I stare at the brown book in my lap, my slightly bent black quill hovering over the blank open pages. The math problems Treble gave me, completed, are on a paper lying on the grass next to my legs. With an explosive sigh I put the quill to paper and start writing.

The dreams came back last night. I’m not sure if I should be worried or relieved. The mare who looks like an older me finds me and asks if I want to join her party. We head off into a dead forest while she mumbles about something called stats, and we eventually get into a fight with wolves made of dead wood. The older me would somehow kill them all with two daggers and then start mumbling about “level ups.”

All in all the mare is just as strange as ever, and she still won’t answer my questions…

Why can’t grown ups ever give me a simple answer to my questions?

Sighing once again, I close my dream journal and put the cork in the inkwell before reaching behind me and placing the items back in my bag. Digging out the blanket Treble made me, I quickly roll it into a ball and place it behind me. I shuffle forward a little before lying down. The blanket rests right between my wings as I stare up at the blue sky and watch a single cloud drift its way across the endless expanse. It’s times like this, with a gentle breeze flowing through my mane, that the world just seems to disappear.

“You done with your math problems?” I hear a melodic voice ask behind me. Tilting my head back I see an upside down Treble looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

“Mhm,” I hum an affirmative, as my right hand snatches the papers beside me off the ground and holds them up to her.

She takes them and looks over the papers with a critical eye. “...Alright, I don’t see any mistakes, so you’re free for the rest of the day. Are you hungry?” I open my mouth but my stomach beats me to it, rumbling loudly in response. Treble chuckles as I feel my entire face heating up. “I’ll take that as a yes. Come on, lunch is ready.”

I look at Treble for a moment before climbing to my hooves and stuffing the blanket in my bag. We walk over to the campfire everyone is sitting around where Snow hands each of us a bowl filled with with berries of various sizes and colors.

Gale opens his beak once I start eating, “Once you two are done, grab your daggers, I’m going to be showing you a few things you ca-”

BOOOM

I start coughing as a berry gets lodged in my throat, before I could do anything a wall of wind slams into my panic spread wings and I am sent flying backwards. My vision blurs as my head slams into something hard, and a moment later the world falls silent as everything fades into darkness.

I am racing between the trees in a dead run. Something is chasing me, I can hear it crashing through the forest behind me. I don’t know what it is, but I know I can’t let it catch me. I push myself to run faster as a bloodcurdling screech tears through the air. Despite my best efforts I can hear the creature catching up as the sound of dead trees being crushed gets louder.

I trip on a root, and I feel the creature charge past me as I fall to the forest floor. I skid across a layer of dead leaves and branches for a moment before coming to a stop. From my position on the forest floor, I look up and see the creature that is chasing me for the first time.

The thing is an abomination, with three twig like arms attached to a deformed black body with giant red bubbles protruding from it at random points. It is standing on two legs that shouldn’t be able to support it and are bending in two different directions. The arms don’t end in hands, but some clawlike appendages that are longer than the arms themselves.

I scream, scrambling to my hooves and running back the way I had just come from. The abomination screeches again before I hear it coming after me once more. It’s catching up much faster now, seeing as I have to jump over some of the stumps the creature left in its path of destruction, or risk it catching me as I climb over the toppled trees. I turn right once I come up to the next stump, hedging my bets and hoping that the monster can’t turn as well as it can charge. My gamble pays off when I hear the monster crashing through several toppled trees trying to stop, although my victory is short lived as I hear something else crashing through the trees in front of me. Turning around once more I see the monster obliterating the trees in its path, its claw like appendages outstretched as if to grab me.

I’m paralyzed in fear, the long black claws inches away from my face. A moment later something roars behind me, and a giant green mass of muscles and fur launches past me and tackles the abomination to the ground.

I stand motionless as I watch the massive green earth pony with a black mane beat the monster senseless. The stallion isn’t wearing a shirt, and a large shredded pair of purple pants is the only thing keeping him from being completely naked.

“Storm?!?” The sound of my name being called behind me snaps me out of my stunned stupor. Tearing my eyes away from the earth pony mauling the monster, I look behind me and see the mare from my dreams running towards me.

She doesn’t seem to be doing very well since the last time I saw her. The left side of her face is wrapped in bandages, and her right wing is bending in a place it shouldn’t. She’s wearing a green outfit similar to the one Mom wears when she is fighting, although I can see several places where the cloth has been cut by something. The mare skids to a halt, falling to her knees as she looks me over. “Are you hurt? Did that thing catch you?”

I shake my head, looking at her with wide eyes as she sighs in relief. She picks me up with her left arm and cradles me against her side. Wrapping my arms around the back of her neck, I can see over her shoulder. The mare turns around before she starts running and I see the earth pony standing over the unmoving monster with his shoulders heaving. The stallion’s head shoots up as the forest comes alive with sound. I thought the monster was loud when it charged through the trees, but now it sounds like an entire army of them is marching towards us. With a challenging roar, the stallion rushes off into the trees, hiding what I can only guess are more of the abominations.

“Wait!” I cry out, turning my face towards the mare carrying me.

“No can do, Storm!” she yells back, jumping over the fallen trees on the path without slowing down.

“We have to help him!”

“He can take care of himself!”

“He can, can’t he?” a voice asks beside me. Looking over, I come face to face with another earth pony stallion running beside us. Although, if the first earth pony was a mass of fur and muscle, than this stallion is nothing but fur and bones. He has a white coat of fur with a green mane; he wears a very professional looking purple jacket with a slightly lighter purple button up shirt, a pair of purple pants completes his wardrobe. Even though he dresses like someone important, the look on his face leaves no doubt that this stallion isn’t exactly right in the head, with the blood red lips stretched into a smile too wide to be normal and the black substance surrounding his eyes. When he looks at me, I feel a shiver go up my spine and wish that he would stop. “I mean, it’s not like they have anything that is powerful enough to actually take him down.”

“Clown, do you have something to report, or did you just come here to make Storm uncomfortable?”

The stallion gasps and clutches a black gloved hand to his chest, “Me? Make someone uncomfortable? Perish the thought, my good mare. I only came to tell you that the safe house in sector J has been secured.”

The older me is silent for a moment before slowing down. “You’re still going back in the cage after this is over, you know that right?”

The stallion sighs before spreading his hands. “Really, girl, why are you always so serious? You need to smile more.”

The older me just stares at the stallion,the silence between them growing thicker with each passing second until the mare runs past him without saying a word.

“Now that’s just cold, Jack!” the stallion yells as his form is swallowed by the dead trees.

We continue on in silence for a while, my temporary guardian weaving through the trees like it’s second nature to her. “Who was that stallion?” I ask, wanting to break the unnatural silence any way possible.

“Someone you should never listen to… ever.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you once we get to the safe house. Now hush, we don’t want to attract any more monsters, do we?”

The thought of meeting another one of those things makes me tighten my grip on my guardian and keeps my muzzle shut. I don’t know how long we run through the woods, but eventually the mare starts slowing down. Looking over my shoulder I can see a rectangular building made out of wood sitting in a small clearing next to a stream.

The mare walks right up to the building before quickly slipping inside and closing the wooden door behind her. She pauses for a moment before moving to a sectioned off part of the building, once inside I can see a large bed with a bunch of different colored bottles on a nightstand next to it. She carefully places me on the bed before looking over the assorted bottles, giving me a green colored one after a moment.

“Drink.”

I blink before taking the neck of the bottle in my hand. Bringing the container to my face, I try to smell the contents, only to find that whatever it is doesn’t have a smell. Shrugging I drink some of the liquid. I immediately feel exhausted, the bottle dropping out of my hand a moment before my head hits the comfortable pillow.

I frown as I watch the little filly in the bed fade out of existence. The fact that she was coherent for as long as she was in here makes me wonder just how badly we are messed up.

“You can’t hide us from her forever you know.” Turning around I see the stallion who informed me that this safe house was secured leaning against the far wall and fingering the sharp edge of a knife. “She’s going to have to embrace us all eventually. She won’t survive if she isn’t the best.”

“So she needs to become a sociopath in order to be the best?” I sneer, walking towards the door.

“She needs to learn that sometimes we must do unpleasant things in order to achieve our goals, and learn how to live with herself afterwards…” I pause with my hand resting on the doorframe to the main room. “She’ll have to kill someone eventually, Jack. That’s just a fact, given the world that we live in now.

“Now then, if we influence her so that she dislikes taking the lives of others, then how long do you think she will last before she breaks? Ten kills, twenty? Or maybe she will soldier on until we lose count of how many bodies litter the ground because of us.”

“We will cross that bridge when we come to it,” I growl.

“Oh really? Then tell me, when was the last time you picked up a dagger as yourself?” I turn my head and glare at the stallion over my shoulder. “When was the last time you fought without a mask?” The stallion reaches up and grabs his face before his form blurs, and a moment later I’m looking at a pegasus mare with a blue coat of fur and a black mane, the left side of her face bandaged and one of her blue wings bent where it shouldn’t. “Because to me,” the doppelganger starts. “It looks like you’re still running away.”

I clench my teeth, and glare at the mare with undisguised loathing. I finally tear my eyes away from her and march towards the door leading outside. “...Goodbye, Joker.”

Author's Note

Does anyone even read the Author's notes?