Chapters ....A proper story is supposed to start at the beginning.... I'm afraid this one's not so simple...
Taking Off, Coming Home.
I've never been one for jumping into things without some background knowledge, but in this case, it might be better if you didn't know the whole story from the beginning. I wish didn't. But wishing isn't going to do us any good now, so let's see here... Suffice to say, this particular story is about a Filly. One whose whole world has been twisted up and shattered apart right before her eyes. But see, I'm already getting ahead of myself. So... where to start... I guess it only makes sense to start off where all stories ultimately have to begin.
She wakes up. She stands up and clears her head; shakes the dust from her mane and looks around. Its not much to look at though: the walls are still there, all four right where they should be, the floor too, with her mattress in the corner and nothing but clutter from there to the door. But the dust; its sitting thick on everything, and one look upward tells her why. No ceiling, not anymore. Whatever happened last night ground the wood to powder, yet left rest of her little shack intact.
She makes her way to the door, and she does so quickly. Something just struck her mind, something far more important than a missing roof. She left a friend out there the night before, and she'd never forgive herself if any harm had come to her. She reaches the door and pushes it open in a hurry, she can't waste a single second now that she's remember her best friend in the world might be in danger. She steps out the door... And falls to her doom...
...Sorry, just seeing if you were still listening. Of course that's not what happened, you know that as well as I do. No, she didn't die, but it was a close thing. She steps out the door and right off the edge of the world. The crevice goes down further than she can see, pitch black nothingness awaiting her if she should lose her grip on the edge of what was once her front steps. The Filly hangs there for a moment, then, slowly, begins to pull herself back up. Once she's on four legs again, she looks back at the newly-formed gorge in her front yard. It stretches on for what must be miles, but it's only about a meter wide.
She shakes off the shock of what almost happened, her thoughts turning to her search. She whips back around toward her house, her purple mane covering one eye until she blows it out of her face. She returns to her doorway and carefully sidles around the corner of the house, staying pressed against the wall until she's sure there are no more cracks in the earth around her. Her friend was waiting for her out back, and the Filly races there to see what has become of her oldest companion. She turns the corner, anxious and terrified of what she might find. Her eyes fall upon the back wall of her home, and she sees her fears are well-established.
The small grove of trees that had stood behind the little house for decades must have simply exploded over night. Chunks of debris, branches and leaves, dirt and roots, all of it was scattered about, smashed against her back wall. Splinters of all different sizes, some as big as her, are imbedded in the earth and the wall, like darts in a board. Her heart falls within her chest, her friend didn't make it. Nothing could have made it through this. And yet, that wasn't good enough for her.
The Filly dives forward, kicking aside branches, splinters, and piles of leaves. She sifts and digs until she's more than halfway across the wall. And that's when she finds her, her life-long friend, buried beneath a pile of small tree limbs. She clears them away, kicking with her hind legs until the branches snap all over again, freeing their prisoner from that spot against the wall. Her friend went through quite a night, but all in all, it doesn't look like anything too serious. A few scrapes, a gash that would likely remain for the rest of her existence, and some minor dents here and there, but nothing serious.
She embrace the cold steel like a long-lost sister, the scooter doesn't object. Reunited, the two return to the front of the house. As they come around the corner, she sees that even more of the ground has given way. She watches as it crumbles before her eyes, a beautiful swath of green land pitched into the tenebrous abyss. The cracking and creaking are perfectly audible, almost deafening as they get closer. She's standing in the doorway, unable to move as she watches a break form in the ground and make its way right to the corner of her house that she came around only moments before. What comes next is a sound like nothing you'd have ever heard, nor anything you'd ever want to. A groan erupts from just below the floor of her house, and suddenly half of the home she had known all her life, had been sleeping inside only minutes before, falls away. The ground beneath it crumbles and takes the half with her bed in it down into the black depths.
She makes her decision right then and there, no time to think up an alternative. She hops on her old friend, backs into the remainder of her house, and aims herself at the door. Her eyes narrow as her wings begin to beat the air behind her furiously. And then, all at once, she's off.
A burst of speed sends her bolting through the door, her front wheel smacking off the doorjamb and sending her into the air, over the thin gorge before her, and onto the solid ground beyond. She stops and turns to take one last look at her slowly-collapsing home. As she does there's another groan escapes from the floorboards, and and the house implodes inward as the ground beneath it gives way. The loss reverberates as a near-physical pain, but she doesn't have time to think about that. No... She has a mission now. She has answers to find, shelter to seek out, and, most importantly, friends who are likely in just as bad a predicament as she is.
So she starts riding, racing toward Ponyville as the cracks around her begin to spread. She's all alone for now. Just one little pony, in a world that's about to fall to pieces beneath her very hooves. You might want to say a little prayer for her here, just a reassuring word or two. She's going to need them...
She expected a to see others running around. Others fleeing to the hills. Others searching for their friends and family. Others trying to find some safe ground upon which to stand. Needless to say, she's disappointed. Disappointed, but not deterred.
Whatever it was that had destroyed her roof had also done quite a number on the road. She has less than a mile to travel to reach the town, yet ever inch of that distance is covered with craters, most no bigger than her hooves. The fields around her are riddled with them as well, and most of the grass is singed a brownish black. The going is rough, and the scenery isn't anything that she cared to gaze on for very long. The world had always looked best when it was zooming past her... Now the improvement was undeniable.
She speeds ahead, the town's not far now. Five more minutes and the first few buildings should come into sight. The bumps in the road are starting to get to her; she begins actively avoiding the bigger ones now, rather than simply letting the scooter bounce along them. Three more minutes. She starts to notice just how dry the air is, dry and warm, not exactly what one would expect from a typical autumn day. One more minute. She can make out the shape of a house before her, then another, and another, until the whole town slowly comes into view. And after a moment, she suddenly wishes it hadn't...
Whats the most important thing you've ever lost? Now don't worry, I'm not going to make you say it... Just think about it for a minute. Come up with something? Alright. Now multiply that by a thousand. Multiply it and then add onto that the feeling of shock, as if something just jumped out of the shadows and tackled you to the ground. You focus on that feeling for a moment, and you should have a pretty accurate idea of what's hitting our little Filly right now.
The longer she stays there, frozen in place, the deeper the feeling of dread sinks in, and the surer she is of the answer to the only question left in her mind. Gazing at the shattered, burnt, and scourged shell of what was once the home of everything and everyone she ever knew and loved, what other questions could there really be? She didn't care what caused it now. She wasn't curious about how it had happened. She didn't want to know how far it had reached. As far as she's concerned, the whole world might as well have gone up in flames; because the fate of that little town meant that her whole world had. So through out all of that grief, all of that turmoil, all of that dread, just one question was left for her to ask... Who could have survived this?
Well, we both know the answer to that, but imagine how she must have felt. How could anything seem as hopeless as the situation she had just found herself in? But was that about to stop her? ...No chance...
She gets back up. The dirt soaked up her tears eagerly, her sorrow quenching its newly-developed thirst. Her weeping had left that spot wet, but now her that her eyes were dry, she was ready to finish what she had started. She lifted her old friend back onto its wheels, off of the charred ground where she had cast it aside a minute or two before. Her wings beat the air behind her with a steady buzzing sound, and off she goes.
She's not far from her destination now. She swerves between the buildings, a long cloud of dust marking her path through Ponyville. The houses and stores she blows by have seen better days, to say the least. Still, the damage isn't nearly as bad as it had looked from the road. Nearly every building is still standing, though to be fair, most seem to be missing a few vital pieces now. Roofs, windows, walls, not one building made it through with all those factors still intact. Well... I suppose thats not entirely true...
She has no idea where it is she is heading, the tears have crept back into her eyes now. She's just speeding along now, as fast as she can, trying to get through it all without having to really see any of it. So she just keeps riding, looking but not taking in her surroundings; making her way further and further into what was once a lovely little neighborhood. She tells herself that theres no one else around, yet the sight that brought the tears back into her eyes begs to differ. She tells herself that it was nothing, just an old statue, probably displaced during whatever calamity had struck the town. She tells herself that the face wasn't familiar to her at all, that it was all in her head, that it she had just projected her own fears onto an inanimate piece of rock... She told herself plenty of things as she rode along; and why not? In the end, any of those lies would have been easier to accept than having to think about the terrified expression forever locked in stone and ash upon her teacher's face.
Thankfully, her journey finally comes to an end, her destination is finally made clear to her. She looks ahead and sees something strange in front of her. A tree. Well, no, not exactly a tree. Its a building, made from a tree, and its still perfectly intact. Whatever had happened here, that structure had been completely untouched by it; thoroughly ignored by the judgement that had fallen upon the rest of the world around it. So thats where she aims her scooter, and thats where she speeds off toward, not entirely sure of why she was going there, or what she would find when she reached it.
Well... What would you think in a situation like this? She starts to slow down, approaching the old library cautiously. She wants to believe it, but the petrified remains flash through her mind again, and send her whirling into a pool of doubt. Still, hers eyes insist that what she's seeing now is real.
So finally, she makes her way to the door. Its already open, so she lets herself in. Theres a fire burning, but unlike what she saw in some of the other buildings, this one's confined to the fireplace. Books are scattered on the floor, unwashed plates and cups thrown here and there for good measure. She knows it wouldn't have looked like this before whatever happened happened, so that same question comes back to her mind once more. Did anyone else survive?
She moves further in, stepping over a small sea of books and scrolls to make her way to the stairs. She notices another door swung wide open, this one leading to the deck on the second floor, one that would normally look out over the nice peaceful landscape below. Her eyes weren't lying to her after all, because sure enough, she finds someone else....
...She finds me...
We talk for a while, a lot longer than I wish we had. She has so many questions; so many questions that I wish I could answer. What happened, Twilight? Who else is left? How did you survive? And of course, the one that cut right to the heart of it. Why did it happen? I wish I could tell her, I truly do. I tell myself that there will be a time and a place for that, once its all over I'll tell her the whole story. I don't know if I was hoping that, by then, she'd be ready to handle the truth or if I was just hoping that I could stall until it wouldn't matter any more. Either way, I keep that part of the story to myself.
What I do tell her is that theres no way that we were the only ones to make it through the storm. I show her one of the scrolls that I had been studying; a list of what I refer to as "Building Blocks" as we go through it. I tell her that they are all things found fairly close to here, all things that should have survived our little disaster. Thats all I tell her; all I get the chance to tell her before she runs for the door, the list clenched tightly between her teeth. She grabs my old saddlebag, throws the scroll in one, and takes off on that banged-up little scooter of hers. And thats the last time that we talked together, just the two of us.
...Zap Apple Jam: tricky stuff to make, even trickier to find so long after the last harvest. But would Granny Smith have really sold off her entire supply without saving some for her family? I don't think so, and apparently, neither does our little Filly. She races down to Sweet Apple Acres as fast as those little wings can carry her. The road to the orchards isn't as badly ravaged as the one she had taken to town. That is, not until you get to the orchards themselves.
She reaches the edge of the Apple Family's land, only to find that its been reduced to a charred ocean of fallen trees, smoking piles of what were once apples, and gaping crevices. Those fissures are growing, not terribly fast, but consistently. If you listen close you can hear the earth giving way around you, splitting apart as if it was slowly being ripped open from the inside. Don't listen too hard though, otherwise the thunder of the occasional tree or two tumbling over each other as the abyss opens up underneath them might deafen you.
But is any of this going to stop her from getting in there? Ha, not a chance... After all, its not just the first Building Block that she's heading in there for; jumping her scooter from trunk to trunk, staying airborne as long as she can each time, her wings battering the air behind her. She's not skidding across fallen limbs and broken branches just to find a little jam from some bizarrely colored apples. She's not plowing head-long through smoldering piles of fruit and compounded ash because I asked her to. There's a bigger reason that she's there, and in her eyes, a far more important issue that's drawn her so far out of Ponyville. Why else would she have chosen to head out there first? After all, that list I showed her was in alphabetical order... So what would make her skip right to Z?
Well, no time to take guesses on that now. Suffice to say, that other reason is what's driving her to plunge ahead through all of these scratches and burns that she's getting covered with. Its all thats keeping her going as the trees around her begin to shift beneath her wheels, cracking and rolling as a new fissure opens up nearby. And if she wasn't so determined to find an answer to that question that's been haunting her since she woke up in the midst of all this destruction, she would have been lost in the ensuing avalanche of wood, leaves, and ash as the ground gaped open in front of her.
Of course, she finds a way out, her wings saving her at the last possible second, propelling her to solid ground. So what is it thats been keeping her going this whole time? What's in her head that's driving her forward? Forcing her to continue rushing toward the farmhouse as fast as she can? What is it that makes her charge head-first through the front door, reducing it to powdered ash as she crashes into the now-ceiling-less rooms within? Well... if I had to guess? ...I'd say, it was friendship...
* * * * *
She doesn't find what she's looking for in the farmhouse. Not in the front hall as she breaks through the door. Not in the living room, or the bedrooms. She scours it all, but no sign of her target. Finally she gets to the kitchen, where she finds the Zap Apple Jam tucked away in a cupboard. She finds old Granny Smith nearby, but the sight is too much for her. She doesn't dwell on the thought long; neither discovery was what she was really here for after all. But just as she's about ready to give up and set her course for the library, she hears something through the shattered remains of the kitchen window. She can't place the sound at first, but after listening for a minute she realizes its what it is. It's one of the most familiar sounds in the world to her ears, just a little distorted by the wind and cracking of the earth... From somewhere in the backyard, she hears crying.
It's not what she's hoping for; well, it is, it's the voice she was hoping to hear. But there's no doubt she had been expecting cries of joy at the knowledge that another made it, not the sobs of grief that she's following now. She barrels toward the backdoor, ash and dust coating her once more as she passes right through what was once a solid slab of wood. The grass she rolls onto is green, lush, and very much alive; completely devoid of the craters that cover so much of the rest of the landscape. There are still two apple trees standing within this little clearing, and two figures beneath them; one yellow, one grey.
Our filly's a little hesitant to go any closer; she knows what she's about to see already, she saw enough of it when she sped through Poniville earlier, no matter how hard she had tried not to. But then a CRACK behind her makes her jump, and she turns to see a quarter of the farmhouse collapse into hole in the ground. Now half the house is gone, now the whole thing, but the fissure doesn't stop there. It's cutting into that last little swath of life left in the orchard, and it's moving fast. The filly decides its now or never, she speeds away, heading for the two figures under the trees.
The tall one is staring at something in the sky, the smaller, yellow one weeping in front of her, her head bowed and her eyes clamped shut. She can barely see the smaller one's face from under the hat covering her head, a wide-brimmed wrangler's hat that's far to big for the poor girl it's sitting on. She doesn't hear the house collapse into the crevice, doesn't notice the earth splitting apart around her. She doesn't even notice the pegasus on the scooter coming toward her. How can she, after everything she just went through, everything that she witnessed over the last few hours. Her farm destroyed. Her home torn apart. Her family... well... you get the picture.
So what do say to a filly who's seen too much? ...Ours doesn't know, but she says this. "Applebloom... We have to go... Please."
