning. Especially with a guest around.”
“If it makes’er go all still and quiet-like, then I call it weird anyways.” Applebloom reached out with a hoof and pushed on Zecora’s side, a gesture which elicited no response.
After a moment’s thought, it occurred to Twilight that Applebloom’s knowledge of apples likely extended to other plants, especially if she spent a lot of time with Zecora. “I need you to do something for me, Applebloom.” Her horn shone a very soft purple as she used her magic to open her saddle bag and levitate out the book, Supernaturals, flipping it open to a bookmarked page that detailed the herbal bath that could cure the effects of Poison Joke. “I’m sure Zecora has most of this in her hut. I’ll teleport you over and-”
“Don’tcha worry ‘bout that none!” Applebloom grabbed the book with her teeth and jumped off the rock into the blue flowers again.
“Applebloom! What did I say about those flowers?”
She dropped the book open at her hooves so she could talk easier, “They don’t do nothin to me, though! Honest! Anyway, look.” She pointed at the list, “I was right’ere helpin’ Zecora gather up all the stuff for the bath last time y’all got messed up by the stuff, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” Twilight blinked, recalling, “You were there for that.”
“There for it?” She gestured to her back, “Why when Applejack got all tiny I let’er ride round on my back, ‘member?”
“Yes, I do now.”
“And the flowers didn’t bother me none then, neither! ‘Member that, too?”
Twilight sat down and gave Applebloom a very serious look, “Just because it didn’t bother you then, for whatever reason, doesn’t mean it won’t now. You probably weren’t even exposed last time!”
The filly just shrugged, “I’mma go find all this stuff for ya an be right back.” She pointed an incriminating hoof at Twilight, “An you keep tryin’ to help Zecora. No fallin’ asleep now!” The purple unicorn responded with unentertained silence, so Applebloom just picked the book up and disappeared into Zecora’s house with it.
Once the filly was gone, Twilight rolled her eyes and returned her attention to Zecora. She began her experimentation in the most obvious place, with a nudge of her hoof, though a bit firmer than Applebloom could manage. The zebra swayed for a second but did not show any sign of response, and her muscles remained all tense and cramped-looking, like she was stressed. Or, recalling the attentive look in her eyes, simply fascinated. Her body language was a bit like she was leaning forward to get a better look at something, except that one really couldn’t lean closer to the sky in any effective way. Her every feature and muscle, even her ears, were pointing upward toward the sky. Her eyes were open as wide as they could manage to catch every bit of light, like a telescopic array spread to look deep into space.
Twilight glanced at the hut to make sure Applebloom wasn’t watching. Coast clear, she raised herself up on the side of Zecora’s head opposite that which was adorned with Poison Joke, and bit the zebra’s ear firmly. She noticed the sweet scent of alchemy about the zebra as she did so, her fur and skin an almost soothing herbal taste, like incense. Afterwards, she inched away and watched for any kind of response, but did not receive any. She frowned and looked guilty. That had to have hurt a fair bit, enough to make Twilight feel bad, but still nothing.
Finally, Twilight looked past Zecora and fidgeted nervously for a moment. She was reluctant to apply any greater physical force to push her, afraid she’d make the zebra fall into the Poison Joke, but then there wasn’t any guarantee that this paralysis wasn’t caused by the blue flowers in the first place and she was starting to feel that she wasn’t going to get any kind of response unless she forced the zebra to move in some significant way. Walking around behind the zebra so that she could get the best leverage and not worry about knocking herself into the Poison Joke, Twilight spent a moment preparing herself. Looking pained, she lowered her center of gravity and bent all four limbs, squeaking out a strained, “Sorry, Zecora” before pushing the zebra as hard as she could.
It shouldn’t have surprised her to bounce off of the Zecora. After all, the zebra was in far better physical shape than she was, denser and heavier, and was in a far firmer stance. And yet, when a decent amount of Twilight’s own push recoiled against her, she yelped in surprise and one hoof slipped out from under her. So she fell backwards on her haunches and rolled off those, and when she finally hit the ground on her side there were blue flowers all around her. As she realized that she’d fallen into the Poison Joke, her eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open, and she jumped to her hooves. “Oh no!” And cringed in preparation of some sudden, terrible happening.
But of course nothing happened immediately. Even in her last exposure, it had taken a while for symptoms to emerge after her exposure to the plant; she hadn’t even noticed them until the next morning. Still, she felt a tenseness of worry in her chest, afraid that her horn might fall off or her fur might turn to spiders of any number of unpredictable and horrible things.
But Zecora had also moved. Not so significantly as Twilight had, but she had moved. She was leaning far forward, her two front hooves no longer under her but stretched out before her to keep from being knocked over. All of her muscles were still tense, and her head was still upturned, and her eyes still locked on the stars, still rapt with fascination as though she were reading the climactic reveal of a perfectly written mystery novel. Slowly, carefully, without shifting her attention at all, Zecora pulled herself back up into a sitting position and brought her hooves back under her, restoring herself to the same rigid pose she was in before.
“Zecora,” Twilight muttered, finding her eyes suddenly raw and the first pressure of unexpected, unmitigated fear pushing outward against her chest. And this time it wasn’t fear of a nightmare or something as visceral as lack of color or movement in the night disturbing her. Finally, she was beginning to think that something might be really, very dangerously wrong with her friend. “Zecora!” Twilight jumped out of the Poison Joke, landing right in front of the zebra. “Say something! Look at me! This is really starting to get...” she struggled for a word, as if she thought the zebra would take offense if the wrong one were used, “It’s starting to get scary, Zecora. I need you to stop, okay?”
No response.
“Stop it!” Twilight reached out and covered Zecora’s eyes, but the zebra didn’t even bother trying to look around the intruding hoof. So Twilight tried to force Zecora to look away, to pull the zebra’s head down or push it to either side, but she was helpless against Zecora’s powerfully muscled neck. “Would you please, just stop it?” And when there was no response to any of this, Twilight sagged weakly for a moment, closed her eyes, exhaled sharply and felt the pang of fear sliding as numbness into her arms and shoulders, a tingling chill in her face. She moved up against Zecora and pushed her forehead under Zecora’s chin. “I wish I knew what was wrong with you.” Truthfully, half the fear she felt came from the mystery, the not knowing. There was uncertainty in the affliction’s anonymity, and terror that there was no clear course to a solution.
Twilight let her shoulders slouch and moved so that she was sitting next to Zecora, her side against the zebra’s side, her shoulder touching the other’s shoulder, hoof to hoof. The proximity was comforting, warm, no matter how rigid the zebra was. The air around Zecora's body smelled of tea. Twilight looked once more at Zecora’s rapt expression, mused, “What’s so fascinating up there anyway?” and then the unicorn matched her pose to Zecora’s, though significantly more relaxed. She tried to turn her eyes in the same direction Zecora’s were turned, thinking she might somehow find some clue there.
Twenty minutes later, Applebloom came out of Zecora’s hut saying, “Twilight, Zecora din’t have all the stuff ya was wantin’ for the-” and stopped mid-sentence at the sight of two ponies - one gray and one a pale, almost cerulean color in the blue light - sitting side by side, staring rapt at the sky. Both immobile.
