Buck #1: Must Be Thursday
Like most mornings in the Apple Family household, this one began when the sun came up. Applejack was more than used to being awoken by a ray of budding sunlight streaming in her window. In fact, usually she relished in it. The world was still shrouded in ethereal silence at this time of day, and her first breath of fresh air always tasted different than all the ones that followed, more crisp and comforting in the back of her nose. It made her feel alive, all stuffed full of energy and ready to take on the day’s tasks. That was what most mornings were like for her, and that was precisely how she liked them to be.
This morning, though, something was different. It wasn’t a physical something, like going to bed too late the night before or finding a hole in the coop fence when she went out to feed the chickens. No, this was bigger, less distinct, more widespread. Nothing in particular went wrong by any stretch of the imagination, but everything was just far enough from going right to pile up at the base of her neck like itchy little pieces of straw.
Her eyes felt gummy with exhaustion when she stumbled out of bed, it took her a full minute and a half to find where her hat had fallen from its hook in the night, and the porch door slammed on her hind hoof when she ducked outside to fetch water from the pump. By the time the pail jumped in her teeth and splashed her right in the center of her chest, her face had crumpled into a scowl that she doubted would disappear any time soon.
It was just going to be one of those days.
The rest of her morning routine went off without too much of a hitch. Big Mac came back in from the barn just in time to take the water from her and set it boiling for coffee, and Apple Bloom was already awake and dressed in galoshes when Applejack came upstairs to check on her, all ready to waddle out into the pigpen and fill the trough with slop. She was almost ready to second-guess herself on her prospects for the day, before breakfast sent her right back to square negative-one.
On any other morning, the eggs being just the tiniest bit runny coming out of the pan would hardly have been an issue, but today it all but ruined her appetite from the first bite. Apple Bloom was more than happy to accept a second helping on her plate, and Big Mac was more than happy to volunteer himself to do the dishes, having noticed the black cloud floating over his sister’s head and very much wanting to stay within its blind spot.
With a sigh and a moment taken to grit her teeth, Applejack hiked out to the barn and hitched herself up to the family’s apple cart, giving herself a mental pep talk as she did up the straps on the old two-wheeler’s harness. She could still turn this day around yet, she reckoned. If she got a move on, she could finish all her deliveries before lunchtime, which would mean she could start harvesting the northwest orchard around noon, which would leave her enough time before dinner to help Granny Smith with the last of the pies for Miss Cheerilee’s bake sale that weekend, which would then free up the evening for a long bath and an early bedtime. She was strong. She was confident. She could do this.
Applejack snorted and reared herself up on her hind legs. When she fell back down onto all four hooves, she did so with enough momentum to jolt the cart into motion behind her. She nudged her way through the barn doors at a brisk trot, and gave a jaunty wave to Granny Smith as she reached the front gate.
“I’m headin’ out to town for the mornin’!” she called out, managing to keep her pace even as she spoke. “I’ll see y’all at lunchtime!”
“You have a good day now, darlin’!” Granny Smith yelled back from her rocker on the porch, lifting one hoof from the yarn ball in her lap to return Applejack’s wave. “Don’t get into too much trouble without me!”
A chuckle bubbled out of Applejack’s throat, and gave her an extra boost of energy to lengthen her strides even more. As if Granny Smith ever got into trouble these days. Actually, it wasn’t like she herself got into much trouble with any consistency either. Aside from the occasional adventure with the other Elements of Harmony, Applejack lived a calm and carefree life out on Sweet Apple Acres, and she couldn’t have asked for anything more. All she wanted out of life was her family, her friends, and her daily routine. As long as those three things were in order, the rest of the world didn’t concern her much.
Her brief bout of self-satisfaction wasn’t enough to turn around her foul mood completely. It did get her to the Ponyville Town Square in record time, though, and at least that was enough to bend her lips right-side up for a spell. Stopping in front of Town Hall for a moment, Applejack rested her legs and, at the same time, checked the list Big Mac had taped to the cart shaft when he’d loaded it up this morning. The first order today was for Daisy Duke, at 14 Buttercup Avenue just around the corner from here.
Applejack hiked up her harness and glanced at the clock on top of Town Hall. The little hand was on the 8, and as she shifted her gaze towards it the big hand ticked over to the second notch past the 12. After lowering her eyes back down to the road, she let out a heavy sigh. Even with the pace she’d taken getting here, she was still two minutes before schedule. Great.
“Good morning, Applejack!” Daisy called out, sounding chipper as a chipmunk as Applejack’s cart creaked to a halt outside her front gate. “I was wondering where you’d gotten off to. You’re usually so punctual!”
Applejack grinned as she shrugged her harness off, all teeth with no lips to match. “My apologies,” she said while walking around to the back of her cart, her lips moving without her teeth following suit. “Bit of a slow start this mornin’.”
“Oh, I’m just kidding,” Daisy said with a wave of her hoof, too busy giggling to notice the twitch in Applejack’s eye. On a normal morning, her little quip wouldn’t have been a big deal. On a normal morning, though, she wouldn’t have been two minutes late.
“How much do I owe you?” Daisy went on to ask, already digging around out of sight for her purse. Applejack shifted the wooden crate with Daisy’s order in it into view, taking mental inventory of its contents as she did. Two bushels of Red Delicious plus one of Golden, add on six jars of preserves minus 20% for the bulk discount, and a bottle of apple butter for her niece’s birthday…
Daisy was halfway across her yard with her purse hanging from her shoulder when she suddenly stumbled, veering hard off to the right before catching herself on the lamppost at the end of the cobblestone walk. By the time she straightened up, Applejack had too. They’d both felt it: a deep, rumbling boom, like a ten-story giant stomping on a pony-sized spider. Daisy flattened her ears and met Applejack’s eyes for a moment, then nearly fell flat on her face. The second boom was twice as loud as the first, and came accompanied by the piercing, telltale snap of stones cracking in half. It sounded close. It sounded like it was coming from right beneath their hooves.
A few ponies in the street began to shout, all of them pointing at a craggy hillside jutting up from just outside the eastern border of the town. Applejack stepped out into the street to get a better look, and furrowed her brow once she did. There hadn’t been a hill over there when she’d pulled over at Daisy’s house a moment ago. For that matter, hills usually didn’t expand several feet in height in a matter of seconds either. Applejack had just enough time to realize that it probably wasn’t a hill at all before the hill emphatically declared itself to be anything but.
With a colossal FWA-BOOM, the bulging mound surged upward and exploded, spewing a pillar of blinding orange flames straight up into the sky and sending chunks of charred earth spraying all over town. Once the fire and smoke dissipated, the creature their disappearance revealed almost defied description. It was easily over three hundred feet tall, reared up on legs as thick as three-story houses seemed to be made of jet-black stone laced with veins of molten magma.
After a few moments, it leaned forward and landed on all fours again, opening a fissure ten feet wide straight down Main Street with the sheer force of its impact. Razor-sharp claws gouged deep furrows where the beast’s stubby digits gripped the earth, and more lava dripped from its maw as it bared its gleaming teeth. When it roared, the sound alone was enough to stop everypony in town dead in their tracks. It was fear incarnate. It was their worst nightmare come to life. It was a deafening, mortifying assurance that there was no point in running, that Death had come for all of them and that none would be spared its unholy and agonizing wrath.
It made Applejack clench her ankles and grit her teeth so hard she saw white. This day just kept getting better and better. In fact, you know what? This day had officially just gotten on her last nerve.
“Watch the cart,” she ordered Daisy, who may have heard her but was also pretty busy collapsing into a little terror-soaked pink-and-green pile next to her rhododendrons. Whichever was the case, Applejack had better things to do than stick around long enough to explain herself in Daisy’s currently preferred language of Incoherent Screaming. If fate was so determined to keep ruining her morning like this, then by Celestia she was going to give fate a piece of her mind about it. And she planned on starting with its most recent spin on her own personal Wheel of Misfortune, namely the embodiment of Armageddon itself that just had to pick today to immolate the world in eternal hellfire.
But of course, as was all too typical now, actually getting into the beast’s line of sight proved more difficult than she’d expected. Everypony in town seemed to have recovered from their temporary paralysis and resumed their previous activity of falling over each other to get away from the creature and carrying on in the process like it was the end of the cotton-picking world. She felt like a salmon swimming upstream during mating season, if the water was a bunch of gibbering ponies who wouldn’t watch where they were going, and the traditional birthing ground was an unfathomable monstrosity rampaging towards town with what looked for all the world like the essence of pure evil radiating off its back in amorphous void-colored spines. By the time she reached what was left of Main Street, battered and bruised by errant hooves and foaming mouths, she was too busy muttering curses to herself to notice the pony calling her name.
“Applejack!” Twilight Sparkle yelled from beside Town Hall, her wings spread and her horn glowing behind a magical purple haze. With a desperate grunt, Twilight loosed a bolt of pure-white lightning that blasted a crater fifteen feet across in the center of the beast’s chest. Magma showered out from the site of the impact, and the beast roared again, ultimately unharmed and even angrier for it. “Applejack, come with us! We have to get to the Tree of Harmony and use our Rainbow Power again! It’s our only chance!”
“Stupid cheap piece of junk screen door …” Applejack seethed under her breath, all the while stomping closer to the eldritch horror dominating the blood-red horizon. “Spend a fortune on new hinges, oil the blasted thing every other day…”
“Applejack? Applejack, where are you going?” Twilight’s voice was soon joined by others, a chorus of all her friends screaming after her first in confusion and then in panic.
“Can’t even find my goldurn hat this mornin’…” Applejack came to a stop at the very edge of town, just inches from the edge of the yawning chasm the beast’s rough landing had spawned. If she’d cared to look back, she would’ve seen all of her friends staring after her, frozen in place with their faces masked in horror. If she’d cared to look down, she would’ve seen the glow of the earth’s exposed mantle at the bottom of the newly christened Ponyville Gorge, lying in wait for her thousands of feet below the moment she took a wrong step. She really only cared to look forward at the moment, though, because that was where the number one item on her To-Chew-Out List was bearing down on her without a clue as to her presence less than a quarter-mile away.
“Hey!” she roared. “‘Scuse me! Yeah, you, Tall-Dark-And-Ugly! I’m talkin’ to you, mister!”
With less than a hundred feet to spare, the beast drove its forelegs into the ground and skidded to a halt, scattering the cobblestones layered on top of the road into town and dislodging the larger boulders that formed the foundation underneath. A particularly large and flat one landed just a few feet from Applejack’s nose. As the beast raised its head and inhaled, she took the opportunity to clamber on top of it, holding onto her hat with one hoof in anticipation of what was to come.
“WHO DARES OPPOSE THE WILL OF PYTHROS?”
The beast’s voice blew through town like a hurricane, flattening every house within three blocks and shearing Town Hall in half like it was made of popsicle sticks and craft glue. There went another of her public works projects into the scrap heap. With her Stetson still firmly on her head thanks to her quick thinking, Applejack growled and made herself known again.
“Down here, genius,” she called out, finally succeeding this time in drawing the beast’s attention down to her. “Just what in the hay d’you think you’re doin’?”
“I AM PYTHROS,” the beast repeated.
“I heard ya the first time, ya big oaf,” Applejack replied, raising her voice again so her deadpan tone could make it up to whatever the beast used for earholes. “Answer the question!”
“I AM ALL THAT WAS AND WILL BE.” The beast’s voice sounded like rocks being ground together inside an active volcano. Applejack crinkled her nose and sat back, cringing as she covered her ears with her forehooves. “FOR TEN THOUSAND YEARS WE HAVE SLUMBERED BENEATH THIS WORLD, GATHERED OUR STRENGTH FOR THE DAY OF YOUR ANNIHILATION. THE END OF PONIES IS NIGH. THE AGE OF TITANS IS RISEN AGAIN.”
“Oh, great,” Applejack grumbled, lifting both her hooves off her head in a gesture of disbelief before letting them slump against her sides. “Of course there’s more of you.”
“YOUR INSOLENCE WILL ONLY PROLONG YOUR RUINATION,” the beast proclaimed. “SUBMIT NOW, AND I WILL GRANT YOU THE PRIVILEGE OF A QUICK DEA–”
“Yeah, all right, look, I’ve had a really rough day so far, and the last thing I need right now is y’all holdin’ your monthly meetin’ of the Unholy Hellspawn Club in my lifelong place’a residence,” Applejack interrupted. She raised an eyebrow when the beast snorted twin columns of fire overhead, but otherwise never broke stride. “So if y’all could just do me a kindness and reschedule your little apocalypse party in some other plane’a mortal reality, I’d sure appreciate it.”
“Applejack…” At some point during her speech, Twilight had snuck up behind her, presumably with the rest of her friends in tow. Her voice had changed a lot in the past couple minutes, sounding less like a vengeful shout now and more like air leaking out of her lungs to form her name through not much more than sheer coincidence. “Applejack, run!”
“PETULANT MORTAL,” the beast bellowed, hunching over in preparation to attack. “YOUR SCREAMS WILL BE LIKE MUSIC TO OUR EARS!”
“Ho boy, are you askin’ for it,” Applejack replied, trying to hold back an incredulous laugh. “I’m warnin’ ya!”
“Oh stars above he’s gonna kill us Applejack can we please go now–”
With a ear-splitting howl, Pythros leapt into the air with bared teeth and outstretched claws, leaving ten-foot deep craters in the ground beneath him as he bore down on Applejack’s comparatively miniscule form. With a resigned sigh, Applejack turned around and faced her friends.
“I warned him,” she told Twilight with a shrug and a shake of her head. As the rest of the Elements of Harmony huddled together and waited for the end, Applejack shifted her weight onto her forelegs and braced her hooves against the stone she stood on. She waited until Pythros had nearly reached her, until she could feel the humid heat of his breath curling the hairs in her teeth, until she could hear his triumphant cry building in his throat.
Then she shut her eyes, reared up onto her forelegs, and bucked him dead in the nose.
The effect of Pythros’s attack on his target was akin to the effect a ripe tomato’s attack might have on a solid concrete wall. The beast’s face imploded the second it made contact with Applejack’s hooves, his neck and shoulders piling up in folded layers around it as his entire head collapsed into his spinal column. Stones collided and cracked along every inch of his body, sounding off with cloudless thunderclaps as Pythros’s body fused together behind Applejack’s hind legs.
There was a moment of silence, so ethereal and unexpected that it rang louder in Applejack’s ears than anything else had that day, and then a single titanic CRACK rent the air apart. The beast dropped out of the sky like the lifeless, congealed rock he now was, and crumbled into millions of pieces when he hit the ground ten feet below. Once a few last spurts of lava oozed onto the street and crusted over black as they hardened, Pythros the Destroyer of Worlds was no more.
Applejack blew out the breath she’d been holding in and let gravity pull her back down onto all fours, her hooves landing on the stone with a gentle clunk. If she was being honest with herself, this whole thing would’ve gone a whole lot better if she’d just kept her temper under control and talked some sense into Pythros before things had escalated to this point. Most times it was about as useful as beating her head against a brick wall before she went ahead and smashed it to bits with a single buck anyway, but at least it would’ve made her feel a bit less guilty. Now she was surrounded by a dead titan and half a town half in ruins, and still in a foul mood. And Celestia only knew how far this little encounter had thrown off her schedule for today. At this rate, she’d have to lose sleep again just to squeeze in a shower tonight.
“Gotta run, girls. I’ll stop by town this afternoon again if I find the time,” she told her friends, who probably heard her but also looked fairly occupied staring at her bug-eyed with her jaws hanging down to their chests. Darting around bits of rubble and gawking passerby, she made her way down the street and back over to her cart, which Daisy had—by accident or intention—actually done quite a good job looking after.
“Sorry about that,” Applejack said as she nudged Daisy’s crate onto her back and brought it over to her. “Lost track’a time. That’s gonna be thirty-two bits and fifty cents, includin’ your discount for the preserves.”
To her credit, Daisy was still visibly breathing, and her eyes twitched slightly when Applejack addressed her. That being said, she also lost a few points for not making any effort to speak, make an affirmative noise, reach for her purse sitting next to her on the ground, or give any identifiable sign that she wasn’t in some sort of high-functioning coma. Applejack sighed and rubbed her forehoof under the brim of her hat. You’d think sooner or later, the ponies in Ponyville would get used to things like this happening every once in a while. Granted, this was probably the first time they’d witnessed a thing met its end particularly like this, but that was hardly her fault. She’d just lost her temper for a bit. It happened to the best of ponies.
“I’ll put it on your tab,” she told Daisy, who in retrospect probably hadn’t heard her on account of being more or less dead to the world around her. Without any idea of what else she could do to remedy that, Applejack turned around and headed back to her cart, kicking the tailgate closed before looping around to slide back into her harness again. She didn’t see the rock—the ambitious remnant of Pythros, she supposed—under the wheel until she was already moving, until it was too late to stop the cart from clattering over it and coming down hard on the other side. A quiet groan and a loud snap filled her chest with dread, and the sight of the cart listing hard to one side behind her confirmed her worst fears. Despite her best efforts at repairing it last week, she’d busted the axle again.
With the whole town still gaping at her, Applejack squeezed her eyes shut and smacked her hoof against her face. This day was turning out just absolutely flipping perfect.
Author's Note
Theoretically coming soon - Buck #2: It's The Thought That Counts
