It was spring and Burnt Oak could smell the sweetness of the pollen in the air. He was a young stallion, but the tree he worked on was old. That was just good business practice, to leave the saplings until they matured. He was the only firewood seller in Ponyville anyway, so he could work at the rate he chose.
He had just started on his second cut when a shriek drew his attention from the trunk. With the handle of his hatchet still between his teeth, Burnt Oak watched as a young deer, with a coat like captured as sunshine, hurtled the nearby clearing. Two Timberwolves bound after him, each five or six times the length of their prey. Burnt Oak knew the cursed creatures felt neither hunger nor exhaustion and as the fawn's evasions grew frantic, he saw their eyes gleam with a cruel luster.
Rushing forward, he swung his neck and released the hatchet from his teeth, sending it whirling into the flank of a wolf. The creature yelped and collided with its companion, causing both of them to ram into a great log. It was just enough for the fawn to disappear into the underbrush.
Burnt Oak didn't wait for the Timberwolves to recover. He hurried back in the direction of town, ignoring the vicious snarls and crashing gait of his impending pursuers.
With one last leap he cleared the dense thickets and was sprawling muzzle over tail into the safety of the prairie beyond.
It was summer and Burnt Oak could see the marks more and more every day. He wasn't sure if they had always been there or if as he grew older, they had begun to make themselves obvious to him.
The bark stripped by the grinding of their antlers and the distinctive bisected hoofprints leading deeper into the woods. He knew they should scare him. His mother had always warned about the Antlerfolk. She said they led ponies deep into the woods and got them lost.
But Burnt Oak felt something had changed about the Everfree. He'd seen fewer and fewer Timberwolves in the past years. As if they had been scared off. As if the markings around his wood camp were protecting him somehow.
It was a ridiculous thought of course. Deer couldn't do magic, if they did why would they dwell in places like the Everfree, which were beyond taming. Still, the notion that he wasn't completed unwanted in these wicked woods excited him all the same.
It was autumn and Burnt Oak could hear the creaking of his bones in the harsh wind. His trips to the woods were getting fewer and fewer these days. It used to take him three or four cuts to bring down a tree. Now, he was lucky to do it with seven or eight.
Not that anyone bought firewood anymore. Thanks to the Flim Flam Brothers Super-Home-Heater 4000, ponies could just pay the power company to zap all their doodads with magic. Supposedly it was safer. Fewer fires. Better for the environment too.
Burnt Oak let out a sigh as he gazed at the last embers of his hearth. Soon they would be out and with the chill would return the pain. It isn't good for you to be working at your age, that's what Dr. Horse had said. But Burnt Oak didn't have any foals, any wife, even any nieces or nephews to spoil. All he had was his trusty axe and his job and the cabin he'd built for himself on the edge of the woods.
Big Mac wanted him to retire too. If Burnt Oak had still had the energy, he'd have kicked the stallion for that suggestion. But unlike the doctor, he could forgive Big Mac, who was the only pony who visited him anymore.
With a groan, he got to his hooves and trotted over to the entryway. Out of firewood. Again. He picked up his hatchet and swung open the door to find a haphazard pile of kindling on the porch. Burnt Oak peered outside in search of the culprit. In the snow was a trail of cloven hoofprints leading back to the Everfree.
It was winter and Big Mac's hooves were numb from digging. Still, it wasn't the frozen ground that troubled him, but the headstone. Charcoal and plain, with a name and some dates. It was what Burnt Oak would have wanted.
But it wasn't what he deserved.
He remembered countless nights sitting up with the old stallion enraptured by stories of his father's youth. Ponies had said he was a loner and a coot, a stranger even to his neighbors. But they hadn't known how warm he could be.
"I know how much he meant to you." Sugar Belle said.
Big Mac just stared at the frost already forming on the freshly overturned earth. Then he heard it. A strange creaking and snapping sound. Sugar Belle gasped, and he looked up to see that the Everfree Forest was parting. Its eldest trees groaned to make way for hundreds of deer.
And at the front of the herd, a magnificent buck, with a coat like captured sunshine. Beside him a demure doe, as white as the moon. The march stopped, just short of the grave.
Then without a glance at Big Mac or his wife, the king lifted his head and let out a terrible moan. The rest began to mimic him and soon all their antlers were glowing and the soil around the grave was beginning to shift. The gravestone cracked, before it was swallowed by great gray roots, each as thick as a wagon. In seconds, a grand oak, taller than most buildings in Ponyville, towered over the grave.
When the bellowing ceased, the leader inspected the oak, patting it lightly on the trunk. Then he and his herd stared at Big Mac curiously, before turning around and disappearing back into the Everfree Forest. The trees all sighed with relief in their wake.
