The weather was overcast, the sky a moody blue. A few long, mournful cries of distant birds sounded from the depths of the Everfree Forest, but aside from those the air was calm and quiet. Two ponies, one of the earth, the other a unicorn, trotted side by side down a trail, overgrown with age.
Applejack cast a worried look at her friend. “Rarity, we don’t need to do this.”
“On the contrary; I believe we do.” The unicorn’s gaze was determined, but kind. “You’re my dearest friend, Applejack. What kind of pony would I be if I didn’t at least try helping you get over this ridiculous fear of yours? This tha… thala…” She stumbled on the unfamiliar term.
“Thalassophobia.” The word rolled off her tongue with practiced ease. “That’s what the doctors called it when Ma and Pa tried to help me with it. Means I’m afraid of deep water. Water I can’t see the bottom of.”
“I would have never guessed.” Rarity shook her head. “I never saw a hint of that when you, Pinkie, and I went on that horrid little misadventure a few years ago. Or when we paid our first visit to the hippogriffs.”
“Well, I was a mite more occupied with the thought of drownin’ with that second one. And as to the former? Well, I still can’t rightly remember all of it. Reckon I just blocked most of it out.”
Rarity looked down the trail, choked with weeds and brambles from years of abandonment. “And it all stems from this… this pond?”
Applejack nodded, mentally kicking herself for the hundredth time in the past few days that she’d let slip to Rarity the nature of her fear and the origin of it. That was the last time she was going to be so careless with the hard ciders.
They followed the trail in silence for a while longer and watched as the trees on either side of the path grew taller and more overgrown. The trunks were choked with vines, some old and brittle, some green and new. The trail bent beneath their hooves and guided them deeper and deeper into the untamed wood, farther from the safe boundaries of Sweet Apple Acres. An unseasonal mist appeared, shrouding the air, and the two mares shivered at a sudden drop in temperature.
“Weather’s gettin’ weird.” Applejack murmured.
“Indeed. It’s this forest. Everything about it is so… strange.”
Applejack saw the unicorn shiver again and saw an easy way out. “Maybe we should go back. Come back another day with better gear?” Rarity stopped in her tracks, and Applejack braced herself for yet another admonishment.
Instead, the unicorn pointed a hoof down the trail. “Is that it?”
Against her will, Applejack’s eyes followed the outstretched appendage and beheld the place from where all of her nightmares had sprung. “E-eeyup.” She stammered, her teeth suddenly on the verge of chattering, and not from the cold. “That’s it.”
Just ahead, shrouded in the mist, was a small clearing in the trees. And in the center of the clearing was a pond. Small. Insignificant. Barely fifty feet in diameter. The trees were set back a short distance all the way around the water, and the trail followed the circumference of the pond before doubling back to its starting point. The pond’s surface was freckled with lily pads and algae, the water black from the lack of ambient light… and the depth. The unknown depth.
It was just a pond, but it took all of Applejack’s inner strength to keep from running away screaming at the sight of it.
Rarity stepped in front of her friend with a genuine smile. “Are you alright, darling?”
Applejack forced herself to nod.
Rarity put a foreleg on Applejack’s shoulder and squeezed. “I only want to help you, Applejack. The way you talked about all of this the other day, about how this place made you feel… it hurt me. I can’t stand to see somepony I care about as much as I care for you be shackled to such a ludicrous fear. Goodness, it’s almost as bad as if you were to tell me you were afraid of apples!” She started to laugh, but the look of sheer terror on the earth pony’s face stifled it in her throat. “Please, darling. Please tell me what it is about this place that horrifies you so?”
Applejack took a long, deep, calming breath. She reached up, grabbed her hat, and placed it protectively over her heart. “I was just a filly. Really, it’s one of the first memories I have. I can’t have been older than two. This trail was a little better used back in those days. Mostly teenagers. They’d come out here to neck and that sort of thing. I remember Ma had one of her friends over from the next farm down the road, and she’d brought her own little filly. We hit it off like foals do. We were runnin’ and playin’ and carryin’ on. Somehow we found our way down the trail and all the way down here to the pond. I remember she wanted to go swimmin,’ but I didn’t know how yet. She said she’d show me and jumped right in. Started laughin’ and splashin.’ Made it all the way out to the center. I was just about to join her when she went under.”
Rarity’s hoof flew to her lips. “The poor dear! She drowned?”
“No.” Applejack’s eyes were glassed over with past horror, long buried images replaying like newsreels in her mind’s eye. “Somethin’ reached up and pulled her down.” She swallowed hard, suddenly very thirsty. “I didn’t see what it was. It must’ve been dark, helped it blend in with the water. It just reached up and pulled her down. Then, not a second later, she was up again. She hadn’t screamed the first time it had grabbed her, but she was sure screamin’ now. All she did was scream. She pounded at the water and paddled as hard as she could, but she just couldn’t get away! Whatever it was, it had too strong a hold on her. I remember she reached for me, and the water bulged behind her, and I saw… I saw…”
“What? What did you see?”
But the image wouldn’t come. It was still a blank in Applejack’s mind. “I saw somethin’ and then she was gone. She didn’t come back up.” The farmer was crying now. “And I ran. I ran straight home to Ma… but I didn’t tell her about the pond.” She looked at Rarity desperately. “I told her and her friend that the filly and I had been playing at the other side of the farm. I told ‘em that we’d been playing hide ‘n seek in the woods and I couldn’t find her. I lied to ‘em, because I knew that if my Mama went to that pond, then that thing… that thing would get her too!” Applejack collapsed into Rarity’s shoulder and wept hard.
Rarity held her close until the sobs became sniffles, then gently pushed her friend up straight and used her hat to wipe her eyes. “Applejack, I’m so sorry this all happened to you.” She smiled as reassuringly and gently as she could. “Nothing took your friend that day. She probably got a cramp and drowned. It happens.”
“But I…”
“Or maybe she caught her leg on some piece of debris just under the surface and tired herself out. The point is that you were very small and you imagined…”
Applejack shook her head rapidly. “No. I know what I saw. I saw…”
“You didn’t see anything. You told me that, just now.” Rarity put the hat back on the farmer’s head. “Because there was nothing there to see. Watch.”
And to Applejack’s terror, the unicorn started for the pond.
Applejack wracked her brain desperately for the missing piece of her memory, some clue she’d missed that would convince Rarity that she had truly seen what she thought she had seen. Nothing was there. Only one thought, one word, would come to mind; yellow.
Rarity was the pond’s edge now. She looked back and beckoned with a hoof. “Applejack, please. You’ll see it’s just a pond and you’ll feel so much better, I promise.”
Applejack’s hooves felt as rooted as one of her beloved trees. “If… if I come over there, will you come back?” She bit her lip to ward off the her teeth’s urge to chatter. “Can we go home?”
Rarity smiled widely and nodded. “Of course.”
Slowly, like her hooves were made of stone, Applejack started towards the water’s edge. She measured each breath, trying desperately not to hyperventilate as the dark water loomed before her. She felt as though she could fall into it even from a distance away, and then she would simply fall and fall into darkness… where something had been waiting all these years. She stopped a few feet behind Rarity and stood resolute. “I think this is far enough.”
“Alright.” Rarity sighed. “Then I suppose you’ll just have to watch me touch it.”
“…what?”
“I’m going to put my hoof in the water and prove to you that this is just a silly old pond. Nothing more, nothing less. Observe.” And before Applejack could voice her protest, she raised her hoof and brought it down on the glassy surface with splash. Ripples and waves spread from the point of impact, causing the pristine surface to shift and the pads and algae to bounce slightly.
Applejack’s breath caught in her throat as her eyes flew to every pulse of water, every slight rising in the surface. She watched, certain that the thing that had haunted her all this time was already on the way to finish the job. The simple, idiot word continued to bounce in her mind like some kind of mocking bird’s call; yellow, yellow, yellow!
Nothing.
The ripples faded, the waves subsided, and within seconds the pond’s surface was as pristine and dark as it had ever been.
Applejack began to breathe again. She relaxed and looked at Rarity, who was looking back at her with a smirk of satisfaction. She felt the faint trace of a smile begin to cross her lips.
“See, I told y…”
It moved fast. Faster than something so large should be able to move. For a moment, it seemed that the dark water had indeed come to life and was rising to strike back at the pony that had disturbed its peace. Then the enormous head, the size of a wagon, broke the surface. The thing’s beak, the same mottled black as the rest of the thing, split open, and Rarity’s pristine white coat was suddenly surrounded by a field of mottled pink. Applejack saw something slimy and writhing in the beak and realized it was the thing’s tongue. It seemed to beckon to her, but her gaze was drawn to the side of the thing’s head. Its slitted eyes opened wide… and they were yellow. As yellow as they'd been the first time she'd seen them.
And Applejack ran.
She didn’t look back when Rarity’s all too brief scream was cut even shorter. She didn’t look back at the splash that came as the thing retreated back into its watery lair. She didn’t slow down when brambles snatched at her coat and vines wrapped themselves about her legs. She didn’t stop crying until she reached the safety of the family barn. She stayed there, shivering and sobbing, until sunset.
Then she cleaned herself up, straightened her hat, and went inside to make dinner.
In the days that followed, she was as concerned as everypony else at Rarity’s mysterious disappearance. She swore up and down that she had no idea where the unicorn had gotten off to. She even led a few search parties through the woods on the farm’s border… being careful to steer them away from a certain overgrown trail.
It wasn’t lying if it was keeping those you loved safe.
Applejack kept her silence, and she kept away from any body of water she couldn’t see the bottom of. And in time, she would convince herself that she had no idea why she would sometimes wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Soon she hadn’t the slightest idea why the only thing she could remember from these nightmares was a kind of hellish yellow.
A yellow that lurked within the depths of a dark and still mirror.
A yellow that was incredibly patient, still growing…
…and terribly hungry.
