The air picked up and flung a hooful of dust straight at her face. She squeezed her eyes shut as it whipped against her skin. It stung, but she was so familiar with the pain that her brain only allowed her to feel a minimal amount. The wind howled its resentment before screaming off to some invisible horizon. Warily, she opened her eyes again.
In front of her was a small sliver of the stripped illusion that had made up her old life. Before, it had been decorated with countless confections, vibrant green confetti laden with heavy red ornaments that appealed to all the senses. It was once a shifting environment that promoted the idea that things were ever changing and that everything was individual, the seasons of a simple life chasing each other like children at play. But now, with its mask stripped away, any passerby could see the truth. That everything was black and made out of grit. That nothing was gold, only gilded. That nothing was worth anything, and everything was worth nothing. That these withered husks that sat before her made up all of reality, and that it was nothing but a wooden cemetery, the headstones of which stretched on for acres.
Beneath each tree rested a sacrifice. There were all types of sacrifices, life changing and insignificant, each bled from a pony who so loyally tended this land, until they had nothing more to give and simply collapsed onto the parasitic earth, and rotted into reality. As for what they had sown? It grew out of the ground and performed its own masquerade before any number of irresistible forces decided to tear down its façade. She didn’t doubt that more than a few of them sprouted from her own wasted efforts. Her own stupidity disgusted her now. How ignorant was she that she missed the point of the same redundant lecture over and over for the heaping majority of her life?
Before the endless maze of tombs, however, there was a margin of cleared earth, and in it rested her one, true accomplishment. In a rough heap of semi familiar shapes, a massive mountain of charred objects towered. The ruinous silhouette flowed naturally with the dusty atmosphere and stood out as its own shadow against lighter patches of grey in the sky, where the sun hid itself from the view of the wasteland. It was the only monument to her ideas, and its height and width proved her devotion to the truth.
She rested, her eyes traveling the present’s landscape with no objective. A few dust filled gusts caught her unaware, but she simply closed her eyes, just because it felt good to. And so she was, her vision alternating between the earth shifting around the trees to pure darkness periodically. She must have sat there for hours, but as far as she knew it could have been an entire day or just a few minutes. The air had begun to cool, and it battered her body with more force and higher frequency. She stood up, shuffled towards the door, fighting briefly with the wind to shut it, before grudgingly turning around to the new environment.
Everything was covered with layers of dust. It had invaded and occupied the house long ago, even back then when the windows were boarded and wet cloth was hung to prevent it, but the only thing it prevented was the dust from leaving. There was a breach somewhere in the house stirring up the otherwise completely stagnant air. Even though it put some dust in her eyes, she was grateful for it. She didn’t want to see any more than she had to, anyway. She hated this place because it made her sick. She suffered from a gut wrenching sickness that was hidden deep inside of her and when agitated seemed to flood every part of her body with cool, liquid lead. But she needed this place because it toughened her resolve and trained her to be less vulnerable against the sickness.
She had tried to cure it before, by taking a random assortment of antibiotics periodically in the hopes that one would work, but there was no real way to tell which ones to continue and which ones to discard. She reasoned that she might eventually accidentally take a mix of drugs that might kill her, but in the end it was the lack of determinable success that drove her away. Finding a doctor was impossible, and would only make the sickness worse. She had barely even reclaimed the town from unbearable levels of intensity, her increased tolerance lowering the sickness down to an almost negligible level, and couldn’t imagine all the pain it would take to find a doctor outside of it. It was impossible to do anything but resist the sickness.
Still, even after three years of reclaiming the town, this house still had a strong effect on her, and that was why it was good for training. With her escape blocked off by the approaching dust storm, however, she stepped over to the nearest window and pretended that she was outside again.
That was when a rainbow cut through the grey sky, blazingly vivid and abrasive against the dull backdrop.
For a moment, confusion struck her. And then the sickness took hold. And then anger poured out through some open wound deep inside that she forgot she had, not countering the sickness, but inflaming it. The rainbow began to bend back towards the house at a blisteringly fast speed, and she ducked beneath boarded window cursing in a harsh whisper.
A moment or two passed, and then…
“APPLEJACK? APPLEJACK!”
She covered her ears as best she could. The sickness and anger were pounding at the back of her skull, making her want to scream out in rage and pain. She whimpered. She heard hoofsteps coming up the stairs of the porch, and then a heavy thud of something being dropped. She began to crawl as fast as she could to get behind a kitchen counter and be out of sight from the porch windows.
“AJ, IT’S ME, RAINBOW!” A familiar voice hollered over the wind. “ARE YOU HERE?”
She peered out from behind the counter to check if she had locked the door. The knob jerked back and forth futilely. She saw a pair of ruby eyes surrounded by a sky blue face pop up and try to peak through boarded windows through the corner of her eye. She jerked her head back around the counter, shaking and hyperventilating. She looked to her over and saw a trail of displaced dust from her crawling, leading right back to the window. She knew she wasn’t the only one seeing it. Her head banged her head against the counter in despair. The sickness had flooded her limbs and made them useless, seizing and strengthening itself by preventing her escape from the voice outside.
“AJ, KNOW THAT YOU’RE HERE! IF YOU DON’T OPEN THE DOOR, I’M GOING TO BUCK IT DOWN!”
She was paralyzed in fear. Copious amounts of sweat trickled down her skin, staining the counter and making the dust stick to her.
“AT LEAST LET ME KNOW YOU’RE OK, FOR CELESTIA’S SAKE!”
She tilted her head up in fear and pain, and after taking a deep breath, she screamed.
“AH’M FINE!” Her voice sounded like her vocal cords had rusted. She couldn’t remember speaking above a whisper for the last year or so.
“I BROUGHT YOU SOME REAL GOOD STUFF TO EAT THIS TIME, APPLEJACK! NONE OF THAT CANNED STUFF, ALL HOMEMADE PRESERVES THAT RARITY AND PINKIE MADE! HOW ABOUT YOU LET ME IN AND WE SHARE SOME OF IT, OK?”
She almost thought she heard a bit of hope in her voice, an odd type genuine enthusiasm that she couldn’t peg for a second. Why did they keep coming back and try to get her out of the house? She wanted to be alone, she didn’t want the sickness to turn her into a useless heap of flesh. For some reason they didn’t understand. They just wanted to play nice while she was in agony, an agony they seemed to not realize they were connected to. She was perfectly content when they weren’t around. If they wanted her to play nice with them, fine. Whatever it took to make them leave.
“THANK YOU FOR THE OFFER, BUT AH THINK AH’D LIKE TO BE ALONE RIGHT NOW, IF YOU DON’T MIND.”
Anger filled the other voice now. “YOU’VE BEEN ALONE FOR THREE ENTIRE YEARS, AJ! GRANNY SMITH DIED SIX MONTHS AGO AND YOUR BROTHER HAD TO DO THE EULOGY! ALL HE DID WAS WEEP FOR HALF AN HOUR, AND THEN HE COULDN’T THINK OF ANYTHING TO SAY, SO HE STARTED CRYING AGAIN. AND HERE YOU ARE, BURNING THINGS. SORRY, APPLEJACK, BUT THAT’S NOT HOW A NORMAL PONY GRIEVES! PONIES NEED YOU, AJ!”
Hot tears scalded her cheeks, causing a thick rage like she’d never felt before to rise up through her throat from a fissure somewhere deep in her core. It tore through every shred of civility and every nice nuance she could muster before finally pouring out of her. It even slightly subdued the sickness.
“AH DON’T REMEMBER ASKIN’ YOU TO COME HERE AND JUDGE ME. IN FACT, AH DON’T RECKON AH ASKED YOU TO COME HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE!” She cried, choking on sobs and rage. “IF THESE PONIES NEED ME SO BAD THEN WHY DON’T THEY WAIT? WHY DON’T YOU HELP THEM? CAN’T Y’ALL SEE I’M TRYIN’ TO MOURN? Y’ALL ARE RUINING ME BY COMIN’ HERE, RUINING EVERYTHING I’M WORKING ON. WHY DON’T Y’ALL JUST LEAVE ME ALONE?”
She sat there slumped against the counter, heaving, sputtering. The wind occupied the silence with its own rage, screaming the truth at her, at the pony outside, at the graves, and everything else in the wasteland that was too idiotic to understand that the world of the swirling, battering winds wasn’t dead, but that it was the world.
The storm had reached its apex, and the torrential cacophony seemed to fill the space of the house with sound as it beat it like a drum. Though her body was shivering and sobbing, deep down in her mind everything was calm and serene. The sickness had retreated a little, and the truth, her truth, gently cradled her to a peaceful sleep.
The morning swayed in and out of darkness as she pushed through the doorway of the old house, falling into a heap on the weathered porch. The dark grey skies swirled above her as the wind came by, biting her like a rabid dog with a familiar sensation. Holding her breath, she twisted herself onto her stomach and pushed her body skyward, feeling the tremors of her legs and the creeping bile in her throat. She threw herself at the porch rail like a drowning swimmer’s last effort against a riptide. Her breaths were short and irregular as she clung tightly, her limbs doing little more than hanging over it.
Her harsh breathing collected itself until it unconsciously molded back into its usual state. High above, shafts of light from a brighter shade of grey in the endless haze fell straight down at her, roughly indicating noon. She dropped her head and lowered her eyes, allowing time to restore the control and feeling to her limbs. After a half hour of peace, most of her functions had returned well enough for minor physical activity. A heavy knot still rested in her stomach, and against sickness induced exhaustion she returned her hooves.
An alien white crate sat on the porch to her left, its stark, crisp color contrasting the peeling scenery so much that it seemed to glow. Fastened tightly to it with a long strand of twine was a rolled up scroll, held close by a thick wax seal. On the sides of the crate, gut wrenchingly familiar pictures radiated their own colors in spite of the oppressing atmosphere of the spinning grey earth around them.
She groaned as she trudged passed, making her way down the steps to a rundown wagon across the clearing. As a tribute to its maintenance having been long neglected, its heavily battered wheels and suspension caused it to tilt to the left. She climbed inside, shuffling to keep her weary body’s balance, and rummaged through a shallow pile of tools and scrap metal before pulling out a rust coated crowbar. She gripped between her teeth and returned to the crate as fast as she could manage, the strain of the metal’s weight making its presence gradually more unbearable.
She dropped the crowbar and undid the letter’s binding, examining its seal. It was the symbol of the goverment that used to rule these lands an indefinite time ago, a solar crest pressed into the wax like a fossil, before she became authority of the wastes on the account that she was the only one to rule over. She turned it over in her hooves. The sickness stirred, but quickly settled down. The outside was harmless, and she was immune to the effects of the stale mold. Holding it gave her a peculiar feeling, like if she were playing with a vile full of plague. To open it would be suicide, the intentional destruction of who she was by means of the sickness. Then, with maybe a tinge of lament, she raised her hoof, allowing the letter to be carried away down the ragged columns of the wooden cemetery.
She squinted to blur the image on the top of the crate into three red smears as she wiggled the crowbar underneath its lid. She pushed the crowbar down, hearing the moaning of nails sliding slowly out of their places before giving in and letting it pop off. She blinked as beads of sweat dripped into her eyes. After spending a few moments to catch her breath, she dove back into the crate, removing several large round jars with brass tops, and a fair amount of hard bread and cheese.
Sitting down, she made herself eat, gagging as some of bread made its way down her unwilling throat. It nestled right up to the sickness in her gut, making her nauseous as her stomach struggled cope with the new arrival. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, two days ago, maybe. Her body seemed to have forgotten how to digest food, seemingly trying anything by twisting and turning itself. She groaned and felt an urge to recline back onto the rotting wood.
Instead, she stood, picked up the white crate, and set it on her back. She proceeded to trot across the windswept clearing towards the wagon and tower of char at an uncomfortably vigorous pace, hoping to somehow spur the breakdown of the unpleasantness in her stomach. When approached the base, she flung the crate into the heap of rubble, hardly slowing.
She looked over her shoulder to see if thrown the box decently enough for it to stay. The open side of it had caught a few ends of the pile, but on the bottom side three pink winged butterflies caught her unsuspecting gaze, hitting her like a slap in the face. She winced and sharply turned her head towards the wagon. The sickness was spreading rapidly, making itself known once again, but just as it was getting so bad that she was going to call off her trip, it returned back to its sleeping state.
Her muscles relaxed and her jaws unclenched. She came around to the front of the mostly empty carriage, fumbled with an old harness and a set of worn out buckles and straps, and yanked the wagon out of its depressing still life pose. It swayed and rocked reluctantly after her as she travelled down a familiar, beaten down trail.
After a brief 15 minute trot, she emerged from the dead forest into the dead town. The appeared to be sitting at the end of the street, waiting like a desperado ready to draw. The dim light that it shed flowed around the buildings and left dull shadows that crawled in her direction.
The path she was on widened into a road, and on both sides sat the residences of ghosts. The flower boxes and gardens that adorned their homes and yards were filled with dead over growth, engulfing the soot covered ornaments. It seemed like all the joy that was represented by each house had been conscripted and placed in uniform, leaving behind a solemn row of perfectly trained soldiers stripped of individuality.
All of the houses had busted windows or swinging doors. These shards and splinters were the only signs of disturbance on them. The town had died slowly, finally acting on its diagnosis years after it was given, and its death was peaceful, almost unnoticed. The old rulers had come to terms with its condition long ago, so much so that they almost forgot it wasn’t dead yet. Everybody had already mourned, and even if they wanted to remember the grey date on which it died, they couldn’t. It was almost as if somebody had been watching it die, turned away, and then turned back only to find that it had been dead for years.
She reached the central circle of the town. It looked both like a battle field and a memorial. On her left side, a blackened skeleton of a tree reached up to the dimming skies like a sinner out of hell. Off of it hung thousands of obsidian like pieces of charred male, decorated with streaks of white on the branches. Every time a strong gust of wind passed by, it seemed to pull off some of the husk’s black essence into the breeze, whittling it gradually down to nothing.
To her right, a heaping pile of ash was huddled inside and around the blackened metal frame. All around, an array of fabrics of all sizes hung about like flags of naked reality. The frame was bent and twisted like malnourished bone, bending down, attempting to grab the ground and pull, ending its misery.
Straight ahead, there was a small crater in the city block. Around it, portions of building were missing, giving a passerby the view of some destroyed doll house. Inside the crater lay twisted, half melted scrap.
Besides the sights of destruction, the town central was for the most part a more crowded version of its outskirts knitted together with a web of alleys and roads. Her hooves nimbly dodged the debris as she passed the site of the explosion, stepping over pieces of concrete and glass, her wagon periodically skipping abruptly behind her.
The houses gradually became less and less frequently damaged by trespassers until she finally settled on one that was untouched. It was a dark grey texture save for some scraps of pink paint clinging underneath the window sill. The windows had started slowly dripping down, like from a clear spring in a waterfall that had paused mid drop.
The door was shut, but when she twisted the knob it creaked inward, allowing light to fill in the first room. She parked the wagon as close as she could to the door before detaching herself and going inside.
Old wood floorboards cracked and groaned as their fibers snapped beneath her weight. The front room was mostly empty, save for an old dinner table and a set of wooden chairs. There was also a set of stairs and a door way to another room.
In the next room, black mold crept along the farthest reaches of the floor with a pungent must smell. A small cabinet sat in the corner, accompanied by a desk covered in yellow newspapers. Two more dripping windows provided a view of a dried up side yard and the street behind the house.
She walked up the stairs. There was a dim corridor with a slant of light being thrown up against the wall. She placed her hoof against the wall and walked slowly until it hit the door way, and turned into it.
A dull wooden bedframe was against the wall without a mattress, and next to it sat a dresser with an old jewelry box on it. Other than that, the room was completely bare. Whoever once lived here knew that they weren’t coming back ever again, as it was stripped of any personal belonging that would’ve signified a specific pony living here. She might have known who, once, but now most of the ponies she had known had fallen off the edge of her consciousness, and the few that she did have were mostly names lacking faces or faces lacking names. Those that withstood the erosion of time she remembered to her despair.
She interrupted the room’s meditation by abruptly walking over to the dresser and jewelry box, pulling out and flinging their drawers to the ground with heavy thuds. She then slid both of them down the hall to the edge of stairs, and pushed them down.
The sound was unnatural, like thunder in catacombs and caused her to wince as the deafening vibrations from the clatter roared into her ears. She went back into the room, and threw the drawers as well, feeling them play a softer version of the same melody through the floorboards.
With the silent atmosphere broken, she walked down the stairs and into the living room with a manner more like a worker than a grave robber. She pulled out the desk and the cabinet to the open door, and piled up the table and chairs from the kitchen along with them. She took as many pieces from the bottom of the stairs as she could carry outside into the twilight, resting them in her wagon. She dragged the furniture out and heaved it into the wagon with a series grunts and grasps. Finally, when the splintered dresser and its drawers were put into the wagon, she turned her back to the waving door.
The streets seemed to be narrower in the dark, but she could tell she was almost back to the old path when she began tripping over debris. The wagon rocked and squeaked in distress as it made its way over the hazards, but quieted down once she made her way into the outskirts of town. The houses towered above her like blocks in a labyrinth, but soon dispersed and were replaced by the scattered, dead forest.
The path led her to a patch of dead land with a barely forgotten house presiding over an ashen monument. She detached herself from the trailer by the shadowy tower, and trotted over to that porch. Underneath, where it was somewhat protected from the storms, was a dented and rusted red can.
Its effect on her took place as soon as she held it, reassuring her with swishing sounds and shifting weight as she walked back into the clearing. The pungent sent radiated from it into her nose, sending her heart into a frenzy and even causing a few minor spasms in her legs. It was already working. The sickness was cornered and cowering, and she was feeling like she was alive again, not just flesh wrapped around a cool, writhing lump.
She set it down and began to empty the wagon’s load. The large furniture she set up against the base of tower, and leaned the drawers and chairs against the pile on top of them. She threw the jewelry box on the pile impatiently, and fumbled with the cap on the can until it popped off.
Her next breath was a sort of ecstasy. It filled her lungs and widened her eyes. Her entire body stiffened before the moment collapsed with her paralysis, and she went into a clear yet trance like state. She circled the tower, splashing the furniture up and down in waves. The air was overbearing with the stench, but she walked back to the wagon unaffected and dug around before pulling out a book of matches. She stepped back to the pile, lit and dropped the match, and stepped away.
The flames burst around the circumference, racing to the other side to meet one another. The wind cried out as it was sucked into the fiery, giving the fire energy peel free the ash within the furniture, turning it into black, collapsing versions of its former self.
The blaze also seemed to suck in her consciousness as well, and she barely registered the curling, blackening hairs on her forelimbs from the ghostly tendrils of the fire’s radiation. Instead, her eyes vacantly followed the flames as they climbed to the apex of the tower like mountaineers. There near the top, an object caught her eye.
A white box with a pink and blue butterfly on was being torn apart by a demon’s translucent orange hands. The darkness advanced from all sides of the box, closing in, and seemingly tore the butterfly out of the visible spectrum.
The sight left her in awe. The moment seemed to stay with her, burned into her retina. However, when it did pass, it left her with an idea that invoked an odd sensation.
A smile.
