They must have come earlier in the night, when Luna's moon was full and the insects had become quiet. Trampled flowers and nibbled garden plants marked the trail leading away from Sarsaparilla Rind's home, and now she stood, bathed in the Princess' moonlight, facing the Whitetail Wood. The birds had gone silent, the wind made only the barest of breezes that shuffled the green leaves of the beech trees several yards from the young mother's home. The soft pitter-patter of tears at Rind's forehooves and the whispering air were the only sounds that reached her ears. Her grandmother Truffle Root had told tales of the Gentle Folk by a warm hearth, a saucer of tea and the flickering shadows her only props. They were stories with many lessons and warnings; stories to frighten would-be troublemakers and rough-housers. In a family of six, Sarsaparilla would snuggle close to her brothers and listen to Grandma Root with rapt attention.
"...and the Gentle Folk will take for themselves what is yours, and leave you with naught but anger and woe," she would say as she rocked back and forth, back and forth, sipping her tea gently. "Be always an honest pony, do good by your kin, and take heed of the Gentle Folk's words: 'On feet, or hooves, or wings, or what-have-you, the Deep Wood is ours, and within you shall speak true.' This is why the forest is sacred, little ones. It is where we have spoken oaths and made promises for eons, before even the pony sisters. The Gentle Folk listen, and they listen well. They keep us true and hold us to our word. Never go back on a word once given." When her stories of faeries were finished, Father would bring her to her bed to rest and weep through the night to himself, praying to the pony sisters to heal his mother's sick mind. Above his quiet cries were the ever-present groans of anguish from Grandma Root, just loud enough for Sarsaparilla Rind to hear from the room over.
Grandma Root never did recover her sanity, and within the year she would pass away into the Next Place to dance among the flowers of indescribable colors in a never-ending field of sunshine. That was what Rind's father told her. Eventually, the children would become adults and strike out on their own, gaining employment or starting business themselves. Rind was one such child that began a life as a simple herbalist far from home, honest and true. The first few years were easy, but a nice stallion once visited Rind from his adventures on the wild roads of Equestria. He regaled her with fantastic ventures and wooed her with exotic songs she had never heard before. She bed him that night and woke to find herself again alone with her plants. She shed tears the first two days, but found herself again in her work. Rind focused on breeding her plants and mixing poultices, offering herbal remedies to travelers and regulars from beyond the hills.
Three months afterwards, she felt it within: a dread pit and a new, shocking weight. She had delivered her fair share of foals with mothers seeking herbal relaxants. Sarsaparilla Rind was with foal, impregnated by a stranger whose name she never learned. In the following months her movements slowed, her teats swelled with milk, and her work became difficult. Some days she did not have the energy to do much but rest and think. She thought of the stallion mostly, and that always came back around to what her foal would look like. She would shake her head, as if doing so could rid her of the reality of being a mother. Sometimes she would attempt to recall the stallion's name, but again all that would do is lead her to try naming her unborn foal. She wasn't ready for a foal, she wasn't ready to be a mother, and–seven months later, when the foal came early–she still wasn't ready.
He was a small thing, weak, with Sarsaparilla's vibrant green mane and tail and his father's dark coat. His eyes sparkled like pools of the clearest lake water, and at times Rind would spend hours looking into them with her own deep browns. She had emptied out a flower bed and stuffed it with blankets, placing him within it like her own precious little flower. Taking care of the little one was work. Hard work. Her business suffered as she tended to his every need; his wailing, his hunger, his fits that had no rhyme or reason. Rind found it harder and harder to nurture her plants, and as winter approached she was becoming desperate.
She found her old faith again, praying at the treeline even as her son bawled in his flower bed, intent on bringing fortune to the both of them. Every night she held her front hooves together, closed her eyes, sat in the frost and begged for help. She made all manner of promises and she swore upon all of her family, but no help came. For another month she continued her nightly vigil until, one day, her plants began to push away the snow. They grew strong and green, and her happiness returned. Customers came again, so many that she had to move her tiny son back into her room so that ponies could haggle and talk herbs. As the snow melted and the sun remained in the sky for longer periods, Rind's plants became supernaturally verdurous. The Spring was kind to her and her son, until now.
Now, her sweet little foal was taken, spirited away into the woods by some unseen thief. The stories of Grandma Root flowered in her imagination, filling the pockets of what would normally be reason. What did any of this have to do with reason, though? Nopony lived inside the Whitetail, Diamond Dogs never roamed this far, and the tracks were peculiar to say the least. Little holes in some places punching through the muddied earth, and wide swathes made by some serpent in others. Reason had no place any longer, and where logic failed did the fantastic begin. Striding through the warm night air, Sarsaparilla Rind struck out into the uninhabited wood to retrieve her son, no matter what the cost.
The darkness wasn't nearly as oppressive as she would have expected. Luna's full moon loomed overhead, bathing much of the beech trees in stark shadow and light, their dull gray bark accentuated by the lunar rays. Sarsaparilla Rind's ears twitched to every nocturnal flutter and call, her eyes and head moving constantly to watch for threats. The tracks she followed would vary from gouges to pricks to stamped earth, yet they constantly led in the same direction, with no other tracks coming near them. Grandma Root's tales came back to the forefront of her mind with a vengeance, causing her frogs to prickle and sweat to bead down her neck.
"They have no shape, the Gentle Folk, they take what they please. Be it luck or life or limb or a body that puts them at ease."
Rind stepped quicker now, moving farther into the Wood while keeping the kidnapper's tracks in the corner of her eye. Deeper and deeper into the clicking, hooting night did she rush, past trees that looked the same as the others and rocks that had no definite features. Faster and farther did she go, until the clicking became silence and the hooting became quiet, and even the warm wind did not shake the branches nor tickle her mane. Only her hooves falling to the dirt made any noise, but then it was muffled; like hearing a knock from behind a wall of water. She looked down between her legs and noted that the trail she had been following was ended.
Two deep holes in the earth, with sprinkles of mud and tattered leaves around them, caused her to look up at the surrounding muted trees with their peeling bark. Nothing but darkness, shafts of moonlight, and trees. Around she spun, hoping to regain the trail somehow, even going as far as examining the bark for claws or blood. Anything. With a desperate scream, she dropped to her belly and began sobbing. She wished for her son, her sweet baby boy. She hadn't meant to...
Then it came. An idea. A remembrance. Something her grandmother, losing her grip on reality, once said.
"To you the Gentle Folk will never reveal, except–of course–for a fool with a deal."
Standing up, and with bravado in her voice, Sarsaparilla Rind shouted into the trees and the white night, "I want to make a deal!" It shouldn't have been possible, but the silence grew thicker; syrupy. Rind became aware of her own heartbeat, of the blood rushing through her veins and the roar of sweat sliding down her barrel. The shafts of moonlight provided by Luna's moon thinned one by one in a display of eldritch impossibility. Soon, there was only darkness, and not even the gray of the beech trees shone through. Rind stood motionless, trying vainly to hear anything outside of her own bodily functions. Only the rush of fluid and the drum-beat of life came to her ears, though she had the thought that the sounds were simply pulsing through her body.
The cry of a foal broke that thought. Rind spun around, throwing her head to and fro in an effort to find her wailing son. "Give him back!" she screamed. "You have no right to take him! None! Give him back!" The cries stopped, and she heard only herself again. A creaking replaced this only a few seconds after, though she could not place its location; it came from everywhere.
"And what right have you?" asked a voice of snapping twigs and peeling bark. It wasn't a sound, but feelings mixed to evoke one. It had no age or gender, no possible identifier except for the emotions accompanied with it. "He is ours," added crumbling leaves and wilting grass, "'twas you that relinquished the child to us."
"I did no such thing!" Rind spun around in a panic, trying and failing to find her son as her mane became disarrayed. "I would never give up my son! Never!"
"What name has he?" Broken stone and cracked shoal shook Sarsaparilla. She was silent, unwilling to answer the heavy empathic voice in her head. "What name has he?" parroted snapping twigs. Crumbling leaves chimed in as well, demanding to know her son's name. They repeated the question with no mercy, a constant maelstrom of shouting emotions whipping around in Rind's head. She was shaking, trying to hold back tears and force the voices out, but they continued their assault without reprieve.
"HE HAS NONE!" The voices stopped.
"How can you claim what has no identity, no tie to you? Why do you only come to his aid now that he is ours?" Broken stone had taken control of the conversation, edging the others out of her mind, though she could still feel the jeering at the edges of her awareness. Again the question came from broken stone and cracked shoal, and again she shivered from it.
"I am his mother," she replied with resolute force. "I am his guardian and protector."
The voices paused to consider this, it seemed, until crumbling leaves and wilting grass broke the blissful silence. "What guardian be you that wishes her child die?"
Sarsaparilla took a step back, her ears flat against her head and eyes wide. "W- what?"
"We heard your prayers long before you sat at the edge of our Wood and begged. The leaves are our ears, and so are the feathers of the birds and the worms of the earth. Our fingers are the roots and the vines and the green things that crawl and cling. We hear all, and consider all. Your wish was not pertinent to our interests. Not until you came to the edge of the wood and left your freezing foal within your wood-home. You claimed you would relinquish anything to us." Sarsaparilla's mouth opened, her pupils dilated and her ears pinned back tight against her scalp. Hot tears landed with resounding crashes at her front hooves as she sat in the dirt. The bodiless voices were quiet as she grieved with regret.
"I never meant to treat him like that... He was just so much trouble. Nothing went right after I had him, nothing made sense. I wanted life to go back to the way it was."
"So you hid your babe deep inside your home, where the many caring ones of your kind could not see him? Assuredly you are an anomaly amongst your people; they have compassion." Crumbling leaves and wilting grass crushed Sarsaparilla with a few scant words, delivered through the darkness into her mind. "Again, what mother be you?"
The mare shook as she stared down at her hooves, though she could not see them in the consuming pitch of sepulchral darkness. She opened her mouth and wheezed, her throat sore from the wailing she had done. "I..." she croaked out. "I am his mother..." Raising her head, she stared deep into the swirling green eyes that loomed above her, a few inches from her face. Two white pupils glowed with anticipation, and Rind felt her hackles rising. This was a predatory gleam: eager and hungry. "I offer you a deal."
At the mention of the word "deal", the pupils shrunk and the eyes came closer. "What could you possibly offer us in exchange for your son? You have nothing we want, and you have not the strength to ask what we desire." The voice was snapping twigs and peeling bark. "You will not have your son back. Leave our Wood." A gust hit Sarsaparilla, but she stood firm, unmoved by the phantom wind. The glowing eyes widened slightly.
"An exchange," Rind whispered.
Broken stone and cracked shoal let out an avalanche of a chuckle. "The depths of your depravity know no bounds, mare. Do as we say and leave at onc–"
"Take me and leave him."
Now two more pairs of eyes–one pair a sickly yellow and the other a subdued gray–appeared beside the verdant orbs. They came closer as one, and the sound of creaking wood and grinding stone followed. The emotion was powerful, nearly overwhelming. The feeling was new and potent: rushing river and torrential downpour. "You give yourself for a child whom you have given no name? A child whom you left to freeze and bawl? Why?" A trio of crystal blue eyes towered over the rest, pupils blacker than night and deeper than the abyss.
Sarsaparilla's legs shook, her ears twitched uncontrollably, and her teeth began to chatter. Swallowing the lump in her throat and squeezing her eyes shut, she said: "He is my son." The silence returned, and when Sarsaparilla opened her eyes, only the three orbs of pulsing blue remained. A rush of wind and a whip-crack of powerful sound forced her gaze skyward, and she saw a massive winged creature rising out over the trees. The trees! The moon had returned to bathe the trees in its milky light, and Sarsaparilla swung her body to chase after the thing in the sky. She stumbled on nothing and fell to the ground, landing in a shallow pool. As she watched the bird-thing move away, she saw small floating particles–almost like leaves–drifting off of it.
Staring into the sky, Sarsaparilla felt the small puddle of water begin to expand and deepen. She couldn't move her legs, but she could still swing her neck. Thrashing about, she finally managed to look behind her into the glowing azure eyes of rushing river and torrential downpour. Her mind scrambled to make sense of the impossible horror before her, she opened her mouth to let out a scream, then disappeared underneath a solid floor of water as she fought for her life. Three ghostly eyes watched the mare–once a tormentor, now a mother–struggle between screaming in horror and keeping the freezing, muddied water out of her lungs.
The mare slowly drowned under nature's power, crushed beneath the water and the haunting, alien gaze of the Fae.
Far above the shrouded Whitetail, a horror of splintered wood and autumn leaves soared. In its harsh claws slept a foal with a coat dark like an oak and a mane and tail bright like the new spring leaves. His eyes fluttered open for the briefest of seconds, and two eyes of the purest blue made themselves seen before he fell back into the unknowing bliss of sleep.
Author's Note
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The number of mothers that met their fate when they did as the chapter told.
(Hint: To find the cipher, "I was killed by my dearest friend, and in the month just passed.")
