The Gift of Growth

Day 1

Trace’s feet brought him to the door of Lavender Grace’s home office, almost all on their own, but were hesitant to carry him much further. Throb. He put a hand to his head as flashes of memory from last night’s dream lashed across his imagination – mind-controlling Grace and Orchid, the arrival of the personal nightmare that was Sunny Days…

“Do that again.”

Lust. Scourge. Enticement. It all wound together, and Trace shook his head vigorously. He could almost still hear her voice. Certainly, he still felt it. But though this particular personal demon had been haunting him for years, it seemed unusual that the echoes would still be so powerful this morning, long after the dream had ended. Had the intrusion of that thestral mare – what was it, Melody? Mist Melody? – had her dreamwalking magic preserved the entire dream as more memory than figment? If so, it was making an already hard– difficult morning that much moreso.

Resentment, after all, wasn't the only thing that was stirring at the thought.

If it weren’t for the sheer detail in which he could remember it, Trace might’ve written it off as an unbelievable, laughable fantasy. The whole scenario seemed worthy of those letters ponies wrote to raunchy magazines: I was having a nightmare, a sexy nightmare, and then this sexier yet hyper thestral showed up in lingerie to dispel the dream and… rope me into following her orders without question for the next three weeks, under the… sexy?... pretense of fixing my upcoming job problems?

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that erotic.

Trace sighed and opened the door to his boss’s office. The mare herself was standing at the window, looking out from the second story over the fields of crops and the morning workers tending to them. Voice distant, cold, Grace barely turned her head before saying, “Orchid Blossom has the Thunderblights under control. I’ll need you to take down all the traps and lures. After that… well, we’ll contact you if we need anything.”

Trace stood still, eyes pointed at the floor, his breath shallow. Here it was, official as Celestia’s royal seal. His job was gone.

“Did you hear me?”

Trace swallowed. In the whorl of hateful memory, painful present, and a distant hope of the future, he found something almost like courage. “Yeah.” He raised his eyes and mumbled, “Can I ask a question?”

Almost.

Grace snorted through her nostrils and turned around. “I don’t know – can you?” she replied with all the smugness of that teacher you couldn’t stand back in elementary school.

It was a struggle to keep his face passive, but he barely managed, clinging to his dignity if not his Harmony, and soldiered on. “Have I… been a problem? Have I caused any issues, or… broken any rules?”

Lavender Grace raised an eyebrow, then thought for a second or two. “You were tardy a few times.”

“That was the first two days,” Trace replied, trying to keep the whine out of his voice, remembering those incidents clearly and how much he feared for his job security after getting lectured by the bosses. “Since then, I’ve always clocked in on-time or earlier. Anything else?”

Grace’s lightly wrinkled eyelids narrowed slightly; not out of malice, but more annoyance than anything. “If you’re wondering whether you’re being let go because of some infraction or slight or farm politics – no. You’re a contract worker, and we don’t need you once your contract’s up. That’s all.”

His throat feeling very dry all of a sudden, Trace stared back and muttered, “That’s all, huh?” No ‘Sorry’ or ‘You will be missed’ or ‘Wish you well on your future endeavors’?

The co-owner of Happy Hoof Farms shook her head, placed her hands on the desk, and leaned forward. “If you wanted this to be more of an ‘event,’ maybe you should have made more friends here. Or any friends.” She then straightened up and said, “Now get to work. I’ve got another meeting.”

Almost on cue (but not quite; it was a beat and a half too late), the door ajar behind Trace was pushed open again. Orchid Blossom ducked and twisted to get her curvy bulk through the doorway. “Mrs. Grace, you asked for me?” she announced in her airy but powerful voice. She looked down at Trace and said, “Oh, hello again!”

Filling up all the space he had and more. Maybe he was still dreaming; the metaphors were coming at his head like confectionary at a bison.

Trace resisted the urge to shove past her (knowing it would probably be futile anyway) and simply maneuvered around her. He had less success resisting the temptation to slam the door behind him, stallion-baby that he knowingly was.

The last thing he heard was Orchid saying, “Hey, you alr–?” Slam.

Honestly, it felt good to cut someone else off for a change.

“‘You should have made more friends. Any friends,’” Trace muttered to himself. “Sure, ‘cause that’s so easy for an ex-mind-controller with a public record…!” He could bring it up at parties, or class reunions, right? “I don't know, Grosse Pointe, I've been trying not to accidentally brainfuck every mare, stallion, and foal I come across. How about you? Freelance assassin? Smashing, let's be friends.”

Going up and down every field with a cart and removing the Thunderblight pheromone traps was grueling work. This job hadn’t been pleasant at the best of times, but it was like all of the things he hated about it were coming up all at once in full force. The collected traps had a funk that stank to high heaven. Stray bugs shocked his arms with tiny currents of magical charge. And worst of all, he was alone; everypony else steered clear of him whenever they saw his cart full of awful-smelling bug traps come down the rows of crops.

Trace worked through lunch and managed to finish gathering every last trap by the time breaks were over. If there was one thing to recommend it, it was that the work made it hard for him to stew. He hauled his overfull cart back to the shed where Mr. Cocoa let him keep all his chemicals and tools – a shed that would no doubt be repurposed for something else once he was gone. For now, though, Trace simply stood all the empty traps against a wall and got to work freeing all the bugs still captive with the adhesive-dissolving agent.

As he went about releasing the Thunderblights (and got a few more shocks in gratitude), he looked around the shed. In his mind’s eye, he could see price tags attached to every item and barrel, totalling hundreds of bits over months of time that was now worthless. Spent, lost, and squandered. The supply stores weren’t going to buy back their own containers that were now less than half full, and it wasn’t like he was gonna find a private collector that would be interested in all the bug-capturing equipment. His best shot was happening upon a colt or filly who’d just gotten a genuine pest control cutie mark, and giving his stuff to them to get their career started… in exchange for lunch money, at most.

Unless he kept the raw plant extracts and got back into botany…

Trace smacked his forehead again. If I’m still having nightmares about that career path, that probably means it’s not a good idea to go back to it. Just seems like a logical rule to live by.

By the time he was done cleaning out the traps, Celestia’s sun was past its peak in the sky. Trace’s stomach was growling since he’d skipped lunch (not that he’d had much of an appetite at the time anyway). He rinsed off his hands and face with the water and rags he kept in the shed, then locked up the shed, parked his cart next to it, and headed out into the fields.

Out of curiosity, he decided to see how the crops were doing without his traps. And sure enough – bizarrely enough – instead of the waves and waves of bugs he expected to see crawling over every fruit and vegetable, the most he could find were the occasional swarm flying high overhead, sparking with magical energy on their way past. Orchid Blossom had really done it. Not only were the bugs leaving the majority of the crops alone, they were beginning to act as a sort of… defensive system!

Not just replaced. Superceded. In a way his intellectual side could even admire, to rub salt in the wound.

Dejected, Trace death-marched his way back to his apartment.

“Sign please!”

When he reached the lobby of his building, Trace was so lost in his own sad little world that he almost didn’t notice the clipboard being shoved in his face by a cheery gray-and-blonde wall-eyed pegasus. He robotically took the pen and looked over the sheet. “I… have a package?” he asked.

“Lots, actually!” the mare replied, jabbing her thumb over at a pile of boxes and bags next to the front desk. “You must be very popular today!”

“Sure…” Trace muttered suspiciously, taking a few steps over to the pile. They were all correctly addressed to him, there was no mistake. He signed the sheet and handed the clipboard back to the delivery mare.

“You want a little help taking them up?” she asked. “Especially that one.” She pointed at a rather large and heavy-looking box that sat at the center of the pile.

“Yeah, that’s fine…”

As Trace and the blonde pegasus mare carried up the boxes, Trace spied the labels on the packages again. They’d been sent from an address he didn’t recognize in… Canterlot. Trace’s eyes narrowed.

A brief, bitter thought meandered through his head. Why was it fair for others to pull strings in his life, but not for him to pull back? The answer was a painful reminder with a less painful solution: He could, after all, refuse to sign, right?

When they went back down for the last armfuls of smaller packages, he said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course!”

“When… would these packages had to have been sent, to arrive here today?”

“Hmmmm…” The mare adorably put a finger to her chin, while one eye rotated out of focus. “These are all Express, and they’re from Canterlot, so… From there, they would’ve been taken to the holding station in Ponyville, then I loaded them up today and carried them here in my cart… So at the latest, they could’ve been put in the system yesterday afternoon.”

“Yesterday afternoon at the latest?”

“Yessir!”

Trace’s right eye twitched. Yep. Strings.

Yesterday afternoon.

Before the dream.

Before we ever even MET.

She already knew I was going to say yes.

Or rather…

She wasn’t going to let me say no.

“Is something the matter?” the delivery mare asked. Her smile was amazingly innocent, and some of his anger was muted. It wasn't her fault, after all.

Trace shook his head rapidly and put on his best fake smile. “No no, it’s fine. Just… haha, a prank, my friend, in Canterlot, is pulling, on me, haha…”

The mare didn’t looked fooled by his forced mirth and stilted vocal patterns, but she seemed to let it slide. “Well okay then.” Since all the packages were now on Trace’s doorstep, she headed back down the stairs. “Have a good rest of your day, sir!”

“You too…” Trace muttered. Someone should, right? Then, once she was gone, he proceeded to unlock his door and shove all the boxes through the doorway with his legs and feet.

He wondered if he was going to get an exercise regimen, too.

10 minutes and one beer later (because he sure as hell wasn’t going to do this completely sober at this point), Trace’s living room floor was a mess of paper and cardboard. From the boxes, packages, and crates of varying sizes, he’d uncovered a veritable treasure trove of random items:

A large bag of mixed seeds.

A songbook of zebra folk tunes. A pair of… bongos?

A piece of paper with some kind of runic script scrawled over every inch of it, back and front. A book entitled Pre-Equestrian Languages.

A set of dumbbells – 2, 5, and 10 pounds. (Exercise, check.)

A tin box containing a brand-new wood carving knife. A box of wooden blocks.

And in the biggest box of all: A high-end magically enchanted tent, boasting features like Sets Itself Up! and Temperature-Controlled Interior! and Bigger on the Inside!

“Am I going camping…?” Trace asked aloud to the empty room, as he sat on the couch looking over his new hoard.

There were only two items left. One was a thin package with “Inspiration” written on it in big letters (including the quotes), which filled Trace with a small amount of dread. The other was a simple letter envelope, labeled Open Me First! ...Whoops.

Trace reached over and tore open the envelope. There seemed to be two papers inside. One was a message, which Trace read first.

Hey Trace! It’s Mist Melody.

With any luck, all of this stuff will show up at your door right after our talk, and we can avoid wasting any time. (And before you ask: No, I wasn’t going to force you to say yes, but on the off chance you say no, I’ll just visit your dreams again tonight and take another shot at convincing you. It really is in your best interest, buddy.)

Trace growled incoherently in his throat, rolled his eyes, and continued reading.

Either way, I hope all this proves that I’m serious about this little endeavor of ours. Putting all this together and sending it to you will cost me a few pretty bits, so don’t think I’m going to all this trouble just to prank you.

What’s all this for? Simple. Your apartment’s a terrible place to train. We gotta get you out, breathing fresh air, all that jazz. Time to brush up on your Colt Scout survival skills!

“I dropped out of the Colt Scouts,” Trace grumbled.

I’ll share more of the plan in your dreams tonight. But I want you ready to go first thing tomorrow morning, and there’s a few things that I can’t pack for you, so check the list on the other page and make sure you’re ready for a trip.

See you soon… ❤

The letter carried the same unmistakable scent as last night; the soul-deep aromachologist in him wanted to know how. Then the impact of Melody's plans hit him.

Trace’s brow furrowed. A trip? But didn’t he need to stick around in case he was needed on Happy Hoof Farms? Oh hell, what are even the chances they’ll need me with Orchid Blossom around… He pulled out the other page, which had a short shopping list on it written in the same handwriting.

– At least a week’s worth of clothes, water, and non-perishable food (you can come back and resupply later)
– Bedroll, blanket, pillows, etc.
– Some firewood and fire-starters (matches or flint, your preference)
– A campfire cooking pot
– Your leftover plant extracts and brewing equipment
– Fap material (to go along with the “Inspiration”)

The young stallion sputtered at that last item, and looked around nervously as though worried he was being watched. How does she know…? he almost thought, his mind wandering to what was hidden under his bed, before realizing it was a stupid question.

Though what did that last part mean, going along with the “Inspiration”?

With growing trepidation, Trace set down the papers onto the end-table and reached out to the final unopened package. After a quick effort to tear the giant envelope open, he peered inside. There seemed to be… photos? Trace reached in and pulled one out…

Trace bit and sucked on his lower lip before he fully comprehended what he was seeing. The only coherent word that came to mind was, “Oh.”

It was an instant photo of Mist Melody, in what was presumably her office, wearing the same skimpy negligee she’d been wearing in his dream. Her pose was… She had her back to the camera, she was bent slightly forward over the desk. With her short purple tail flagged to one side, her titanic (and barely covered) glutes were fully displayed to the viewer’s lens, along with a hint of her sculpted, powerful gray thighs. One hand was reaching back and stroking her own ass, while the other hand braced against the table. Her bat wings were folded against her back, which meant there was almost nothing covering the acres of Q-cup backboob visible from behind – she was actually twisting to the right a bit, so that the way her enormous silk-garmented breasts rested on the table was easy to see. And her head, turned so that she was peering back over her shoulder, shooting a smouldering look into the camera with one glowing, golden eye.

Oh. Inspiration.

Trace’s neck creaked as he slowly turned his head back towards the envelope. There were over a dozen more photos inside.

Snapping out of it and cursing the betrayal of his own overactive libido, Trace tossed the picture back into the package and stood up, adjusting his pants. He was going to go out shopping and get his mind off all this! Off Mist Melody and her machinations.

Besides, he was probably going to jack off before bed anyway. But not to those pictures. Definitely not to those cheesecake pictures.

Night 1

Trace came around to awareness in a place he’d been to a lot in the past few years:

Sunny Days’ office.

Trace looked down at his hand and winced. There it was, the little porcelain pot with the special freesia bloom, in his hand again.

He let the flower roll out of his hand and smash on the floorboards, but it was already too late. Sunny was already moaning in lust, rubbing her hands all over her petite, curvy body. Her long tongue licked all over her muzzle. Sunny’s clothes melted away; her larger-than-life breasts bounced up with almost comical perkiness. The desk separating them disappeared, and she took a few steps closer. Trace backed up against the door, which refused to open.

“Do it again... Do it again. Do it again! DO IT– hrrrk!”

That was new.

A large – if elegant and supple – hand had reached out and grabbed the sexual caricature of Sunny Days by the neck, interrupting her mantra.

Trace looked over to the left and saw the frankly rather frightening shape of a huge, hyper, and armored thestral, keeping his former business partner in a chokehold with merely one hand. The armor was a no-nonsense mix of plate and chain, tightly fitted to the guard’s hyper-muscular form but arranged for maneuverability and colored in the blues and blacks of Princess Luna’s night. A longsword was sheathed at the Dream Warden’s hip.

Strange. She looks more real than… Oh. Right.

Mist Melody grinned back at Trace. With extra fang. “Hey, cutie. Is this mare bothering you?”

Her massive arm flexed and her hand squeezed the nightmare-Sunny’s neck. Trace shuddered, waiting for a snap… that never came. There was an odd sound, like a balloon rupturing and deflating, and the mare in Mist’s beefy hand began to shrink, and shrink, and shrink, and… change color?

Sunny Days almost completely disappeared into Mist Melody’s fist, save for the head, which had shrunk down to a fiery and horned blue ball of anger, glaring at Trace with its wispy eyes.

“The actual ffffffuck?” Trace managed to spit out.

Mist regarded the tiny monster now captive in her hand. A disdainful sniff preceded her explanation. “This is a Lesser Fiend. Nightmare creature. Feeds off guilt or greed, tries to stoke ponies into either punishing themselves or doing something they’ll regret.”

Trace watched as the little horned devil tried to pull itself out from between Mist’s big gloved fingers. It gave him a toothsome snarl, that came out as more of a squeak. “Oh,” he said, “so… this is the cause of my problems?”

“Mm-mm.” Mist shook her head sadly. “The angst is all yours. You just have an annoying stowaway who’s making it just a little bit worse.”

What happened next was so quick Trace barely saw it: She let the fiery blue ball go, but her other hand instantly went down to the hilt of her blade and, in one smooth motion, unsheathed it and sliced the monster in half. Her expression never changed. The blade’s arc ended just above Trace’s head – it glowed faintly turquoise and hummed with magical power. The Lesser Fiend faded away into mist, along with the rest of the dream-office.

As the dream reverted to the default ‘field of stars’ dreamspace, Trace stepped back, looked around, and then glanced fearfully back up at the powerful thestral. “Is… Is it gone?”

Mist let out an aggravated sigh and sheathed her sword. “No.”

“What??”

She shrugged her big shoulders, the chains of her armor clinking with the motion. “I didn’t get the core. It’ll reform in a few hours and probably burrow into the membrane of your dream-sphere, lay low for a while. But it likely won’t stick its head out when it knows a dreamwalker’s in town.” Trace could not believe how profoundly meh her expression was.

“Wait wait wait.” Trace rubbed his eyes briefly, trying to regain a sense of what was going on. “That sounds like something we should take care of first!”

“Lesser Fiends are tricky,” Mist Melody admitted. One hand idly played with the hilt of her sword, running her thumb in slow, sensuous circles over the pommel. “They’re not super dangerous, unless you’re already on the edge of… something, but they can hide like the dickens. You need– The fastest way to reveal their core is to get the victim involved, get them over their guilt. And like completely over it, not just a momentary epiphany. That can take weeks. We’ve only got three. So either we can hunt down one minor nightmare creature, or we can find out what you need to make you happy in your life. Easy decision.” Her thoughtful look transformed into a confident smirk. “Besides, if it all works out the way I hope it will, a Lesser Fiend will be a chump.”

“So… we’re just going to leave it be?”

“Hey, you’ve got a personal dream-bodyguard for three weeks,” Mist pointed out with another of her toothy grins, then flexed one of her tremendous biceps to a full peak. She kissed it slowly, sighing happily. “Fiend will know better than to fuck with that. You’ll be fine.” She clapped her hands and rubbed them together. “Now! You got all the stuff I sent you?”

Still unnerved but unable to pursue the previous line of questioning, Trace rubbed his somewhat thinner arms through his pajama top (When had his clothes changed?) and muttered, “I think so. You didn’t exactly provide me a manifest.”

Mist ducked her head as a perfect replica of Trace’s apartment began to materialize around them, complete with the shredded paper that he had forgotten to clean up from the unpacking. Mist stepped around the couch, her massive footfalls slightly shaking the cups on the end table, and peered over the pile of boxes. She smiled and said, “Yep, looks like everything.”

Trace looked around in confusion. How could she know for sure from a dream? Were they actually being projected into his home somehow? Was she drawing from his memories? Was he subconsciously volunteering the information?

Cheekily, Mist spied the opened package of photos. “I see you opened up the ‘Inspiration.’ Have you knocked one out to it yet?”

“No!” Trace quickly lied.

She giggled at that. Her massive armored breastplate, adorned with a symbol of Luna’s moon, was necessarily roomy and designed to deflect blows away from the center of mass, but it was still impossible to miss a certain shifting of contents underneath as her chest bounced. “And you went and got the rest? All ready to go first thing in the morning?” Her prodigious rack was still bouncing; that was definitely a breastplate.

Trace forced himself to look her in the eyes, held back a sigh, and scratched the side of his head. “I’ll have to get my cart and load it up… but yeah, more or less. What am I doing?”

“Lemme show ya.”

The ground fell away from Trace’s feet – suddenly he was floating an inch or two off the floor. Then, without any more warning than that, the apartment moved to one side rapidly, and he was propelled towards the door. He phased through like a ghost, then shifted direction and flew down the hall and the stairs without losing any momentum. All Trace could do was keep himself still and watch as the world flew by. In fact, something was preventing him from closing his eyes.

Trace watched as he was forced out of his apartment building, flew down the street, then made a turn for the southeast path leading out of Hoofbrook. Faster and faster he flew, miles of hot farmland rolling by. And in the distance – rapidly approaching – were the gnarled black trees of the cursed woods. The evil forest where all the magical monsters of the Plaguelands once made their home.

Nowhere a sane pony went, but he was increasingly doubtful of Mist Melody's participation in that category.

He flew down the road and into the woods, unable to stop watching, like the images of this journey were being burned into his retinas. The path wound left, then right – and then he made a sudden right turn into a clearing. The world stopped moving, and the now thoroughly dizzy stallion collapsed back onto the ground in a heap.

Trace shook his head vigorously and tried to regain his bearings, blinking a few times to make sure his eyelids had starting working again. He looked up and around, seeing a ring of black trees all around him. He scrambled to his feet in fear – he knew what kinds of creatures were in this place: Thunderblights, fearcrows, timberwolves, tatzlwurms…!

The clearing erupted into chaos. Buzzing, crowing, howling, hissing. Thunderblights filled the air beneath the tree canopy, sparking and zapping everything in range! The giant black fearcrows flew up to Trace’s face, using their glowing red eyes to freeze him with visions of his worst nightmares! A pack of timberwolves leaped out from behind the northern hill of the clearing and surrounded Trace! The ground rumbled and exploded upward as a giant tatzlwurm burst through the ground, then spread its sharp tri-jaws and screamed at him, hissing with its black tendrils!

“Okay, STOP.”

Everyone and everything in the entire area froze awkwardly, looking up at one of the trees. Mist Melody was hanging upside-down from a gnarled branch about fifteen feet above the ground, using her knees to stay hooked around the limb. She glared at everyone beneath her, her anger tinged with annoyance, and then flipped off the branch and landed on her feet, creating a loud and dramatic boom and kicking up soil and dust.

“First of all,” she began, standing up to her full 7’10” height, “you’re the pest control guy, Trace. Bring some frickin’ Thunderblight repellant and you’ll be fine.”

Out of nowhere, there was now a pole with a pheromone well in Trace’s hands, and the Thunderblights scattered.

“Second,” Mist continued, rolling her eyes, “the fearcrows aren’t out until mid-autumn. Your bosses told you as much. It’s still summer; they’re asleep.”

Hanging their heads in embarrassed shame, the horrible crows landed on the ground and marched out of the clearing single-file. Trace was less surprised to note one of them was wearing his brand of pajamas.

Mist rounded on the timberwolves that were surrounding Trace, who flinched in nervousness. She rolled her eyes, cocked her head and hips, and stared at him. “Thirdly… yes, there’s a pack of timberwolves in this forest. But I have it on good authority that their territory is further in, and they’re not the type to go out of their way to hunt ponies.”

The wolves’ wooden ears flattened against their heads. The largest of them, presumably the leader, let out a howling order. The wolves retreated back over the hill.

Mist twisted around one more time and looked up at the tatzlwurm that had invaded the center of the forest clearing. It hissed at her one more time; she hardly reacted at all. “And tatzlwurms, seriously…? They live in the canyons, Trace. They’re miles away from here. And they don’t like digging through old growth forests anyway! The roots grab and tangle deep in the earth. They hate burrowing through that stuff!”

The tatzlwurm looked down at the ground, as if suddenly realizing it didn’t have an exit strategy. It hissed and howled, writhing its body through the air as it slowly faded away into nothingness. The hole in the ground disappeared like nothing had ever broken through.

Mist Melody walked back over to Trace, who was now on the dirt in the fetal position clutching his repellant pole for dear life. She reached down and effortlessly pulled him up to his feet.

“Why… Why here?!” Trace demanded, still breathing heavily. “Why camp here, in the cursed woods?!”

Utterly annoyed, Mist rolled her eyes and replied, “Because they’re not actually cursed anymore. They were cleansed years ago. Here, check this out.”

The thestrals eyes and wings glowed with some kind of pinkish-purple magic, and the sky swiveled. The black night was chased away by the golden light of morning in a matter of seconds, filling the huge forest clearing with light.

“Hehehe, I love doing that,” Mist giggled impishly. “But take a look at the trees now.” For a moment, though, he just wanted to look at the twinkle in her eyes. Wait, no. No he did not.

Trace took a look. The black and gnarled trees from the night before were now… well, still gnarled and evil-looking, but the blackened wood now had streaks of healthy brown running through them that were more visible in the daylight. And when he looked further up, the canopy was filled with an adornment of natural green leaves, like any other forest.

“See that?” Mist said, squinting her eyes a bit at the light she was a little unused to. “Natural magic, natural life is returning. This land had all its power sucked away for an evil purpose, but now it’s starting to heal, bit by bit. It’s starting to bounce back. All you gotta do is give it a chance.”

She smirked down at Trace like she was saying something really clever. She even did that one-eyebrow-raised trick. Trace didn’t notice at all; he was rubbing his eyes and still trying to calm down from the adrenaline rush of being surrounded by monsters, imagined or otherwise.

“So!” Mist declared. She walked around the clearing a bit. “It’s private, it’s accessible – only an hour’s walk from Hoofbrook, 20 minutes max by flight – it’s reasonably safe, AND it has all the natural resources we might need for your ‘curriculum.’” She put her hands on her gorgeously curved hips proudly. “It’s perfect!”

Trace groaned and tossed the repellant pole to the ground. It faded away. “...I go camping here in the woods, and then… then what? What do I do?”

“Exactly what I say,” Mist Melody purred. She had a tone of threat and promise both. “I’ll have instructions for you daily. Tomorrow I’ll let you get set up and look over the reading materials. But after that, buckle up.”

The earth stallion threw up his hands in resignation. “And when do we stop?”

Mist walked up to Trace and leaned down to his level so they were seeing eye-to-eye, intimidating him a little bit. Very seriously, she said, “When we know your hidden potential. No sooner or later than that.”

Day 2

Trace grunted and sat up from his dingy mattress, covering his face with his hands to keep out the morning light in the room. Peeking between his fingers, he spotted the luggage bag he’d half-heartedly stuffed a week’s worth of clothes into. This is it, he thought sluggishly. This is my last chance to just say no and drink myself to death instead of getting mauled out in the woods.

After taking a minute to think about it, Trace got out of bed and zipped the bag closed.