Apple Bloom frowned at the… well, intruder was far too kind a word, but she’d been raised right and wasn’t going to uphold her family’s legacy by giving the pony in front of her a title it hadn’t earned. Not yet, anyway.
“You heard me,” hissed the mare, horn already recharged from her last show of force. The wall next to the entryway was smouldering, and distantly Apple Bloom wondered if she’d be the one who’d have to clean and reinforce that, or if she could convince Big Mac to do most of it. But for now, the rude pony was demanding her attention, because, well… some ponies didn’t have much in the way of manners.
“Ah didn’t, sorry. What can I do fer ya?” She did her best to smile, ignoring the horrible stench the stranger brought with her. “Ya need food? Ah’m afraid we don’t have much to spare, but Ah’ll see if we have a few bites for the road.”
The mare spat at Apple Bloom’s hooves. “Food? Don’t be stupid, you brat. Somepony in here’s got something I’m after, and I’m not about to let you get away with hoarding that power all to yourself.”
“Mahself?” Apple Bloom was stalling, and she knew it, but Big Mac wasn’t due back to the barricaded barn until later that evening, and there was no way he’d see any sort of signal she could send him. Still. “Ah’m sorry, Ah don’t know what you-”
“Your sister! She had the power, and I know many ponies that’d give anything for it.” The mare stomped her hoof, and the cloak covering her back shifted, revealing twinned long scratches against her sides. One of the Ascendants, then, looking to become an Alicorn to survive the horrors ravishing the land ever since that day, months ago, mere months. That’s all it’d taken for some ponies to show their worst sides, and if Applejack were here, she’d have said that sort of pony was probably just looking for an excuse.
But Applejack wasn’t here. And if Apple Bloom had anything to say about it, she never would be.
“Ah don’t have a sister,” she smoothly responded. A lie, but she hadn’t inherited her sister’s penchant for Honesty. “An’ if Ah did, she wouldn’t have any more power than the average Earth pony, Ah’m afraid.”
The intruder laughed, and coughed, and the skin and fur around her eyes shifted slightly, like an ill-fitting scarf, and Apple Bloom shuddered. The first signs of Sun Sickness, then. She was desperate, and that made her even more dangerous. “You’re lying. You’re LYING! I KNOW it’s here, and I know you didn’t take it, because if you had, you wouldn’t be able to lie! Tell me, you horseapple smear, where’s the Element?”
Apple Bloom squinted at the horizon, but nothing in the bones of the drought-dried orchard moved. Her brother wouldn’t be back soon enough to help her, then. Fine. She could take care of herself, and if he didn’t like it, then that was too bad.
“It’s unaccounted for, ma’am,” she sighed, evenly meeting the mare’s blighted eyes with her own unimpressed gaze. “Ah’m gonna have ta ask ya to leave, as yer trespassing. Please take the warnin’ and go.” Or don’t, Apple Bloom mentally pleaded. Let me name you. Let me show you what happens when you mess with a REAL Apple.
“I don’t think I will,” was all the stranger said before she forced herself forward, pressing forward against the half-door Apple Bloom was using as part of a barricade, horn still lit but thankfully forgotten. “You’ve got it, and I can’t… I need to have the Element! Let it attune to me! I’m far more Honest than you’ll ever be!”
“Honest?” whispered Apple Bloom, and mentally renamed the intruder as a threat. No longer a pony, not in the ways that friendship could help, but still… alive, and unpermanantly so. “Whoever told ya that it always had to be Honesty? The Elements were somethin’ else before they met Twilight’s…” not friends. Friends wouldn’t do that to ponies they cared about. “... thralls, Ah think they call them?”
The threat took a step back, horn fizzing erratically. “What are you talking about? Twilight is trying to save us! Your sister is trying to save us! You took what she needs to free us from this hell, you all did, and now Equestria’s paying the price!”
“Ah took nothing,” said Apple Bloom to the threat, and took one step forward. “The Elements abandoned their Bearers when they abandoned us, and then the Elements found others. Mah Element… well, it used to be Honesty, but it’s taken a new form since the Bearer’s betrayal.”
She could see her own reflection in the threat’s glassy eyes, so she got to see herself flicker like a bad illusion spell just as the threat realized that maybe, just maybe, she’d made a mistake.
Something surged from where Apple Bloom’s hooves met the ground, an invisible force punching from the earth upwards, knocking the threat aside like a dead branch. “What… what are you…” Her eyes bulged. Something wrong was going on in her body, but she hadn’t figured out what yet. She collapsed onto her side, crumbling down like an old building.
“Ah suppose ya could call it Honesty, in a way,” admitted Apple Bloom, as thin tendrils of soil crept up the threat’s body, spiraling around her hooves and pressing inwards, towards the flesh. Mercifully, from Apple Bloom’s point of view, it covered what was going on underneath, creeping higher and higher up the threat’s cheeks, just barely hiding how oddly skeletal they’d become.
The threat trembled, crying out raspily as her mouth filled with dirt. “What is happening to me? What did you DO?”
Apple Bloom shrugged and focused on slowing, not taking everything, not now, as the earth swallowed the threat down to her bones. Her horn sputtered out with the hiss of dying magic. Not alive enough to be a threat, but not entirely dead until her lifespan was complete… Apple Bloom wasn’t a killer, but one more crying pile of bones and dirt she’d send back to her sister was, hopefully, that many fewer that’d come after her again.
“Well, yer alive, still, kind of, so once ya feel like ya can get up or the rain washes ya out enough to move, Ah hope ya do the smart thing and tell Twilight ta stop sending ya all, or Ah’ll finish the process on ya.,” said Apple Bloom with no small amount of relief to the shuddering remains of the pony. “But Ah was saying somethin’, before ya interrupted.”
The near-corpse whimpered, and Apple Bloom smiled grimly. “Yer alive, but there’s only one truth all living things must respect, an’ it’s that truth that the Element’s decided upon for me. Tell me, what’s more Honest than Decay?”
