In Which Mermaids are Hunted
“Fluttershy.
“Fluttershy.”
“...”
“Fluttershy.”
“Mmmwha?”
“Wake up!”
Sudden, blinding cold. Wind whistled between her bones as the covers were whisked away. Fluttershy let out a gasp, a great crack of thunder shaking the floor. Outlined in the lightning forking down outside, streaming ragged and flashing through the open door, Applejack grinned.
“We’re goin’ mermaid hunting.”
Fluttershy whimpered. Applejack’s seven golden teeth glinted in the night. Somewhere, deep in the storm, a crow cackled.
*
Rain pounded down like the hoof of Celestia as Fluttershy trudged through the muck. Her mane plastered wetly across her face, mercifully stuck against the raging wind. Her hooves were barely hers, so deadened were they, as she dragged the awful weight of the boat along the shore. Each step was a titanic effort, her hooves sinking further and further into the ground with every pace, rain lashing backways and sideways and everywhichways as she struggled to push against the very air itself.
“Aye, just over there.” Applejack stood, a shadow cut against the sky, resplendent, upon a rock. Her one good eye burned in agony of passion, gazing out across the broiling ocean with a fury matched only by that of the sea. Fluttershy just wished she’d help with the boat.
As the lightning split the clouds behind her, Applejack hopped down. Her terrible stare turned upon the craft, and a smile spread across her face.
“Get the shovels.”
“Huh?”
Applejack spun to face her, all the power of the vast and seething depths blazing in her soul as the wind tore the words from her throat. “The shovels, Fluttershy! Get the shovels!”
Fluttershy hurried to get the shovels.
*
Waves rolled under them unknowably, black and treacherous as midnight. Down a thousand fathoms deep stretched the ocean, and their little boat clung to the top of it like a tick. Clouds reeled in fantastic whorls, incomprehensibly huge, as the tiny craft rode wave after wave, climbing those inky mountains so slowly, so frightfully slowly, before plunging down drops fourteen lighthouses tall into the creases on the face of the deep.
“Row!” cried its captain, her voice as violent and bruised as the waves. “Row, damn you!” Fluttershy, damn her, pulled on the oars with all that she had, digging the wood into the void and yanking upon its stony depths. Rain pelted the sea, the boat, the ponies, utterly forgotten amidst the ancient sworls that reared up around them.
Applejack leaned out over the prow, hoof sheltering her eye, as she scanned the horizon for signs. A wave rose up before them, the largest yet, and she barely moved an inch as they scaled its great swell, gazing into that wall of water with an intensity the tide could not match.
Climbing, climbing, almost vertical, Fluttershy pulling desperately against the oars as they raced for the precipice, the sky opening out before them in its infinite expanse. For a moment, all was visible: a million miles of roaring waves, each great monster to the eye but a pinprick, falling away from them all the way to forever. They hung there, the universe still and silent, for an instant, a century, a millennium, before the ocean reasserted its awesome power, and they plunged into the vast abyss.
Like a raindrop from the heavens they sped down the cliff, skipping over the furious surface, a stone on a lake. Faster, faster, until suddenly—
“There!” roared Applejack, quite as loud as any breaker, and Fluttershy looked up to see her pointing at something, nothing, a speck in the distance. “Dead ahead! Stay yer course!”
Fluttershy dug into the sea once again, as if she had any control over their path at all, and every muscle she had strained against it as they kept surging forward. The shovels rattled ominously along the floor.
*
“We’re here,” announced Applejack, with no small glee. Fluttershy looked around. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost an oar, the pole spinning off into infinity like a twig, and had been switching from one side to the other ever since.
“Where,” panted Fluttershy, her first words since shore, “on earth is here?”
Applejack grinned. “Does this look like earth to you, missy?” Indeed, everywhere she looked, the hills were made of water. “This is the sea. And here...here be mermaids.”
The boat lifted on a swell, dipping and diving as the tremendous void of the ocean passed beneath it.
“M-mermaids?” asked Fluttershy.
“Aye,” said Applejack grimly. “Mermaids.”
Something bumped against the boat.
Teeth gleaming, mane wild, eyepatch pulled tight around her head, Applejack smiled. “Right on time.” She stooped, tossing a shovel to Fluttershy. Fluttershy failed to catch it. By the time she’d wobbled to her hooves, shovel clamped tight in her mouth, Applejack was leaning over the prow again, eyes a-searching.
The wind howled. The rain lashed. The sea thundered. Moments passed. Then—
“Gotcher!” Applejack lunged. Her shovel swung for the ocean. There was a very definite clang as it connected with something, and the mare gave a triumphant whoop. “Little devils!”
Trembling, though she knew not what with, Fluttershy peered over the edge of the boat. The shovel weighed heavy in her mouth, a thousand times heavier than it had been on shore. She scanned the billowing fabric of the ocean, unsure of what, exactly, she was looking for. Just as the weight of the shovel tugged at her neck, and she was sure any moment she would fall from her perch into the raw oblivion below, there was a movement. A flash of colour in the darkness. A point against eternity. There, and then gone.
“Take that, ye wee bastard!” came the cry from behind, followed by a dull bong, as Applejack hit another of the things in the water.
Fluttershy searched the rolling, twisting, heaving curtain. There! Another flash, red against the black, surfacing for a moment, and gone. Fluttershy was sure it had been a face. Immediately after, a flicker of scales broke the surface. “Merponies,” she breathed around the shovel. Behind, Applejack jabbed out again.
The sea rose and fell like a creature living, like a country, like a dynasty. Fluttershy watched carefully for any colour, any faces, any scales, anything that broke the vast undulation of the deep. Her bones ached. Her teeth hurt. The air was so full of pressure she worried her ears might implode. Yet still, she searched.
In an instant, a face broke the water. Yellow. Smiling. “Heyhowarey—”
Fluttershy squealed, and brought the shovel down hard upon its head. A good, solid whack. Smack! the creature disappeared below the surface. Fluttershy may have screamed, but if she did, it was lost among the rumblings.
“Aye, there ye go!” Applejack laughed, swinging wildly at the waves beneath. After a moment, she tilted back and turned to Fluttershy. “Well don’t just sit there. There be plenty o’ mermaids abound!”
Feeling vaguely sick, Fluttershy looked back into the blackness. She stared long and hard at that fathomless expanse, that ill-tempered mistress called sea, and in the boat all else seemed to fade away. Her place seemed set, fixed, formless. Her destiny wild and laid out. She saw a thousand years and a thousand more pass by like minnows in those waves, eternity holding out its hoof to be taken. Fluttershy didn’t know if she had accepted.
Her strokes were timid and fierce, vicious and shy, aimless and calculated. She beat at the water with a desperate energy, again and again and again until her jaws could barely hold the shovel any more.
In all, she hit two more merponies that night.
*
Consciousness ebbed in and out distrustfully. Applejack sat opposite, dragging back against the waves. Fluttershy thought for a moment she saw a profound cliff falling away behind her, as if they were cresting a particularly large colossus, but that couldn’t be right, because the ride felt so very gentle. Closing her eyes again, Fluttershy didn’t even notice that they had somewhere lost the other oar, and Applejack, strange and wild as the sea, was pulling on their two shovels to row.
*
Shore beckoned. Fluttershy limped out the boat only vaguely, and was glad beyond words to feel firm earth underhoof. They left the dinghy on shore, as the tide was pulling away, and Fluttershy followed, every joint and limb as numb as the depths, as Applejack led the way back up to the lighthouse. As soon as it opened, Fluttershy was upon her sheet in an instant. Miraculously, it was still dark.
She heard the wide click of the door being locked, and Applejack’s groan as she settled down across from her. Wind hissed at the stonework.
“Applejack,” she said softly, half-hoping the mare wouldn’t hear, “why did we do that, tonight?”
“Well,” Applejack replied, her voice as full of wisdom as the sea, “it’ll help the redcurrents, see?”
Fluttershy stared, seeing nothing before her but the sheer, undefined blank at her nose. “Okay,” she whispered, and drifted off to sleep.
“Aye,” said Applejack, settling her hooves comfortably behind her head. “We’ll have some nice juicy berries come spring.”
In Which Hearths are Warmed
“We are ruined.”
“A-applejack?”
The mare spun, her eye wild as her mane. “All is lost. Why this betrayal, Fluttershy? Why now?”
“Ah...I...” Fluttershy backed away. “I have no idea what you’re talking about?”
“They say Celestia Herself was betrayed with a kiss. In ignorance the foal does curse its mother. We are doomed! Doomed, I say!”
Wind howled against the wall outside, stabbing with icy tendrils at every point of entry, every hole and crevice. Wood creaked. Windows rattled. Applejack drew herself into the fullness of her height, and for the first time in all the months of their acquaintance, Fluttershy saw something approaching fear shining in her gaze. Her voice was raw, furious, hard-edged with desperation. “Don’t ye see? The Winter Queen approaches!”
Fluttershy stared at her. “Applejack,” she said, “I only put up tinsel.”
*
“All right,” said she, “This is where we are.”
The map spread out before them was far older than either pony. Older than the lighthouse itself, thought Fluttershy—older than the rocks it sat on, even. The parchment was yellowed, and threadbare, and spotted here and there with dark and splotchy stains she hoped were ink. The artist’s name was long since lost to one such blot, the date beside it strange and vague: ’93—which 93 was that? Last decade past? One hundred years before that? Centuries further still? Perhaps it was the ’93 of a different time entirely; an age of dark and chaos, where spirits ruled the land as well as sea. Fluttershy knew little of the history of this place—except that however many years had broken on its shore, the lighthouse-keeper’s eye had seen them all.
“Here,” said Applejack, and placed upon the parchment a cork and candle-stub. “This is us.”
“Which am I?”
Applejack stared at her as though it should be obvious. “I chose the wax to match your colour.”
“Oh.”
“This is us,” repeated Applejack. “This is where we be.” She gestured helpfully at the illustration. “This is the lighthouse.”
There came no argument. Applejack seemed satisfied. “There are two entrances. See here.”
“But...”
“Barricading the door alone is not like to be enough. This devil needs not wings to fly, as cold and quick as burns the wind. Stay vigilant: we must not trust the sky.”
Fluttershy swallowed, and pressed her wings more tightly to her sides.
“She is coming for us now, you made sure enough of that. We cannot run; she’s far too fast for us. We can only stand, and fight, and hope to hold her back till fairer seasons pass.”
“Applejack—” Fluttershy tried.
“We have not long. We must prepare. Fluttershy, I shall need my shovel.”
“Applejack—”
“What is it, mare?”
Fluttershy looked at her hooves, then at the parchment, then at the defences Applejack had laid out atop her map in bright and jagged detail; in old ink pots and rusted nails. Her voice was small against the raging night. “Um, what actually is this winter queen?”
“What is she?” Applejack smiled. A grim, bloody thing that barely stretched the corners of her mouth, and didn’t touch her eye at all. “She is the snow. She is the demon horned of cold and chill, come down from Frozen North. She is the ice that steals into your bones at night and makes your grandmare shiver in her long-forgotten grave. She is the frost you do not notice until it’s far too late, until your fur turns blue and your legs give out from under you, until your very soul is frozen over and your insides scrape with ice. She is all that, and the terror deep below the surface, too. Aye, and she will be here soon. Mark me well: as the snowdrops die, and the life does wither, so she rises. When the icicles grow tall as knives above the door, she does approach. When the worms deep in the soil lie dead and buried, and you dare not close your eyes for fear of freezing shut—hark! for she will be upon ye. You see what you have summoned?”
“Um...”
“I suggest you fetch my shovel.”
Fluttershy ran to do just that.
*
The ground was hard and unforgiving, but it was not graves that need be dug. Again and yet again Fluttershy had asked what they were doing, why in this dread and raging black, where torches did not even get a chance to sputter before the wind tore them to shreds, they had to stand outside and carve chunks out of the ground with a shovel so sharp with frost she felt it in her skull, but Applejack had given her no answer but a laugh. As she struggled to stick the blade into the rock, she began to have an inkling as to how Applejack had come by her seven golden teeth.
*
“That’s right,” shouted Applejack, around a mouth full of nails, “harder!”
Fluttershy braced herself against the wall and beat out all the worry in her heart into the wood, chest heaving, muscles straining, striving to recapture that wild energy she’d worked upon the mermaids.
“Harder!” yelled Applejack, and with a mighty swing the ceiling door was sealed, and the fifteen planks across it hammered tight.
*
Fluttershy was not sure what freak occurrence, what twist of nature, had caused the ocean here to freeze in place, but as she wandered through the vast graveyard of waves, she was glad of it. The monsters here that had been frozen would make short work, she had no doubt, of their small boat. Spooky as it was to walk among these giants, all this raw power stopped suddenly in its tracks, she fancied it was kinder than that journey would have been.
Applejack strode far ahead, her mane and tail whipping in the wind, an orange shape upon the blistering white that reared up all around them. Air moved strangely here, whistling through the cresting, breaking, broken waves like song, every now and then a ragged harmony. Only other giants of the deep bore hope of understanding such a chorus, surely, yet all the same, Fluttershy could swear it sounded sometimes like there were other ponies out here, whispering of secrets gone unburied.
The cave was hid so subtly in the rock that, had not Applejack been there to point it out, Fluttershy never would have found it. Inside, the wind could hardly gnaw at them the same, but the sounds it made grew all the stranger, echoing about the rock in low and haunted groanings. The stone that served as shore in here was near as cold and hard as ice, and Fluttershy took little comfort from it. At the back the cave expanded further, and the orange shape in front disappeared around a fold of rock. She followed after quickly; loathe indeed to consider how far these caves extended, how easily she might die down here alone, how long this granite throat had been here, howling.
A shout ahead told her they had found what they were come for. She swallowed. Applejack had told her she would be surprised: Fluttershy prepared to be blown away.
The whalesong in the chamber echoed like a chuckle. Applejack grinned, and passed her over a dull red box marked years ago with one word bold:
D Y N A M I T E
*
They were prepared. Prepared as they could be, in any case—for what preparations could be truly made against a force of nature? What walls could stop a demon? Fluttershy knew not, but suspected she would find out soon.
“This,” she whispered, pressed in her position—as bait, in the centre of the room—“is not how I expected to be spending Hearth’s Warming Eve.”
“Aye. Now you see why we do not keep it here. We do not celebrate, and never decorate.”
“I just thought it would brighten the place up.”
“And how merry do you feel right now?” Applejack bared her teeth in something that might have been a smile. Fluttershy winced.
“Sorry.”
“Let this be a lesson to ye. Some trifles here do not bear trifling with. Some things hold greater purpose, and more enchantment, than they seem.”
Fluttershy wanted to ask her what she meant by that, and why Hearth’s Warming decorations, of all things, why tinsel, should be imbued with so much power—and why, for that, it had been so easy then to find—but before another word could leave her throat, Applejack’s ears pricked up. She put a hoof to her lips, very slowly, and with great deliberation took her shovel in her teeth, raising it to pony height in her position, crouched behind the door. Fluttershy felt a chill upon her spine, like icy tendrils descending from on high, like the blizzard outside blowing deep within her flesh.
Moments passed, every one of them too long and filled with thud-thud-thud and rushing, of blood beneath her skin. Then—
Bang!
Fluttershy jumped, nearly taking off in fright, as something hit against the trapdoor above.
Bang!
It came again. For a few, horrible heartbeats, Fluttershy wondered if she’d really put all she could into nailing closed the door.
A third bang! and then a muffled sound—a voice, akin, perhaps, to the cracking of ice, perhaps the wind among the bones of waves—she could not tell. She could only imagine, and of all things, that was worst.
No more banging came from the roof. Fluttershy looked over, and Applejack nodded. All part of the plan. The door had held: the winter demon would be forced to go by land.
Hours passed, so long that Fluttershy was sure the creature must have gone—or maybe only seconds, it was hard to tell—before the voice came again, from outside. Fluttershy sent a prayer of thanks to the heavens that whatever winter tongue the ice queen spoke, she could not understand it.
“Hold,” whispered Applejack, quiet as the grave. “Steady now.” For long moments, all there was was wind, battering against the tower. “I think—”
A crack like thunder echoed off the rocks, and though she could not tell it, Fluttershy was sure that the devil outside was cursing. All that digging had been worth it—the thing had stepped on dynamite they’d buried out there. She hoped against hope that was enough to kill it. Or send it home, at least. Drive it off till summertime, when mainland supplies would be cheap and plentiful, and they could buy all the dynamite a demon might deserve.
Crack!
Crack!
More dynamite. More explosions. She counted it down. They’d buried nineteen sticks among the rocks: that meant sixteen left. Sixteen tries to kill a demon, else the two of them were dead. If mining bombs could not delay it, she had her doubts about their one remaining shovel.
Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!
“Ow—”
Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!
“Aw, come o—”
Crack! Crack! Crack!
“Not. Cool—”
Crack! Crack!
“Swear to Celestia—”
Crack!
Silence. There had been a voice out there. Fluttershy wondered vaguely if the demon could talk in pony, or if she were simply going mad.
Silence.
Awful, deafening silence.
Applejack stood. “Sounds like that got ’er. Stay here.” The door swung open, shut, and Applejack was vanished.
Wind echoed within and without. Fluttershy could feel the thrum of heartbeat in her throat. The lighthouse yawned around her, vast, and empty, too big to take in all at once; and she knew, she knew that the moment she turned away the ice queen would come crashing through the window, or the door, or the ceiling, and she couldn’t see it all at once, but she knew she had to try—
A short, sharp cry cut through the gale. Applejack. She knew the shout too well to doubt it. Something sounded after it; that same, muffled, wintry voice. What was it doing? Taunting Applejack? Taunting her? Fluttershy pressed her face against the window, but outside was only white. The blizzard was blowing fierce, and nothing could be made from anything.
Silence.
The cold of glass upon her cheek settled in her heart. The demon was out there—so was Applejack. It wasn’t dead—she might be. One pony, alone, in the snow, against a creature of frost itself—and it was all Fluttershy’s fault. If she had not done what she had done, no matter how small, no matter how insignificant, the winter beast would not be here. Applejack would not be in danger. Applejack would not be— She refused to let herself imagine it. She gulped. Stepped up to the door.
“I’m coming, Applejack,” she said, so quietly even she did not hear it, and strode into the blizzard.
*
White, white all around, endless white. Snow in her mane, snow in her mouth, snow in her eyes. Cold that crept into her bones...
“Applejack!” she called into the vast expanse. “Applejack!”
No orange shape against the snow; she could not even see the lighthouse. She knew which way the ground was only because her hooves were planted firmly on it—she was not a strong enough flier for weather like this. Nopony was.
“Applejack!” she called again, but wind whipped the word from her throat before she finished saying it. The white was frozen wet into her fur, soaking down her legs, her tail and mane were heavy, she blinked, and tried not to blink again, remembering what Applejack had said about eyes and freezing darkness.
“A—”
A dark form in the sky. A blur, a silhouette unnatural, a creature not with wings but twisted, deadly horns, moving slowly into focus—not slowly, quick! quick as anything she’d ever seen! She had not time to think it was impossible, that nopony could survive out here, that surely not even demons could fly in weather so violent and wild, before hooves clamped about her stomach, and she was lifted in the air.
Fluttershy closed her eyes, and prepared to meet her maker.
*
“What?”
Fluttershy stared. Then stared some more, because she knew her eyes must be deceiving her. Her eyes, her ears, her every sense, in fact. She should not be sitting where she was, she should not be alive, and warm, and most of all, she should not, under any circumstances, be sitting there alive and warm and holding a cup of piping-fresh hot chocolate between her hooves.
Applejack had the grace to look abashed. “Sorry.”
“I’ll say,” said the winter queen, devil horned of ice and snow, demon of the Frozen North. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m...fine...” Fluttershy said faintly. “I...I just...what?”
“She always does this,” said the demon, whose air of terror had mostly vanished when she’d fluffed out her chest fur to dry herself by the new-built fire.
“I do not.”
“Uh, yeah, you do.” The demon stabbed one blue hoof straight at Applejack. “You are officially the worst pony in Equestria to deliver presents to. Everycreature hates coming here. I’m only here cause I’m the only flier good enough to get around your traps.” She looked thoughtful. “Well, that, and I really owed Spitfire a favour.”
“You don’t have to come,” the lighthouse-keeper grumbled.
“I do, actually. It’s kind of my job.” The demon frowned again at Fluttershy. “Are you sure you’re...”
“I’m fine.” She was fine. Yes, absolutely fine. Just sitting here chatting with a monster, who had not killed her, and had brought her back to the lighthouse, and had made her a nice hot cup of... “So you’re really not a demon?” She eyed the creature sitting there before her, all rainbow mane and cocky grin and strange blue horns.
“Nope.” The demon-who-was-not-a-demon tapped her antlers with a smile. “Reindeer. Name’s Rainbow Dash.”
“And you’re not from the Frozen North?”
“Well...North. It’s not as cold as all that, though.”
“...Okay.” Fluttershy hoped she didn’t sound quite as distant as she felt.
“You know,” Rainbow Dash turned to Applejack, “if we still did the whole naughty-nice list thing, my job would be so much easier, you don’t even know. I guarantee you’d be getting coal.”
Applejack drew herself up. “I’d rather have nothing, if it please your master all the same.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever, you know how she gets. Look, I’m on a schedule here, I’ve really gotta fly.” She turned to Fluttershy again. “Are you sure—”
“Yes.”
“Alright then.” Rainbow Dash stretched her legs, pranced experimentally, and picked up her harness from the fireside. “Where...ah, here we go.” From one compartment she pulled two bright packages, tied each with ribbons yellow and orange, that absolutely should not have fit in there. “Here.” She tossed one out to Applejack, who caught it reflexively, and didn’t seem impressed that she had. “And for you.” She placed the other carefully in Fluttershy’s hooves.
“Well, that’s me.” Rainbow Dash slipped into the harness with practised ease, and pulled her goggles down to peer through at them. She stuck out her tongue. “Aww, I just remembered where I’m going next. The Storm King’s palace is so far away. I guess at least the worst part’s over.”
Pausing at the door, she flashed the two of them a grin. “Oh, Happy Hearth’s Warming, by the way.”
The door opened, closed. From outside there came a final crack!, a “Sonuva—”, and she was gone.
*
Her sheet was cold, but not as cold as usual, thanks to the chocolate in her belly and the fire burning still and the cosy woollen jumper that Rainbow Dash had given her. She glanced over at Applejack, snoring loudly by the door. The mare had taken one look at the postcard-sized package she’d been given, and tossed it in a trunk upstairs. “No need for trinkets out here,” she’d snorted, and kicked the box away. Fluttershy hadn’t missed the dozen or so identical presents that filled the thing.
What kept her up, however, was not the wind, or fire, or winter visitation—no, it was the lumpy, badly-wrapped package that Applejack had pushed into her hooves ten minutes past without a word. Covered in newspaper as ancient as the mare herself, tied with twine hoofmade from fish intestines, it lay heavy on her lap. Big, and flat, and tall, and utterly unexpected. She gazed long at it before she opened it, laying the twine carefully to one side and tearing the top as delicately as she could manage. She pulled it out, and smiled. The thing, for whatever reason, felt much warmer than it should have, and much more gentle, too. She wrapped her legs around it, and drifted off to sleep.
The silver gleam of a brand new shovel winked between her hooves.
