The World Zolt Lives In

Chapters

Prologue
Chapter 1 - Waking Up
Chapter 2 - Sustenance
Chapter 3 - Danger

Prologue

Cold.

The world felt incredibly cold.

It was a good thing that she and her son were the types of ponies to grow out thicker fur coats during the winter. Without those genetics, gathering food at a time like this would be unbearable, even with fur-lined outerwear. The trees were encased solidly in inch-thick icy tombs and the wind had grown out its fangs just in time for the dead of winter. If there was one benefit to the intensity of this blizzard, it was that the snow was flecked with enough ice that, when she and her son walked carefully enough, their hooves did not breach the earth’s frozen exoskeleton.

“Come on, honey.” She raised her voice a little to be sure it reached her son’s little ears over the blasting wind. She hardly had to look to see where her son was stationed; his fur, unlike her or his father’s, was a vibrant orange. Certainly, had it been autumn, she would have to keep a much stricter eye on him. Her young colt tore his eyes away from the snowy evergreen fern he had been staring at, fossilized in the thick freeze just like everything around them, and tromped his way over to her.

“How are we going to find anything to eat in this weather?” His mother heard him mumbling beside her.

“Lots of creatures love the snow just as much as you do,” was her simple, affectionate response. And it was accurate, too. Her son was entranced by snow more than anything else. ‘If you didn’t have me to keep watch over you, you’d let yourself freeze to death in that snow!’ she would always say, and he would always quietly mumble his begrudged agreements.

So, the hunt continued for nearly a half-hour, mother and son treading slowly and carefully over the ice that managed to remain intact beneath them. The mare managed to snag two large Snowbits in this time, which was plenty to keep them fed for a day or perhaps even two, but the two pegasi agreed amongst themselves that there was good luck fluttering in the chilled air and that they should try to find at least one more small animal to take. After trudging through some brush and coming through to an oddly quiet clearing, the small orange colt suddenly tugged on his mother’s saddlebag to prevent her from advancing further.

“Mama, there’s a Chillcorn over there,” he pointed with his small hoof towards a blue squirrel digging in the snow – “can I try to get it?”

His mother looked for the creature in question. Sure enough, across the clearing there was a bushy blue tail poking up from the snow. The little rodent was burying its food deep in the ice in hopes of retrieving it once the thick freeze had melted. There were droves of Chillcorn Squirrels in the area this time of year, so hunting them had never been advised against as far as she knew.

The mare put a violet hoof to her chin, considering the options. Her son had gone with her on a few hunts before, but every time he had tried to arrow something down himself, he had always whiffed it and the animal would escape with no injury beyond distress. The target was only a small distance away, but still a tinier animal than he had tried to take down before. But the two were feeling particularly lucky, and she knew that he would be grumbly and sad for the whole rest of the day if she didn’t let him try.

“You think you can get it?” The mare took her quiver from her left side, opposite her saddlebag. Strapped firmly to the outer side of the quiver were two bows, one large longbow and one tiny compound bow that served as her son’s training bow. It packed less punch than the longbow but should still certainly be able to successfully slay a small creature like this.

“I think I can try,” The young pegasus reached clumsily into the quiver while his mother unhooked both bows from it. Before he could grab himself an arrow, his hoof was batted away gently.

“Hold on, dear. Let me pick the right arrow.”

Her son pouted but relented, sitting down slowly on the packed ice. He gingerly grabbed the small bow from his mother’s hooves when it was presented to him and patiently waited for the arrow that was soon passed to him. He nocked it and slowly took aim. The circular clearing they had both found themselves in was so well-protected from the slashing wind that the snow had a slight dip towards the middle of the area, where less snow had managed to accumulate. The squirrel avoided digging in the lower snow, popping back up to the surface occasionally to bury the stash it had made and to burrow other holes.

Everything in the world, except for the oblivious Chillcorn Squirrel, seemed entirely still.

He took deep breaths. Lined up the shot. Closed his eyes right before…

schhM!

The arrow launched towards the unsuspecting animal and plunged right into its shoulder. In instantaneous panic, the squirrel turned and started to run to the trees before collapsing into the snow seconds later, mercifully dead.

“Look at that!” The older mare took her son’s bow from his hooves, making an effort not to stomp with glee. “You got it!”

The colt frowned a little, looking on at his first-ever kill. “I wanted it to be instant.” He didn’t like the idea of an animal actually suffering at his hooves, whether it was necessary to use their meat for food or not. His mother put a hoof on his shoulder.

“I know, honey. Every good hunter wishes that for their game. But it was your very first! You’ll get better with time... Oh, I’m so proud of you!”

The two ponies trotted towards the kill, hooked it onto the mother’s overcoat, and dug around in the snow for a little while to gather some of the Chillcorns the squirrel had been hiding.

Leaving the clearing and moving back through the snow-flecked brush, they were soon back on their trail back home — and back into the storm, where the wind had not cooled its temper.

The two ponies began their trek back home. While the snow slowed them down a great deal, it kept the meat fresher to make up for it.

When around fifteen minutes had passed, the larger pegasus could hear her son gasp. She turned to look at what her son had seen — it took a lot to make her son gasp, let alone out of surprise and not excitement.

There was something deep blue sticking up from a mess of ruined snow. The scattered dents in the otherwise pristine, flat white were already being filled back in with the sheer amount of ice coming down. It was impossible to tell where the small footsteps came from or even what shape they had been.

“Is it a dead animal?” The mother asked, and the orange pony, who rushed to try to unbury whatever it was, shook his head worriedly.

“It’s a pony, mama. He wasn’t here the first time we went by.”

The mare immediately stumbled in shock, a hoof breaking through the ice by a few inches. She pulled her hoof free and moved as quickly as she could without breaking through the floor of ice. Once she reached her son, she began digging through the snow alongside him, uncovering a small pony. She could see a gray wing poking through the snow, which she wiped as free of ice as she could. The pony was clearly not conscious, and it didn’t seem like they were breathing, either.

“It’s a filly,” she murmured, devastated. The pony they had found was so small, she couldn’t be much younger than the colt that had spotted her. She was light gray with blue and yellow hair, a loose scarf spread haphazardly around her. Other than the long scarf, she had no clothing at all. Either the tips of her hooves were marked with white fur, or the snow and ice was starting to embed itself into her flesh. It wouldn’t be the first time the mare had seen such a thing happen. But to a pony so young…

“Somepony left their filly out here all alone?” The small colt was very distraught, starting to tremble for the first time since he stepped hoof into the cold. Eerily, the wind began to die down as though it, too, was too shocked to speak.

“Either that or she wandered off and they couldn’t find her. But who would be in this area so recently — in this kind of a storm?” The mother and son didn’t live particularly close to civilization by trail. Of course, the young filly was a pegasus, but her wings were small and her age indicated that she likely couldn’t fly long distances. She would have had to do a lot of work to get to this area in her condition. Could she have fallen out of a sky-carriage, or even an Aeropony?

An orange hoof gently brushed some snow out of the lifeless filly’s hair. “Maybe they were coming to our house. What if her parents are waiting there for us to come back? For us to help find their missing filly?”

The older mare nodded, understanding. The idea was a bit farfetched, but they didn’t live very close to anypony else and she knew this young filly had to have been accompanied by someone at some point in time. “Alright, sweetheart. You’ll have to wear the game belt while I carry the young one home. Let’s hurry."

Chapter 1 - Waking Up

Cold.

The world was cold.

Nopony was there for her — it was impossible to make friends ever since things changed, and her parents and teachers never believed a word she said either. She could never figure out how to make ponies like her. Or how to like them in return. Would she have to cast some kind of magic spell and force it to happen?

Everybody was cold, pony or otherwise. The looks they would give her, the way they would address her by cruel names… Cold. Ever since her world had shifted, the looks ponies gave her had so noticeably changed. Adoration, care, love… all had melted unrecognizably away from anypony she’d known. Their faces made no sense. The few times she managed to muster up the courage to look at another pony, their expressions were so hard to decipher. She couldn’t understand why they looked at her like that, every single one of them. How did they all know, before even speaking a word to her, that they wanted nothing to do with her? Had everypony unanimously decided that she was some kind of diseased mongrel?

Pain flashed through her memory in broken, fuzzy snippets. Needles in her legs, bruises and cuts on her thighs where her cutie mark served as a constant reminder of her affliction, her own tear-stained face in the mirror. The flashes disappeared as quickly as they had come, leaving behind only the faint sensation of gripping sadness and unease. She could barely think. She tried hard to hold onto the memories, to see them clearer, but static was gunking up her mind.

And now, to top everything off, her body was suddenly so cold. It felt like she was encased solid; had she become like those trees, cocooned in ice? Those trees… the blizzard. There was a blizzard, and... was this what death felt like? Did death even have a feeling…?

But she was thinking now.

She knew that she was, because she was aware of just how freezing she felt. She hadn’t been aware of anything until now… not for a while. At least, it felt like a while. Walking on top of that strangely-intact snow, looking around at the icy woods; it felt like weeks had passed since then.

So … finally decided to wake up, did you? Thought you were going to rot for a little while there. You’re so lucky, Zolt, aren’t you?

Zolt tried to stir, uncomfortable, as the voice spoke to her. She knew what that voice was. She couldn’t quite move her thawing body enough to shift around yet, and even if she could, it wouldn’t have helped. No matter how much she jostled herself or turned away or ran, it wouldn’t have mattered. There wasn’t any escaping it.

I kept you alive for all those weeks! If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be able to think at all. Maybe you should thank me for once.

Alive… I’m alive?

Suddenly, heat. It didn’t feel like burning, but it was overwhelming and panic-inducing how quickly it came. One moment, Zolt had barely been able to think straight, let alone feel a thing at all, and the next, the bursting sensation of warmth flooded through her from her throat to her stomach, then slowly to her limbs.

You should be thanking me.

It was getting quieter. The voice was fading away. She knew it wasn’t permanent relief, but it was relief nonetheless. Further and further away that wicked scowl drifted, until it couldn’t be distinctly heard anymore.

She tried again to move, this time finding more success. She was finally able to distinguish her body parts from one another: hooves, head, neck, body…

A small sound caught in her throat. Her head was tilted uncomfortably and she suddenly became aware of thick, hot liquid in her esophagus. She tried not to panic or choke, instead drinking the mysterious substance that was being administered to her with as much calmness as a young filly in such a situation could muster.

She knew by now to not fight when she felt so uncomfortable.

The moment she was able to, she opened her eyes. She was in a warm room, laying in a bed with thick brown blankets draped over her. A round potion bottle was being held up to her lips by a familiar mare, now empty. The walls of the room were reddish-brown, almost brick-like in color. There was a stone fireplace to her left, housing a sputtering flame.

“N- Nnnnnnn…” Zolt tried to speak, but found it infuriatingly difficult.

“Do not try to speak, my dear. It will not work, and you will waste energy trying.”

How could she have forgotten Norai?

Back in Gardenia… Back home, Norai lived alone in a large cottage. She was known to be the goddess of Potions and Brewing, but few revered her as an actual deity. Few ponies outside of the state knew who she was at all and to those that did know her, she was simply the local sorceress. Despite lacking a horn, she was very skilled in magic, and Zolt had, for better or for worse, met her on several occasions. Zolt, after another gurgling attempt to speak, finally nodded, accepting her own silence. She leaned back in her bed, completely trusting Norai’s words. It was hard to relax completely, though; there were still so many questions coursing through her.

“I will try my best to explain, answering your unspoken questions. You were found… in the snow… during a serious blizzard. I know the mare that discovered you, and she called me to ask for assistance. I… rushed over as soon as I could.” She spoke much slower at times — while emotional distress flickered across her face — but otherwise there was no indication that this was anything other than an average day for her.

Zolt’s mane was messy, much messier than normal. It covered her right eye like she always preferred, but it also sat uncomfortably on her neck and shoulder. She tried to fix it, but her hooves hurt badly to move, as though she had slept on them really wrong. She slowly moved her head to the side, trying to see more of the room, but jumped when she saw that she was being stared at by two big green eyes. There was a small colt just about her age sitting at the foot of the bed a few feet away from her. He was sitting on top of the blankets, dead silent, facing her directly and maintaining a constant stare. Norai, invested in her relaying of information, didn’t notice Zolt’s fright and continued speaking.

“Your parents… have been worried about you, so I told them you have been found and that you are okay. Well… I lied and told them that you are okay. I did not know at the time that you would be...

“…

“…But, no matter, you are alright now.

“You have been asleep for three days. We have been trying very hard to keep you warm, but the Elixir of Sunrise takes a while to brew. I-if we hadn’t managed to…”

Norai looked back at Zolt, who was now nervously glancing around at every part of the room except the colt whose eyes were still locked on her: the large TV screen on the wall directly in front of her, filling her with dread, the large desk-n’-mirror to her right, even the small black trash can near the only door in the room (which was also to her right). Zolt felt awkward with how much emotion Norai seemed to be expressing. In all the time she had known Norai, Norai had never stammered or had much trouble getting her words out at all — it emphasized how serious this all was. Even if Zolt could speak, she didn’t quite know what she would have said. It hurt her to know that she had caused Norai so much stress.

“I should not overload you with information. I suppose … this, along with many other things, will be much easier once you regain the ability to speak.”

Zolt’s eyes darted back to Norai, as though to ask, ‘When will I regain the ability to speak?’

“In about two hours’ time, your body should be more capable of holding its heat. The elixir will start to wear off and you will redevelop the ability to speak over the following hour or so. However, there is a chance that you will begin to freeze again once the elixir wears off. If this happens, the elixir will be re-administered to you and you will have to wait another two hours.”

Zolt slumped a little. She wanted to explain herself, to apologize for being so much trouble, but she couldn’t.

“I should be going now, but first, this colt here is named Bandicoot, but I believe he prefers to go by… ‘Bandi’…? And, Bandi, this mare is named Zolt.

“Bandi and his mother are the ones who found you, Zolt. He’s just a year older than you. You’ll be staying with them while you recover and get back on your hooves.” Norai gave Bandi a small, warm smile. He glanced at her, blinked, then nodded a little before resuming his deep stare at Zolt.

“Well, I will head off for now,” Norai sighed, straightening up and starting to head for the door. “I am very glad that you will recover just fine. I…” Norai paused, her hoof resting on the doorknob, ready to turn it and escape the emotion that was throwing her off-guard. She directed her gaze once more towards Zolt. “I do not know how you got so far away from home without collapsing. And, despite being one, I cannot fathom the graces of the Gods that have to come into play to keep you alive through that. But I have seen enough to understand that you had a valid reason to leave in such a sudden fashion. I believe that… here will be a better place for you… for the time being. If Ms. Sweet has any issues she needs my assistance with, she knows how to contact me.”

With those parting words, Norai was gone, and Zolt was left with his colt who didn’t know how to keep his eyes to himself — this ‘Bandicoot’.

There was a long silence. Then, finally, Bandicoot mumbled, “You can’t speak.”

It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. Zolt narrowed her eyes in a glare. Was he making fun of her?

Zolt made another attempt to brush her mane away from her neck, and thankfully managed to do so. Bandicoot’s eyes locked onto the part of her mane that covered her eye. His expression was hard to read. It was hard to tell if he even had an expression. Or emotions.

“I don’t like talking to strangers. I don’t really like talking at all. I prefer to listen. Let other ponies talk to me, or around me. But you can’t do that. So I guess I have to do the talking. That feels weird. And I really don’t know how to do it.”

His voice had a strange sound to it. Was it an accent? A dialect? There was something about the way he spoke that seemed very different than what Zolt was used to, and it both intrigued and somewhat frightened her.

“When I found you, I had just gotten a squirrel for me and Mom to eat. But you’ve been out so long that all the food we got has already been eaten. My mom left an hour or two ago to get some more food. But… she told me to keep my eyes on you.”

Zolt glared back at Bandicoot. Was that why he was staring at her so intently…?

“Do I still have to keep my eyes on you even though you’re awake?” Bandi asked slowly.

Zolt shook her head firmly. Bandi immediately broke his gaze, choosing to look instead at the fire in the fireplace. Zolt let out a long breath she didn’t know she had been holding in.

“You haven’t eaten in days… Are you hungry?”

Zolt tried to think. Was she hungry…?

A sharp pang of hunger suddenly slammed into her stomach. She winced, wrapping her hooves around herself. Bandi looked back at her, seeing her nod. “O-oh, o-okay! Ummm… I’ll be right back. Don’t move. Don’t do anything!”

Bandi stumbled off of the bed and galloped out of the room.

Zolt stretched, pushing the blankets off of her. She flopped forward on the bed, faceplanting into the top of the mattress. It had been a long time since she had been on a proper bed, let alone with this much space. The mattress was comfortable.

When Zolt closed her eyes, she could see the small, scratchy, itchy bed from before. The last one she had slept in before running off.

It wasn’t at a house, let alone her own house — but a facility. Lots of ponies lived there. How many months had she been there before she had left…?

The bed there didn’t feel good.

Or… safe, even.

The hooves that would shake her awake weren’t her parents’. Half the time, they were ponies she’d never seen before at all.

Suddenly, she was being shaken again. Just like before. Did they need to take her blood again?

Zolt jolted up into a sitting position.

Bandi was sitting next to her, holding… branches. Branches coated in ice.

“You shouldn’t eat them too often, my Mom says, but since we don’t have anything else to eat, maybe they could tide you over?”

Branches?

Can ponies really eat those?

Chapter 2 - Sustenance

Zolt was surprised to find that branches were fairly easy to consume, although harsh on the teeth. She learned quickly to whittle away at the wood with the sharper of her teeth, taking thin strips off before chewing them down to mush with the rest. The particular wood that Bandicoot had brought in was reddish in color and tasted a bit fruity, but mostly earthy — somewhat like crunchy, sweetish dirt that could be safely consumed.

It wasn’t bad. Not bad at all. She wished, despairingly, that Bandicoot had brought more for her to eat. But she didn't let herself dwell on that desire for long.

“I think my mom should be back soon,” Bandicoot assured the young filly soon after the two of them had finished their unconventional snacks. “She never takes her phone with her when she leaves to hunt. Says it’s too distracting, or tempting, or something. So she can’t text or call me to tell me if she’ll take longer than normal... She’s rarely gone for this long when she’s just hunting."

Zolt frowned deeply. She hadn't even considered the fact that these ponies were now being saddled with her presence and all the extra work that comes with it. Her parents always talked about how much more work she was than her brother, thanks to her… ‘affliction’, as they’d call it… And now, these ponies were being told to take care of her for hoof-knows-how-long! She didn’t deserve that level of kindness. Not when she was in this kind of a mess only thanks to her own self. Why did this colt and his mother have to suffer because of her own inadequacy? Was his mother out hunting for longer than usual because there was another pony to feed? How much extra work was Zolt requiring of these complete strangers simply by being there?

“Can I see something?” Bandicoot asked slowly, seeming to notice the trance-like state Zolt had found herself stuck in. Her eyes refocused on the small colt. He was now leaning slightly in her direction. She wanted to gasp, but no sound came out when she tried. Bandicoot looked into her visible blue eye with an insistence Zolt couldn’t pinpoint. Nervously, she nodded, granting him permission for whatever it was he decided he should do.

Bandicoot’s hoof immediately went up to Zolt’s forelock, brushing it away before Zolt could process what was happening. Just like that, her other eye was exposed — not blue, like her left, but a glimmering golden color instead. The world seemed to stop. Bandicoot stared. Zolt began to tremor, a deep rumble starting in her chest. Her eyes slowly widened, but Bandicoot's expression remained completely still. Unreadable.

Overrun with terror, Zolt batted Bandicoot’s hoof away and scooted as far away as she could without falling off the bed, near clawing at her mane to bring it back down over her eye. She thought about running. Jumping off the bed and finding the closest exit. Bounding into the snow, running until she found some form of shelter or civilization. But… she didn’t. Not this time. The fear kept her paralyzed. Images flashed through her mind of Bandicoot attacking her, knocking her to the ground and beating her gray coat purple. He was a similar size to her, but she was sure that he could overtake her if he really wanted to.

“Your eyes are two different colors,” Bandicoot’s words stated the obvious as bluntly as the first time he had spoken to her. “I know what it means when ponies have eyes like that.”

Of course he does! Zolt thought. She didn't know how exactly such young ponies would always know that she was dangerous to be around, but time and time again ponies Zolt’s age had proven to be rather knowledgeable on everything that made her ‘wrong’. Maybe parents warned their children to avoid any ponies with such a physical feature. It was good advice, she supposed. She looked down at her hooves in shame. She was stupid for thinking she would be able to hide such a hideous thing from anypony, even strangers. These ponies were supposed to take care of her. How was she ever going to have hidden it for long? I’m ridiculous for even thinking it was possible.

But when she thought about it for a moment, she realized that Bandicoot didn't seem to be all that scared. In fact, she had moved away from him. In Zolt’s past, there were but few instances where someone wasn’t scared when seeing her yellow eye. At times, these strangers would even seem enthralled by her bizarre characteristic. But those were only ponies that didn’t know what it really meant, and they would always eventually find out the truth. Either someone close to them would fill them in, or guilt would overrun Zolt such that she felt forced to tell them herself. But Bandicoot claimed to know the truth, and yet he seemed entirely calm. How was that? Zolt locked her eyes back onto the red-haired colt. He seemed to be deep in thought, but still not particularly put off. At least, not so put off as to squawk and run for the hills — or to snuff her out entirely.

Finally, he spoke. "It's no wonder my mom seemed so surprised when she checked your eyes. I thought they must have been really dilated or something. Now I know why she was being so secretive." Bandicoot climbed off the bed, and at first, Zolt thought he was going to leave. Her heart sank with the sudden thought that maybe he did want to get away from her. Instead, though, he walked over to the fireplace whose flames had started to die out. Calm as ever, he grabbed a long metal rod that had been leaning against the wall and poked at the fire. In doing so, he granted her the gift of a few minutes of relative peace, where the fire crackled on and she had time to calm down and think.

Her thoughts were a jumbled mess at first. Maybe he's only pretending to be calm so that I don't attack him. It could just be a safety thing. What if he has some illness that prevents him from expressing emotions — or, even worse, prevents him from feeling emotions at all? Maybe he's more dangerous to me than I am to him. Maybe once his mom reappears, they’ll both gang up on me and take me somewhere absolutely dreadful with ponies who hurt me. Or they could even just hurt me themselves.

It took her mind a long time to calm itself, but once it had, she started to wonder about the way Bandicoot spoke. He talks kinda weird. But he knows a lot of cool words. Like ‘dilated'. Maybe, if he attends school, they want ponies to learn and use fancy words. At home, when I used words like ‘dilated', I would get strange looks. I’d be told I was too young to know words like that. They'd think I was trying to insult their intelligence. Do lots of ten-and-eleven-year-olds outside of Gardenia talk more like me? How much does he know? Would he be willing to teach me things? Will I be going to school? What’s school like?

She tried once again to talk, knowing that the outcome was unlikely to be a satisfying one. Her assumptions were confirmed when all that came out was a strange breath. It was enough to catch Bandicoot’s attention, and his eyes met hers. Her other eye was still partially visible. She could tell he was looking at it. She felt her face heat with embarrassment as she turned away from him, using her front hooves to brush her mane back into its rightful place once again.

“I already know what your other eye looks like,” Bandicoot pointed out, “I don’t see the point of you continuing to hide it.” He didn’t seem angry or judgmental, only matter-of-fact. Zolt shook her head in defiance. She tried to think of an excuse, a way to explain herself that could be conveyed with no words. But nothing came to her. She was too clouded with embarrassment, fear, hatred of herself. The overall feeling of anxiety flooded right back into her as she realized once more that he might want her to die. Maybe he would try to flay her skin and use it as a ponyskin rug. Or he could turn her into Pony Soup. Was Pony Soup a thing?

He might try to invent Pony Soup!

Or he could just kill her and throw her outside for the sharp-toothed creatures of the forest to eat.

Before Bandicoot could speak, a sound shocked both he and Zolt out of their ‘conversation’: a door opening within earshot. Bandicoot glanced back at Zolt before straightening to his hooves. "Don't worry about greeting her," he smiled at the gray filly for the first time since meeting her. "I'll let you rest while we cook lunch.” With that, Bandicoot exited the room, closing the door quietly behind him as he went. Zolt could hear muffled conversation between that peculiar child and his mother, but she couldn't discern any words.

She moved towards the center of the bed with her back hooves, crawling underneath the blankets. She took a deep breath and sighed. Even though the bed was especially comfortable compared to what she was used to, there was no way she needed more rest. That was a bunch of baloney! After all, she'd been sleeping (well, unconscious) for days. Once she was done soaking in the comfort of the mattress, she was going to explore the room so thoroughly, Goddess Fiona herself would be proud!

Bandicoot’s smile kept floating back into her mind. Why had he smiled? Was he happy his mother had returned, that he'd had an excuse to leave? Was he plotting to attack Zolt with his mother's help, just as she had feared?

Soon enough, she began to snore.

-+-+-

The never-ending forest.

The church.

The basement.

That rundown hospital.

The stained bed, the foul-smelling rot.

All these different locations’ memories hit her at once. Their ghostly images assailed her, but she was unable to recoil. She wasn't aware enough of her own mind to be able to fight these memories off. So she watched.

She could see her legs, coated with blood, her front hooves clawing at the wooden ground, trying to anchor themselves in place. The face of a lifeless priest.

Flash after flash, evil things she thought she had forgotten.

Zolt…? Zolt… Zolt?

-+-+-

“Hey, Zolt? Zolt!”

Zolt sat up, eyes blinking slowly as she tried to unblur her vision. How had she gotten so turned around in her sleep? The pillows and blankets were strewn haphazardly about her and instead of laying facedown on the pillows, she had woken up on her back, staring at the ceiling. She was turned sideways on the bed, her hooves nearly hanging off the edge.

Bandicoot had been trying to wake her up for a small while now. Roughly ten minutes ago, he’d quietly entered the room, convincing himself that Zolt probably hadn’t fallen asleep all that fast. But, when he did discover her snoring, she was so sprawled out across the bed that he figured she must be really tired. While he had no clue how on dirt the filly could still be tired after sleeping for so long already, he hated the idea of breaking her out of what seemed like such a peaceful slumber. Maybe she would rather sleep than eat, he had thought anxiously to himself before creeping out of the room and closing the door behind him as quietly as he could.

“Where’s Zolt?” His mother had asked him when he had returned to the kitchen without her.

“She was dead asleep. I didn’t want to wake her up.”

Bandicoot’s mother sighed softly, a small smile on her face. “She’s slept for quite a long time already, dear. She hasn’t eaten in several days, and her stomach is probably screaming. Please, for her sake, will you go and fetch her?” She added an extra-sweet tone to her last few words, hoping that her playfulness came across properly.

Bandicoot groaned. He had known it was possible his mother would insist on him waking Zolt, but a small part of him had hoped that she, too, would want Zolt to get as much rest as Zolt felt she needed. “Do I have to?” He had grumbled, after a few long moments of silence spent staring at the ground.

“I suppose you don’t have to do anything,” his mother had replied, quick as ever. She had opened one of the dark wooden cupboards, retrieving three large, dark blue plates, “but I’ll never, ever forgive you if you let that filly go another unnecessary minute longer, hungry.” She then began the process of filling the three plates with all the different types of food she had brought home, except for the dessert. That, naturally, was for later! The older mare glanced back at her son, flashing him a quick, genuine smile, so he knew that she was teasing — for the most part. He didn’t seem particularly satisfied even with said clarification. Still, the small colt had left, hopefully to actually retrieve the gray filly this time.

Bandicoot had approached the room once more, putting an ear up to the door. He had heard snoring, still. Darn it, he thought morosely, I hoped she might’ve woken up by now. I actually have to wake her up…

He had shifted his weight between all four hooves slowly, trying to figure out how he was going to go about this daunting task. What if Zolt hated him forever because he just so happened to interrupt the best dream she had ever had in her entire life?

You’re having those “irrational fears” again, he told himself, forcing himself to open the door as quickly as possible so he had no time for doubt. He stepped into the room. Quietly, he murmured, “Zolt…?” but, frightfully, she didn’t stir even a little. Progressively, he said her name louder and louder, until finally he found some confidence—

“Zolt!”

And here she was.

“W-What?” Zolt sputtered, recovering from her shock and twisting her body uncomfortably to look at Bandicoot. Her voice was croaky and weak, and it caught Bandicoot off guard. She wasn’t supposed to be talking for another few hours, but fifteen minutes of rest and a big shock seemed to have been enough. Not to mention she looked completely exhausted, which made him feel even worse about waking her.

Before Bandicoot could explain anything, let alone offer even one of the seventeen apologies he already had planned for waking her, Zolt sniffed the air like a wolf out for blood. She blurted, “I smell food,” unnaturally shocked. “By the Gods, is that food?” She looked excited for a moment — then, as suddenly as her excitement had come, her expression became blank.

She rolled out of bed and set to work pulling the remaining blankets and pillows off. She grabbed the white sheet off of the floor, throwing it up over the mattress as neatly as she could. It landed mostly proper. Bandicoot had the strange feeling, watching her — her movements, her expression — that she was fervently trying to distract herself from the thought of food. He felt this observation must have been entirely false, though. Why would she want to avoid the thought of food if there was clearly food nearby and she hadn’t eaten anything except a frozen branch in the last few days?

Bandicoot realized he’d forgotten to speak. “Well, I-I didn’t want to wake you up but my mom said, she said… Um…” Bandicoot noticed, for the first time, Zolt’s cutie mark. He felt jealousy welling up, even though he had absolutely no clue what her cutie mark meant: a bold, blue letter Z with a yellow strikethrough behind the middle of it. He’d never seen a cutie mark like that before. How could Zolt have gotten her cutie mark for writing the letter Z (or maybe sleeping? That made a lot of sense…) but he hadn’t been able to find a cutie mark yet in anything? He realized he’d probably been staring too long and immediately looked back at her face. He’d been told by his mother repeatedly that staring at ponies’ flanks was rude, especially fillies. He was lucky Zolt hadn’t noticed. He didn’t want to be rude when he already owed seventeen apologies. “She wanted me to come get you so you could eat with us.”

Zolt dropped the large, thick blanket she’d now been wrangling, only half-covering the bed. She continued to hover there, seemingly frozen in place. Bandicoot was growing increasingly concerned. He wanted to ask her what was wrong, but couldn’t tell if that was the best idea. He didn’t know what emotion she was feeling and therefore had absolutely no ground to stand on and no idea of how he was supposed to be reacting.

“Like…” Zolt seemed to re-enter her own body, slowly lowering herself down off of the bed, two hooves rested against it as she stood on hind legs. She had a strange expression that matched nothing Bandicoot had been taught about before. “It’s okay if I eat?”

Now Bandicoot was especially confused. “What?” was the meager response he came up with.

“I, um… it's just been a while since I've had anything other than grubs and random plants, is all. I spent a long time traveling on my own and eating off of the land. Never really anything cooked. Nothing prepared by any hooves that weren't my own,”

Bandicoot looked at Zolt’s hooves on the mattress, trying to imagine such small hooves struggling to make fires to keep warm at night, or digging up bugs from the earth and stuffing them, dirt and all, into her mouth. He hadn’t really thought about what survival entails and what that, as a result, meant Zolt had likely gone through. Now, he began to think that maybe she wasn't naturally so small— that the elements, and other external forces, made her that way. While the bones in her hooves and her ribs weren't protruding in any extremely concerning way, Bandicoot knew that they could still be seen, and he had never seen somepony Zolt’s age with visible bones like that.

“But before you ran away from home, you must have had stuff prepared for you. Stuff your parents, or guardians, or family friends make. Right?”

“Yeah, I did at some point,” Zolt agreed, and Bandicoot felt relieved, “but that was years ago now.” Bandicoot’s relief disappeared immediately.

“Years? Why years?”

Zolt shrugged, unsure of how much she wanted to say. She was scared to death that she might freak him out too much. But lying felt significantly worse. She decided to simply go lighter on the details than she felt inclined to. “For the last several years that I ‘lived with my parents’, I was always being carted to all these different places. My parents wanted to try and ‘fix me’.”

“They wanted to exorcize you,” Bandicoot clarified knowingly. Zolt glanced at him and saw that he appeared to be genuinely concerned. It was the most emotion she had seen him visually express. She gulped, hating that her secret was being acknowledged aloud. And, with her increased anxiety, words couldn’t resist spilling out much more easily.

“Y-yes. They wanted to get the demon out of me. But, at times, they would refuse to believe I even had one in the first place. Even though I hadn’t been born with the yellow eye. There aren’t many reasons a child could be born with two matching eyes and then, one day, come home with one being a completely different color. But they constantly told me I was faking it. The moment they saw that my eye had changed, they were denying that it was anything unsavory. Invalidating what had happened to me; what I had seen. But even though they said they didn’t believe me, they still took me to religious buildings. Then, hospitals. Then, witch doctors. Strange magic-users. Norai…”

“That potion Goddess?” Bandicoot asked. He buzzed his wings to help lift him off the ground — with immense effort, he managed to float up just enough to climb more easily onto the bed. Zolt thought that it would have probably taken less effort for him to just climb into bed normally, but considered that perhaps he was practicing his flight skills. Bandicoot laid down gently, looking earnestly at Zolt, trying his best to show that he was paying attention even if he really wanted to chew his hooves or hit the hoofboard of the bed to distract himself from the sadness he felt.

“Yes. I must have been carted off to a dozen different places or more, all for different lengths of time. Consulting Norai was one of those last-minute decisions my mother made after I had snapped — yelled at her — one night. Norai lived much closer to us than any of the other ponies she wanted to consult, and my mom needed something close by so I could be out of her hooves as soon as possible. I think she was worried that Norai would do some sort of wicked black magic to erase the demon and that it might have more negative side effects than good. I mean, I think that’s the reason why I hadn’t been brought to her first. But she became desperate. Little did she know Norai would come the closest to ever helping me…”

Zolt knew fully well that she was talking too much. But Bandicoot didn’t seem frightened, doubtful, or grossed out. His ears were pointed towards her, his eyes were locked firmly onto her, and he nodded along as she talked. It was rare for her to receive this sort of a response when she would ramble. She didn’t know how to cut herself off. Other ponies were supposed to do that for her.

“But she took you to Norai anyway,” Bandicoot tilted his head slightly.

And he was responding to her. Not cutting her off, or shutting her down, but properly, actually responding, as though he wanted the conversation to continue. As though he actually wanted to hear more. Even if he was faking it just for politeness— something Zolt heavily suspected — few ponies even had the kindness to fake it. She was starved for attention, surely, after weeks of being out in the middle of nowhere, and years of lacking much positive communication beforehand. But she was rusty. I’m bound to mess something up soon if I keep talking, she thought.

“Yes… I think she was so desperate for me to be fixed. For it to stop. Whether that meant I had to stop faking it or the demon had to be extinguished from my body, I think it didn’t matter to her, at least towards the end. Just as long as it would stop.”

“And it didn’t,” Bandicoot guessed.

“Not yet,” Zolt said instinctively. But, then, after a bit more thought, “maybe it never will.”

Immediately, Zolt regretted saying it. It must not’ve made her look like any easier of a child to take care of, to imply that it might just be a part of her for the rest of her life. Now, more for Bandicoot’s sake than for her own, she wished she could believe it’d ever be fixed. Would she really have to spend the rest of her life being such a burden to everyone else around her?

“Sorry,” Zolt said quickly. “That’s really bleak of me to say. I should try to be more positive. I wouldn’t want to be—”

“I’m sorry that I woke you up when you were asleep,” Bandicoot interjected. Zolt stared at him, confused. “I plan on apologizing sixteen more times.”

Silence fell. They both stared at each other.

Zolt, to her own surprise, burst out laughing, burying her face in the mattress to try to quiet herself. Bandicoot cracked a smile. “What?” He said, feigning defensiveness. “It’s a serious crime!”

Zolt rolled over onto her back, continuing to let out half-suppressed giggles. Her hooves waggled in the air. It had been a long time since she’d laughed, and even longer since she’d laughed around another pony. What did ponies usually do when they laughed? How did they move around?

In the moment, it mattered surprisingly little to her what other ponies were ‘supposed’ to do when they laughed. She cared only that she had been laughing.

Bandicoot permitted himself a small giggle before letting the moment settle. Then, he sat up. “Alright, I understand you lived in a lot of different places. I don’t like that it happened to you, but I don’t quite understand what that has to do with you not eating a proper meal in years.”

Slowly, Zolt’s expression sombered. “Oh, right.” She turned back around, sitting up to match Bandicoot. “Well…” she took a deep breath and sighed, “I think one of the earlier ponies my mother brought me to for ‘guidance’, some Chrysalian priest, said that hunger might be a way to keep the demon at bay. I suppose it wasn’t the worst advice ever, if one’s only goal is to get a voice out of their head. When I’m hungry or sick, it hardly ever shows itself. But then, I’m hungry and sick, and it still feels like a demon is crawling around inside…” As though to punctuate her words, her stomach snarled with hunger. “...Me. My family kept food from me as much as they could get away with to try to extinguish the demon through force. All it did was keep me really hungry.”

“So… if you’re no longer hungry, the demon will show itself more?”

Zolt’s ears fell back a little. She doubted she was going to get any food now after all. But it was too late to lie. “Yeah. But… for what it’s worth, I’d really rather have a voice telling myself that I look ugly in my head than I would want to keep being hungry… If food were being offered to me, I’m sure that I would accept it.”

“Does the demon ‘coming out more’ put me or anypony else more at risk of being harmed?” Bandicoot asked slowly. He didn’t seem afraid, but he was certainly choosing his words very carefully.

“No. A-At least, I don’t think so. The only times I’ve ever… h-hurt… another pony… was when my life was at serious risk. When I would be killed if I hadn’t retaliated. But… My promise hardly matters, doesn’t it? It’s still a demon inside me that could come out if it chose to, and could do serious harm. Just because it hasn’t reacted unreasonably yet doesn’t mean…” Zolt, trailing off, rested her head on her hooves, her positivity tanking into nonexistence.

“Then come on,” Bandicoot said, poking Zolt’s forelock gently. “My mom brought back enough food for three whales to eat, let alone three ponies. I don’t want you to be hungry on my birthday.” He gave her another reassuring smile, trying to comfort her in whatever way he could muster. She looked up at him.

“I-it’s your birthday?”

“Sure is! And usually, my birthdays are really terrible, and my wishes never come true. My mom swore that this one would be different. She was devastated to have found you in the condition you were in, mostly because she was really scared for you, but she also thought that it would be a world-crushing blow to me, right before my ‘best birthday ever’.” He got up, hopping cheerfully off the bed. He walked right up to the still-open bedroom door, resting a hoof on it and looking back at her. “And my first wish already came true, before the day has even barely started! So now, I have a second wish; for you to stop being hungry. My mom says you have to do whatever you can to help ponies’ wishes come true on their birthday. So, please eat?”

Zolt sighed, resolving herself to eat the cooked food she desperately wanted. She knew she might regret it later.

As she climbed out of bed, she asked, innocently enough, “What was your first wish, then?”

Bandicoot grinned even wider. “That you’d wake up safe.”

-+-+-

“I hear that your voice has returned, little one. Much earlier than expected,” Bandicoot’s mother laughed. “Norai told me that that might happen.”

“What do you mean?” Bandicoot and Zolt asked at the same time. Zolt looked at her hooves, face reddening at the fact she’d spoken at the same time as Bandicoot.

“Well, Norai told me that you have a tendency to heal from things a lot earlier than expected. Nothing too crazy - you took plenty of time to heal from your freeze, that’s for sure. Longer than expected there, if anything. But little things, like side-effects of potions, or scrapes and bruises. Things like that.”

“I never knew,” Zolt said, genuinely surprised. “I thought everyone healed from that stuff quickly.”

“Some ponies might,” Bandicoot’s mother balanced the three dinner plates on her hooves, bringing them into the next room over and laying them out at a large table. “But you, my dear, certainly have something special about you.”

Zolt was taken aback. So there’s even more that’s abnormal about me than I thought. She wasn’t sure whether to be dejected or proud. It didn’t seem like an entirely bad thing, but what caused it? She didn’t feel it was particularly worth it to be possessed by an evil, sick entity in order to be able to heal quickly from side-effects and small cuts. She would rather have scrapes mar her skin for a little bit longer than average if it meant lacking the demon.

Bandicoot gestured for Zolt to enter the dining room, which she obeyed. He followed closely behind her.

The dining room’s walls were a deep purple color with white trims. The doorway was a wide, open arch, which Zolt was fascinated by. She had to refrain from the urge to touch the arch with her hooves as she passed through it. There were a few white cabinets lining the ceiling on one wall, and a wide shelf sat underneath it, filled with cookbooks, statuettes of different animals, and a few cooking utensils (like a cheese grater that had several books leaning against it, which Zolt found particularly humorous). On top of the bookshelf sat a few different framed pictures that Zolt was unable to cast away her curiosity for. She made an immediate beeline to the shelf so she could see what kinds of things had been photographed and used as display.

“We can look around a bit later. Let’s put a pin in that for now, yeah? Don’t want the food to get cold!” Bandicoot’s mother gently redirected Zolt towards the rectangular dining table. It was made out of some sort of light-colored wood. The ‘tablecloth’ was an oval that covered the table only partially; Zolt thought of it as a rug for the table’s ornaments. The plates themselves were placed on unclothed wood. She couldn’t recognize any of the food that was on said dishes, but it intrigued her, and her hunger spiked painfully at the aroma they produced. The seats were an elegant King-Leafspring-XVI-style, white wood with purple cushions as accents, the inverse to the walls. Two plates were laid out next to each other, with the final plate set in front of the left. Bandicoot chose the left seat.

“W-Which seat is mine?” Zolt asked Bandicoot quietly, hoping his mother couldn’t hear.

“You could sit anywhere,” Bandicoot averred, before adding less confidently, “it’s okay if you want to sit next to me, though.”

Zolt nervously clambered into the seat next to Bandicoot, wondering if Bandicoot’s mother might get upset at Zolt’s seating choice. What if Bandicoot’s mother had wanted to sit next to her son? That seemed pretty reasonable for a mother to want to do.

“What's all this?” Zolt asked, gesturing towards the plate in front of her, trying to be as polite as possible.

Bandicoot’s mouth fell open in shock as he glared at the filly. “You haven't had any of these before?”

Zolt shook her head dejectedly. “The only things we would eat back in Gardenia were usually really simple, all things considered. More ‘nourishment’ than ‘cuisine’. Usually, we just ate animals and bugs cooked over a fire, or homemade bread and cheese and butter… We have a few more complicated recipes, don’t get me wrong, but none of it looks anything like this.”

“There’s still so much that the rest of the world doesn’t know about that strange state,” Bandicoot’s mother stated gently, laying out seasoning shakers. Zolt stared at the two pieces with confusion. Both shakers were small, and glass, so their contents could be easily seen. But Zolt had never seen anything like the powder that was inside. One seemed to be made of pure white, like snow, and the other looked like mashed-up rocks with bits of red and white inside, or like a strange, red-heavy galaxy. They wore strange metal hats, with holes poked in them. Were they alive? Did they need to breathe? Zolt barely heard as Bandicoot's mother continued, “It’s such a mysterious place as far as the rest of the world is concerned. I’ve never heard of a pony leaving aside from Norai. They really must love it there.”

Zolt looked closer at the food on her plate. There was a strange block of some off-white foodstuff, with brownish speckles peppered across its visible surface. On top of the strange oblong object was a drippy topping of some sort, white in color, and what Zolt assumed were tomatoes. She disliked tomatoes, but the pieces were small, and she was so hungry that it truly mattered to her very little. One of the smaller foods sitting next to it on her platter was very, very yellow, which Zolt assumed had to involve cheese in some way: there was a mass of mysterious arch-shaped bits piled on top of one another, covered with the yellow goop. That was the scariest-looking one to Zolt. The next "secondary food" was a few slices of what she could only assume were roasted carrots, coated in some kind of powder (much like what sat in the strange glass bottles) and mixed in with green beans, peas, and corn. This was the most familiar to Zolt, and what she was the least scared of on her entire plate. Finally, the last food item, similar to the yellow dish, was a big pile of stuff. Unlike the arch-shaped objects, these were a bright orange color and oblong with green bits inside. The chunks were tiny, much tinier than the ones making up the yellow dish. The orange color made Zolt think that perhaps these were orange bell peppers cut into tiny bits, but the smell of the dish didn’t give her much confidence in this idea.

“How do I go about eating this stuff? Do I use these things?” Zolt grabbed the pokey, four-pronged piece of metal sat in front of her. Bandicoot had already grabbed his and used it to spear a piece of the yellowy food.

Bandicoot immediately took up the opportunity to teach Zolt about the food that was on her plate, as though he had been waiting years for just such an opportunity.

“Since it’s my birthday, it’s sort of a mix of a few different things I really like from a few different shops and restaurants in the nearest cities. So you have a burrito—”

“Brr-ito,” Zolt repeated quietly to herself.

“And it’s like a tortilla — which is like a sort of bread — wrapped around a bunch of fillings, which could be anything, really — gah. It’s really hard to explain burritos, isn’t it?”

“So there’s stuff inside that weird wrapped-up bread?”

“Yeah!”

“And on top of it?”

“It looks like the toppings are queso and diced tomatoes on yours. But Mom brought a lot of food back, so there are other types if you don't like this one,” Bandicoot leaned closer to Zolt’s dish to check for any glaring details he might have forgotten to mention.

"There's a shop in the marketplace specializing in burritos; you can order them pre-made or get ingredients to make your own. These were pre-made, but there's ingredients to make your own later. I can teach you how to wrap them," Bandicoot's mother finally took her seat in front of her son, smiling with warmth and patience directed at Zolt. She didn't mind answering Zolt's questions, especially if it helped her feel more welcomed in their home. Grabbing the salt shaker, she started to season her Casiceran rice, trying not to snort with amusement at how Zolt's eyes went huge, learning for the first time how seasoning worked.

“What’s kay-soh?” Zolt murmured, her head feeling dizzied from all this new information.

“It’s like… cheese, but different, but still cheese.”

Bandicoot’s mother explained, “The burrito originates from the state of Casicero, but all sorts of different states have been making their own interpretations of the dish. Queso is actually a Minervan food. Bandicoot described it best - cheese, but different, but still cheese! The burrito isn’t the same as Casicerans used to make, but it’s still delicious. You have nothing to worry about,”

This made Zolt feel a little better, surprisingly, since the phrase ‘you have nothing to worry about’ is, in fact, a very anxiety-inducing phrase to hear most of the time.

“To answer your initial question, you can eat the burrito with utensils. Yours has queso on top, so it’s probably a good idea to use a knife and fork, yeah. Usually, if you’re meant to eat them with your hooves, there will be metal foil wrapped around one side so the fillings don’t fall out.”

Zolt picked up the glimmering silverware that had been placed neatly next to the blue dinner plate. “Well… I guess I’ve just gotta go for it.”

“Well said!” Bandicoot’s mother laughed cheerfully, a sound that made Zolt jump at first.

“As for the other stuff, when you get to them, there’s Casic rice - a style of rice originating from Casicero, as you might expect - mixed vegetables, and macaroni and cheese. Macaroni and cheese can either be a side or a main dish, and it’s pretty popular in these parts.” Bandicoot's mother gestured towards Bandicoot, who had given up on explaining what different types of foods there were and had instead turned his attention towards annihilating the "macaroni and cheese".

Zolt, carefully as she could, cut into the burrito. The tortilla was easy enough to slice through, but the fillings weren’t perfectly aligned as she had hoped. Instead, she had to saw through it a bit, making something of a mess. She felt self-conscious about how messy her cut had been, but felt a bit better when she looked at the other two’s dishes and realized they weren’t making clean cuts, either. “Are you supposed to eat it all at once or one at a time?”

“Whatever you prefer,” Bandicoot’s mother nodded encouragingly with a smile. “Different ponies eat in different ways.”

“Hmm,” Zolt hummed to herself, staring at what she could see of the burrito’s contents. She was dissatisfied with the 'however you want to' conclusion; what was the more normal way to do it? Still, she figured Bandicoot's mother wouldn't have given an answer that would set her up for failure. She figured she'd just play it by ear, then. She cut into her 'burrito' again, making a proper slice and picking up as much of it as she could with her fork. She could see more queso, or perhaps a different white sauce, a light-colored meat that appeared to be some sort of poultry, large slices of bell pepper (thankfully something familiar), stringy cheese, mushy beans, and some red sauce. Nothing about it looked too terrifying. And she was hungry, so it would surely taste the best it possibly could with her stomach in such an indiscriminate state.

She took a big bite and nearly coughed the food back out with how much flavor suddenly attacked her at once. The meat — which she realized quickly was chicken — was juicy and, surprisingly, more flavorful than usual! Is this what it meant for something to be 'well-seasoned'? Zolt was hardly familiar with any seasoning at all. The closest she’d gotten to experiencing seasoning like this was "zezzic", a Gardenian spice made from a mixture of plants. Maybe garnishes would count as seasoning, in which case, she had had some of those. Nothing like this. The queso was smooth and flavorful, the stringy cheese didn't clash with the other flavors and, if anything, enhanced them, the beans were not too overpowering but came through enough to be noticeable… and, best of all, the other ingredients packed so much of a punch and the tomatoes were so small that the red chunks barely registered! It was a great sensation, but incredibly overpowering and upsetting at the same time. She was embarrassed, even a bit horrified, to be sitting in the same room as the ponies that had taken her in while she was experiencing such a feeling.

Without her understanding why, her hooves began to shake, seeming all the more noticeable with how the glint of the silverware moved with them. Her eyes welled up with tears before she could even realize it was happening. She started to panic, hating the fact that she was about to cry, perhaps even break down, in front of these complete strangers. Strangers that had shown her kindness. Listened to her. Saved her from dying in the middle of a blizzard. Strangers who didn’t deserve to have to navigate around a whiny pony like Zolt, crying over a ‘brr-ito’.

Bandicoot, despite his mother having Zolt more directly in her line of sight, was the first to notice Zolt’s reaction. He dropped the fork he had been eating from, forgetting his manners entirely and speaking with his mouth full. “Zolt? Wuh’s wrong?” He put a panicked hoof on her forearm.

“I-I don’t know,” Zolt muttered, completely earnest. “I’ve just never had anything like this before. I don’t know why it’s got me…”

“It’s okay, dear,” Bandicoot’s mother set her own eating utensils down, reaching a hoof forward and resting it against Zolt’s. It had been a while since Zolt had been physically reassured, too, and this hit her like a train. Great tears spilled out of Zolt's eyes before she could even understand why they were there, and with her free hoof she tried desperately to wipe them out of the way.

“I don’t want to ruin your birthday,” Zolt’s voice sounded meek. She looked over at Bandicoot, continuing to swipe at her eyes.

“It isn’t ruining my birthday,” Bandicoot said quickly. He’d never had to comfort a pony like this before, let alone a pony he knew so little about. He hadn’t had time to learn the best types of things to do in these sorts of situations. “I’m sad that you’re upset, but it isn’t ‘ruining’ anything. It’s how you feel; I’d feel like my birthday was more ‘ruined’ if you only pretended to be happy the whole time.”

“It’s not that I’m unhappy,” Zolt whimpered, trying to get a hold of herself with only small success. “Everything is just so different and it’s giving me the sneaking suspicion that none of this is real. But I’ve never dreamt of anything like this before, where it’s all so vivid and… warm…” Zolt looked around. How could her mind have come up with all of these details, let alone stuff that was so unfamiliar to her? Entire foods she hadn’t known to exist?

“I should have figured it might be overwhelming,” Bandicoot’s mother sighed softly. “I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t apologize!” Zolt said quickly, fearful that she might be getting too close to ‘yelling’ territory. “I guess it’s just… I’m surprised. Before I had initially woken up, I was dying. I was freezing in the ice and cold after weeks of running through woods, fields, and rivers. I was about to die, and now I’m here.”

“I assure you, this is no ‘heaven’, if that’s what you’re trying to say,” the violet mare scoffed a little at the thought, “especially to find such a young filly, broken, and very-nearly dead.”

“But it’s the closest I’ve ever gotten. A-At least, I think it is. Maybe not the closest I’ve gotten to dying—” Bandicoot noticeably winced at these words, “—but the closest I’ve gotten to anything good happening. This isn’t a cottage carved into a huge tree, or a hole dug in the ground. It isn’t some run-down hospital that’s been standing for a few thousand years. We’re in a regular, normal house. Eating food I’ve never heard of at all,”

Zolt’s body begged for her to continue eating, but her heart was hurting her even more.

“Gardenia is very much cut off from the rest of the world,” Bandicoot’s mother explained, “I suppose it didn’t occur to me just how different things would be there, but yes. Around here, there aren’t usually trees big enough for houses to be carved into them. We don’t normally dig holes in the ground for shelter. It is different outside of Gardenia, by a long shot. But while I do pride myself on keeping my house as close to a safe haven as I possibly can, the world outside isn’t nearly so merciful. It’s going to be stressful, and hard, I think, for you to adjust. But, whatever happened to you in those thick-wooded forests was something that you had every right to escape from. You’ve managed to survive conditions that Bandicoot and I likely wouldn’t be able to fully conceive of. You deserve to eat food that you like. So even if you must cry, please don’t let the newness, even the goodness, stop you from doing what you need to do for yourself.”

Bandicoot and his mother had both refused to eat any more of their food until Zolt did. So, if for no other reason than allowing the two ponies who had rescued her to eat, Zolt tearfully continued to consume what may have been the best food she had ever had in her life. Once she had started to eat, she found it hard to stop. Tears went away with every bite of food that she swallowed. She had never known food to be something so good, and so healing.

The mixed vegetables, Zolt had tried next. They were good, and thankfully a good anchor for Zolt. It gave her some nostalgia for home, but nothing close to homesickness. She may never feel homesick in her entire life, and she felt content with that. The ‘macaroni and cheese’ blew Zolt away. The Casic rice was a perfect side to compliment all of the accompanying foods.

By the time Zolt had stopped to take a breather, her plate was clean, and she was painfully full.

“I am a bit excited you haven’t tried many types of food,” Bandicoot admitted as the three ponies cleaned up the leftovers from their lunch. Zolt had only been able to eat her one plate, Bandicoot one and a half, and Bandicoot’s mother two. Zolt had insisted that she would eat if she could muster to and that she would eat more of the leftovers later, which finally seemed to quell her new guardians' fears. Bandicoot was working with Zolt to store the remaining leftovers properly. Zolt held the "Tupperware" and helped scoop the remaining rice into it. “It means that there’s a lot that we can show you. You probably won’t like everything. That’s normal. There’s a lot that I don’t like,”

“I can’t imagine not liking this stuff,” Zolt said with a small smile on her face. She was surprised the voice in her head hadn’t ruined the moment this time. Not yet. Sometimes it slept for a long time, she supposed. She felt happy smiling with the confidence that, at least in this moment, it was okay.

“Me neither,” Bandicoot agreed.

A plate slipped out of Bandicoot's mother’s hooves, splashing into the sinkful of hot, soapy water. Some of the water jumped up, splashing against the fur of her chest.

“Fuck!” She hissed, only managing to suppress her voice somewhat. Zolt and Bandicoot overheard.

“You shouldn’t swear, Ms. Bandicoot,” Zolt said, a playful tone to her voice. “The gods and goddesses would never do that, and I’m sure they drop plates all the time!”

Bandicoot’s mother laughed a bit at this.

“Yeah, I’m sure the deities would never say words like that…”

-+-+-

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Soleil hissed, repeatedly hitting the side of her head with her hoof to accentuate her words.

“What’s wrong?” Sparkshooter asked, sarcasm permeating through his tone.

“This is complete bullshit,” Soleil continued, either not picking up on Sparkshooter’s sarcasm, or not caring. She watched as her right-hoof stallion turned his attention back to the banners he had been in the process of decorating the hall with. “Norai just sent me a letter. Zolt was found. By Bandicoot and Sweet Tooth. It’s a good thing she was found, but how did she cross that huge of a distance to get there? What are the chances she’d end up with those two ponies? Out of anyone that could find her! She wasn’t supposed to meet Bandicoot for another several years!”

Sparkshooter put a hoof to his chin, thinking. “...Which one’s Zolt again?”

“What do you mean, ‘Which one’s Zolt again’? She’s the fiftieth—”

“Oh, yes! Her. Well, what’s really the big deal about her meeting the guy a bit early?”

“We had a whole thing going! And now that’s ruined because she’s somehow able to survive in unsurvivable conditions?! I never would have expected this. I hate not being able to expect things.”

“Boy, don’t I know it,” Sparkshooter rolled his eyes. He hammered away at the final nail, causing it to dig its way into the skin of the wall. “Maybe we should just see what happens. Trying to plot out an entire lifespan hasn’t been working out lately, has it?”

“I’ve only been doing that for the past 250 years. Before that, deities had no dominion! At least, not as they do now. And it didn’t work before that.”

“It’s not been working for the last 250 years, either. So she met a pony a few years too early. Doesn’t that mean, in its own way, that’s what was meant to be?”

Chapter 3 - Danger

Nearly a week had passed since Zolt had first woken up in Bandicoot and his mother’s — Sweet Tooth’s — home. It had taken her several days to decide that she really did want to remain a part of the household. Guilt had overrun her for those first few days. Every time she ate their food, she felt like she didn’t deserve to do so. Every time she slept in their guest bed, she felt that she was only wasting their precious space. Often she was compelled to do some kind of work for the family to justify her presence in their home, but most of the time she was prevented from doing much by Ms. Sweet herself.

“You’re only ten years old,” Ms. Sweet had reminded Zolt repeatedly, “ten-year-olds don’t have to do hard work. You've been through enough as-is. You're allowed to take a break.”

But Zolt was stubborn, as was her guilt.

So, after the young filly’s continuous efforts to help around the house, she and her new guardian had made a compromise: Zolt was now to accompany Sweet Tooth on her grocery runs to the nearby town (and the further city, when needed). While the meat the family ate came primarily from Sweet Tooth’s hunting, this wasn’t the case for all animal products. Even the nuts and berries gathered from trees, bushes, and shrubs didn’t make up the remainder of the family’s diet, either. Things like milk, bread, beef stock, and carrots still had to be purchased from a grocer, or a farmer directly. Zolt was fascinated by this information. She had never been to a market for food before. The only kinds of markets she had ever seen back in Gardenia were for magickal supplies or medicinal products - maybe the occasional booth for crafts, like baskets and woodcarvings. Zolt didn’t even think she had had milk before. Since out-of-state imports weren’t permitted in Gardenia, she would have had to access milk through a cow farm within the state, and she was inclined to believe that those didn’t exist. She had never even seen a cow in pony before.

Zolt and Bandicoot were now preparing for Zolt’s first-ever grocery run, and she couldn’t be more excited.

When he had learned that Zolt was going on the grocery run with his mother, Bandicoot inexplicably decided he would come along too. Ms. Sweet had teased him for “not wanting to be away from Zolt”, sure, but it would be worth it to… well, not be away from Zolt. He had been enjoying her presence over the last few days, but it wasn’t in a weird way like his mother seemed to think. He had never really had any sort of close friend before. Or friends that were allowed in his house, for that matter - upon learning that his mother was a ‘friend to the Gods’, his peers always had way too many annoying questions about his mother, her personal life, and by extension, Bandicoot and his personal life. How many deities had he met? What were they like? Were they really as powerful as everypony said? Which deities were his favorite? None of it was what Bandicoot had any interest in talking about, especially since it quickly became the only part of his life that anypony had any interest in learning about. Everything else became obsolete when they knew that his mother had met the Great Goddess Soleil herself.

It was impossible not to know that Ms. Sweet was involved with deity-related matters when entering the Sweet-Bandicoot home. Ms. Sweet loved taking photos and even photo-editing as a side hobby. As a result, pictures were strewn everywhere throughout the house whether they were organized in expansive photo albums, hung in varying patterns along the walls, or polaroids lying in random piles on bookshelves or nightstands. Many of these pictures involved her interactions with the deities, or even deities in different settings themselves. It was a bit strange having a picture of Teñuni, the War Goddess, hanging in the living room, but the pictures did look nice. Bandicoot would never tell his mother that, though. He let her believe he disliked them.

Bandicoot was trying to attach a horseshoe to one of his back hooves, trying to get the placement just right, when he suddenly stopped, staring intently at the glass door. Much of the walls on both opposing sides of the living room consisted of enormous glass walls with smaller sections of glass delineated from the rest - proper sliding-glass doors, accented with black plastic. Bandicoot, seeming to have seen something unusual, gawked at the glass door to his and Zolt’s left; the one leading to the backyard area. His horseshoe hung forgotten in one hoof.

Zolt, putting on a pair of warm socks Ms. Sweet had gotten her, paused to follow Bandicoot’s gaze to the glass door. But it was such early morning that darkness still enshrouded the world outside. She couldn't see anything at all.

“What's wrong?” She asked, pulling her final sock as high up as she could and reaching for her brand-new light blue jacket.

“I saw something moving. It looked as big as a pony.”

Zolt looked at Bandicoot with mild suspicion, then back at the glass door, unsure of how to feel. The eye could play lots of tricks when it was dark out; she had lots of experience with that. But she didn’t want to discredit him so quickly, as others had done to her in the past. There were a few natural things it could have been, after all. Like bears, and non-sentient deer! Maybe even wolves…

“What did it look like?” Zolt asked, pulling her new jacket (“new” meaning “newly hers” in this case — the jacket previously belonged to Bandicoot) on and fumbling to zip it up. She quickly became distracted with the task, thinking about how much she liked the jacket’s color. It was a rather specific shade of blue. She then started to wonder what exactly this shade of blue was called. She liked to know the exact shades of different colors, particularly those she liked. When she finally refocused on Bandi’s words, she’d missed half of what he had said.

“ — but just black. And big.”

“Hmm.”

It happened quickly. From the bedroom hallway across the room from the two foals, Bandicoot’s mother started to enter the room. Right as she had crossed the threshold between hallway and living room, the glass wall that Bandicoot had been looking at exploded inwards, shattered glass flying in towards them.

Ms. Sweet was the first to react, leaping through the air to try to grab both children and shield them from the blast. Zolt was the closest to her and the only one she caught. Bandicoot was just a bit too far away, and Ms. Sweet fell to the ground with Zolt clutched in her hooves and wings. By the time the world settled, Bandicoot was gone, and the gaping hole in the wall let in a noticeable cold chill. There was icy blue light, bright enough to illuminate much of the visible outdoor area, emanating from the horn of a cloaked pony. The light was painful to stare at directly, making it hard to decipher what was near the light. But what Zolt could make out made her blood freeze. She saw Bandicoot clutched onto by the neck, with a gleaming blade held uncomfortably close to his stomach. It was an incredibly unwelcome sight, as far as she was concerned, and it made her own stomach do somersaults.

Without intention, a burst of energy erupted from her body, knocking Ms. Sweet off of her. Before she could process what was happening she was standing, staring at this strange figure she had never before seen. It spoke, in a somewhat feminine-sounding, authoritative voice.

“I do not wish to harm the sunrise. Only the dusk,”

Zolt didn’t understand what this weird pony was talking about. The cloaked pony seemed to understand this – even, perhaps, revel in it.

“Step forward, little one, and the orange one won’t be hurt.”

Zolt had no reason to trust the apparition that had not only violated her fledgling sense of safety but threatened to hurt a pony that mattered a lot to her.

Yet, even despite this lack of trust, she felt she had no other choice but to do as they said.

Zolt took a few cautious steps closer. An arrow from one of Ms. Sweet’s bows whizzed past her, heading straight for the cloaked pony. She instinctively dropped to the ground even though the arrow was doomed to miss her anyway. It nearly struck its target, but a simple levitation spell practically scooped the arrow out of the air before it could break clothing or skin. A whiteish-blue aura surrounded the arrow, not gripping it particularly tightly — the arrow bobbed around gently in the magical field.

Even despite the colored aura, Zolt could see that the tip of the arrow was dipped in a deep bluish or purplish color. She also knew that Ms. Sweet had some different types of arrows with magical or poisonous effects.

Evidently, this one had both.

After only a few seconds of the pony’s magic grasping the arrow — loose as the grip was — and right as the strange cloaked pony had started to speak, a dark, spindly energy started to creep out of the arrowhead until the pony’s entire magical field was blackened. They screamed in apparent pain the moment the poisonous shadow made an appearance. Zolt realized, with swelling admiration, that Ms. Sweet had not intended for the arrow to burrow itself into the flesh. Mrs. Sweet had known that the pony, being a unicorn, would be capable of seeing and stopping the arrow. She wanted them to. That, it seemed, was how the ‘venom’ was activated: contact with an aural field. And activate, it did.

The arrow fell meekly to the ground when even the pony's horn was surrounded by this new magical poison. The arrow now seemed completely normal aside from a few scorch marks. It lay there innocently as though it had not just debilitatingly injured a living being. The pony strained themselves to cast a spell but failed.

This strange hooded pony, in a rage, threw Bandicoot to the gravel with as much force as they could muster. The guttural grunt that left Bandicoot as he slammed into the small, sharp rocks was gut-wrenching. Zolt’s prior satisfaction at realizing Ms. Sweet’s ingenious move was immediately obliterated and replaced solely with worry for her closest friend.

She instantly saw red. But this monster apparently did, too. They launched towards her, lifting two shaky, long-sleeved hooves. “Soleil will revel in your bloodshed!” The pony's voice was raspy, furiously insistent, and horrifying.

“Soleil wouldn't revel in anypony’s bloodshed!” Ms. Sweet shouted defiantly from far behind Zolt. At the same time, Zolt was jumping back with a flutter of her wings to avoid being grabbed and throttled by this… this thing. The pony’s coat was navy blue, judging by its hooves. It was hard to tell what the rest of it looked like aside from the fact it had a long, sharp horn.

“Soleil, our Goddess, might act as though she doesn't want anyone to suffer, but we know it is an act. We are connected with her in spirit! We know that she wishes every day for every rotten demon to be expunged from the earth!”

Another arrow zipped past Zolt, expertly aimed for the deranged pony’s shoulder. The pony didn't seem to react in time to dodge, not used to having to dodge things directly. The arrow embedded itself with a strange noise Zolt had never heard before. Schnk! Zolt winced, immediately feeling her own shoulder tingle at the thought of such a thing happening to her.

The cloaked figure screamed, lunging forward once more and this time catching Zolt off guard. Its hooves wrapped around her neck and squeezed so tightly that Zolt thought her neck might be crushed like an empty soda can before she could ever even choke. She tried to scream but no breath came out, and the all-too-familiar red-hot searing bloom of pain started up in the back of her neck, where her scar was. She tried yet again to scream — hating the feeling of her breath bubbling at the bottom of her throat where it could not pass the now-narrow passage through her throat —then to wriggle free, but the pony was too enraged, too filled with adrenaline and brute strength, to let that happen.

Ms. Sweet was running towards the assailant, preparing to stomp it with all the force that she could manage with her front two hooves. She could do a lot more damage if she bucked with her back hooves, and she knew it, but she wasn't as accurate with this kind of move and she could accidentally hit Zolt instead on the attempt. So the more accurate, less powerful hoof-slam it was!

But before Ms. Sweet could reach her target, the sound of a bloodcurdling scream froze her with terror. Her eyes darted to where her son had landed on the ground moments before, terrified that the scream had been his. Alas, Bandicoot was gone, nowhere to be found, and the scream hadn’t seemed to be his after all.

An enormous dark gray head, almost reminiscent structurally to a bull’s, had emerged from the back of Zolt’s neck, attached by a tapering string. Where the string was closest to head and neck, it thickened into a black-and-white striped cone. In parts not closely attached to either head or foal, this line connecting the two beings was so thin that no striped pattern could be observed there, inspiring Sweet Tooth to think the thicker striped pieces were functionally like nails keeping slabs of wood attached to each other.

This head on a string was so powerful in its expulsion from Zolt’s neck that the thick part of the strange striped line pierced clean through the hoof that had been choking her. One moment, the hoof was intact, and the next consecutive moment there was splintered keratin, chunks of hot flesh and hoof and bone flying as though they were as light and free as water itself. It made no physical sense - how had this huge head passed through the pony’s hooves without blowing them clean off? Whatever it was that had happened, it had left the hooves just intact enough to experience what must have been an insurmountable amount of pain.

This dangerous cloaked pony was now physically attached to Zolt, its hoof now functioning like an earlobe molded around a piece of jewelry that had pierced through it. It was a horrifying thought and an even more horrifying sight.

So that's her demon, Ms. Sweet thought, taking in all the visual details she could. Immediately, the demon’s power was overwhelming to the senses. Ms. Sweet subconsciously took a few steps back, a wing unfurling with discomfort as she looked around for her son. He was still nowhere to be found. Where is he? Where’s my son? Anxiety flooded her mind and made it hard to think about anything else except protecting Bandicoot.

“Y-you cut off my hoof!” The cloaked pony screamed, sounding much too… genuine. Too much like a normal, reasonable pony would in this type of situation. The pony was clearly an evil sort that Ms. Sweet did not want to pity even in the slightest. But the agony they were surely feeling at this moment made it difficult not to. But not impossible. Flashes of the sight of her son being held by the neck, a knife to his stomach, was sufficient in making all sense of guilt trickle away.

The huge gray head had one blue eye and one yellow eye, just like Zolt, but the colors of these were much more desaturated and dark than Zolt’s — including its mane. Its right eye was blue, though, in contrast to Zolt’s. These mismatched eyes looked somehow surprised and terribly bored at the same exact time. The creature whirled itself to point downwards, looking intently at the cloaked figure’s hoofwound, now starting to ooze as the string moved with the floating head’s movements, widening the hoof’s hole even further as it wriggled around. “That doesn't look ‘cut off’ to me,” it said, its voice surprisingly cool, feminine, and pony-like. None of these three adjectives were what Ms. Sweet would have expected. Ms. Sweet had expected hisses, snarls, and growls, but to see this animal speaking articulately, with an identifiable calmness… Something about it was more unsettling to her than if it had been a feral, incomprehensible beast.

The creature had very flat, broad teeth when it initially spoke. But it left its mouth open while deciding to… change its teeth. It was a fascinating, yet upsetting, thing to witness. The teeth themselves morphed, with two of its flat teeth becoming canines and then continuing to grow into large, curved fangs, reminiscent of a Sabertooth Tiger. The other teeth receded into smaller curved points, reminding Ms. Sweet of cat claws. Zolt thought they were like sharp waves in an ocean.

The cloaked pony wriggled with discomfort, near-shouting with fright.

“This would be ‘cut off’!” Zolt clenched her eyes shut and looked away as the demon shrunk itself down to a size more suitable for slicing through hoof with its newly-sharp teeth. A grotesque snapping squish commemorated the official separation of bone and flesh, nerve and joint, tendon and ligament. Zolt’s ears flattened as tightly as they could against her head, partially to block out the sound as much as possible but also to prevent the spattering blood from infiltrating places it shouldn't. It was a good call — soon the feeling of thick, wet warmth was sludging against her skin, coating nearly half of her face and a significant amount of her shoulder and chest.

Her mind started to shut itself off. She could tell that it was. She knew she should feel so much more panicked. She should maybe even start hyperventilating, screaming, crying, thrashing. But instead, here she sat, dead-silent, as though moving or reacting put her at risk somehow. She was completely and utterly shell-shocked; her mind was trying to force itself away from what she could see right in front of her. What she could feel, dripping slowly down her cheeks and shoulder.

She closed her eyes, a tremble starting at her core. She tried to imagine some happy memory, some anchor to hold her mind down and prevent it from flying away. Yesterday, she and Bandicoot spent nearly the entire day together as he taught her the mechanics of several different “video games”. Zolt was so new to them, and new to being around another pony her age for so long all at once, but both were a pleasant new. An enjoyable new. This… this was no such kind of “new”. It was incredibly difficult to hold onto the feeling of safety, warmth, and happiness. It felt as though this small little world she had managed to find herself in had now been bastardized, ruined, and snatched away from her. She feared she would never have a day like that again.

The cloaked pony, now free from its attachment to Zolt, used its new mobility to stumble backward. It looked like it wanted to run away, but had no balance or sense to do so. With a pathetic grunt, it collapsed to the ground. A multicolored aura sparked up around Zolt’s demon’s… horn? Ms. Sweet saw what looked to be a pumpkin or apple stem barely emerging from the creature’s hair. She had no idea that that was supposed to be a horn until it had produced its own magic. Ms. Sweet, in her own miniature state of shock, found herself unable to do much except gawk at the rainbow glow the demon produced. She never thought that a demon could have such a colorful magical field. It seemed too… well, innocent. Light. Cheery.

A long, sharp icicle began to form amidst the colorful energy. In seconds, it had been as vivid and clear as real ice, as though all the different hues had stacked on top of one another to build the perfect icicle. Ms. Sweet wondered if it was real ice or if it was merely an illusion; a mockery of ‘real’ ice magic.

Without another word, the body-less beast shot this spike of cold straight into the neck of the cloaked pony, ripping through its clothing and its skin. There was only a short gurgle before everything about it stopped: its movements, its sounds, its thoughts. Its life.

Zolt let out a terrified sob, turning away with a mind to run absolutely anywhere other than there. Once again escaping. Once again finding somewhere else to be. The demon and her weren’t the same soul, but they were connected souls. That which the demon did, Zolt was in some way responsible for. If Zolt had been quicker, if her mind had been working better and she had dodged the cloaked pony’s attack the second time, maybe the demon would have never had to show itself. Maybe… this pony would still be alive. She killed a pony. It was just like—

A small “battle cry” knocked Zolt out of her thoughts. “Hyaaaah!!” She looked up to see a blur of orange flying through the air, propelled by inexperienced wings. Bandicoot was holding an axe that was much too heavy for him. He barely managed to keep his grip on the very end of the handle, the blade at the complete mercy of gravity. He tried to use the momentum of his flight to throw the axe into the hooded pony, but it was incredibly ineffective. The blade barely nudged the pony’s clothing before clattering onto the gravel beneath.

“Oh. It was already dead,” Bandicoot said with such an innocent tone that Zolt almost barked out a laugh. She might have been able to, if it weren’t for the searing pain in her neck returning; the demon was leaving its physical state, something that caused Zolt a lot more pain than she wished it did. Once it had finally gone, Zolt felt completely exhausted. She didn't think she could run if she had wanted to. Certainly, her legs ached to just go, her wings twitched with the desire to carry her into the air and miles away from here. But any attempt to actually move her legs was met with a great deal of protest. Her mind, her spirit, her body… all of it was failing her all at once. She wanted to lay down right there in the dirt and sleep the entire day away.

“I'm sorry,” she blurted out, horrified that, now that Bandi and his mom had seen the demon show its face, let alone what the demon had done, she would be ostracized. She was fine with the idea of running away herself, but being sent away? That had a whole other sting to it.

“Why?” Ms. Sweet asked, grabbing the axe off of the ground with a level of ease that clearly embarrassed her son. She looked around, although it was hard to see much in the darkness. The sun was soon to make an appearance, as evident by the deep blue that was beginning to break through the blackness of the sky. She knew that this psychotic unicorn had to be a member of some sort of cult, in which case, there were likely many more members. Was this pony acting alone as a result of some sort of mental break? How did it know that Zolt was here? Were they still in immediate danger? Would the other cultists soon arrive to take their revenge?

“I-I just killed a pony! Don't you care? I didn't think I'd ever… it's just…” Zolt wobbled. She tried desperately to get her thoughts in order, but the pressing matter of standing was more important. She stumbled a little, kneeling on the ground as Bandicoot dropped everything — even his own embarrassment — to support her weight against him and help her stay balanced.

“You were protecting yourself and us,” Bandicoot said, watching as his mother started to undo the clothing wrapping the corpse’s body.

“All we've learned is to never put our hooves on the back of your neck,” Ms. Sweet said, a small laugh leaving her. The laugh seemed to be more closely related to stress than mirth.

The dead pony’s clothing was removed, and Ms. Sweet dug through the pockets to find several sacrificial blades, a small bag of strange herbs and sticks, a bright green feather, and a tiny dead mouse. Bandi immediately asked to see the mouse, which Ms. Sweet obliged. She got up and walked towards the snow, picking it up in heaping hooffulls and bringing them back to the body. Zolt thought at first she was going to bury the body in the snow, but instead, she packed the snow down into a wide, flat, rough square. It took several trips for her to do this, in which Bandi looked at the mouse from every angle. He seemed more distraught about the mouse being dead than the pony, and Zolt almost had to agree. The mouse had a clean “X” shape carved into its chest, the intersection of which had been punctured through many times by some tiny object, judging by the smaller holes. The mouse’s eyes were gone, its fur still mostly intact.

“I hope they found the mouse already dead,” Bandi mumbled. “Killing it is just mean.”

With a sigh, Bandi took the mouse to a designated spot and buried it shallowly in the snow. Zolt didn't want to be the one to tell him that eventually, the snow would melt, leaving behind rotted mouse, there for all to see (and smell).

Ms. Sweet had taken one of the twigs from the bag of herbs, inspected it closely, and then used it to draw a strange, detailed shape in the short snow “platform” she had packed next to the corpse. Zolt wanted to ask rapid-fire questions about what Ms. Sweet was doing and why, but she also needed to bathe and/or sleep as soon as ponyly possible.

“I have to get this stuff off me,” Zolt said, the exhaustion finally making an appearance in her voice and expression, “is it okay if I just go do that?”

“Okay,” Bandicoot nodded, hoping his mother would have agreed with such an allowance. He was just glad that she hadn’t run away. She looked like she had really wanted to for a second there.

*~*~*

The shower had been long and filled with stress. She spent most of the shower’s duration sitting in the tub, water hitting her from above, idly scrubbing at the parts of her body that had touched blood. Her coat seemed to be stained with it; it took two or three different soap-washes to get out most of the reddish pigment, and even still, she could feel the blood still sticking on her. Her mind kept flashing back to how it had felt, what she had seen, and the fact that a pony that had woken up that morning, with thoughts of their own, assumably a family of their own, and ideas, aspirations, dreams, was now dead. Something that had been a working machine was now empty and soulless, broken down and left somewhere. All because of her.

She thought about how she might be imprisoned for what she had done, although she knew that foals were rarely incarcerated. She also had two credible ponies who could stick up for her if anyone asked questions. Still, the idea of being taken away to a stone-cold cell was extremely worrying, especially if she was thrown in with criminal stallions. Those were her least favorite types of ponies to be around.

She didn't want to run away, as much as her body urged her to. She reached the ultimate conclusion that she should wait until she was sure that the Sweets wanted her gone for good. She decided that they would probably be too nice to outright banish her, so it was up to her to discern what they were really feeling.

She scrubbed herself down one last time, trying hard to stave off the mental images of death, and exited the shower, drying her coat a bit too thoroughly with the towel. After the shower was said and done, her coat was practically rubbed raw and had a splotchy pinkish tinge in the places she had given the most attention to. And yet still she didn’t feel clean.

Sighing, she tossed her towel into the bathroom hamper and crept into the living room, anxiety fizzing up in her chest. Bandi was sitting on the couch, his back facing her, staring at the broken window. Zolt was shocked to see that, although the window was broken, the gash was only a few feet wide now, as though the cloaked pony from before had only punched a hole through it instead of blasting the entire thing open. Even the door was mostly intact.

“What happened?” Zolt asked, and Bandicoot jumped, twisting to look at the filly.

“W-well, uh… Mom left to get the groceries… and she told me to watch to make sure you were okay. But you were showering, so…”

“I meant the glass. How is the hole smaller?”

Bandicoot turned to look back at the window, as though he had been noticing it for the first time. “Before Mom left, she summoned Giz— well, a family… friend? His name is Gizzard. He eats pony flesh,”

Zolt already felt her head spinning and she had only been engaged in conversation for mere moments. “Wh— hang on. What?”

“...Well, Mom used a summoning glyph to summon one of the creatures she has an alliance with. His name is Gizzard. He's a ghoul demon, so he has to eat the flesh of a sentient creature at least once a week, but he doesn't like to kill anything. So in exchange for us giving him the cult pony’s body to clean up, he's fixing our window.”

Zolt heard a crunch of glass and turned her gaze lower. She saw a stout, hairy creature that she had never seen anything like before. It was roundish, with four stumpy legs that had three blunt claws each. It was chestnut brown with markings in different brownish shades; it opened its mouth much wider than it looked like it should be able to, revealing many layers of sharp, curved teeth and a huge tongue. One of its eyes was a soft pink and the other was a pastel yellow, making Zolt think of strawberries and bananas. If it hadn't been for the rows of sharp teeth and the unhinging jaw, Zolt would have thought Gizzard looked completely non-threatening.

“So your momhas an alliance with the demons?” Zolt asked, her resolve decaying at the news. Bandicoot looked incredibly uncomfortable at this accusation.

“N-no. I mean, not with every demon. Demons are a diverse group … some of them aren't all that bad.”

For the first time, Gizzard seemed to notice her. It stared at her with wide eyes for a few moments before getting back to its task — it placed a shard of glass back into its rightful place with its tongue, its saliva seeming to glue the pieces together with surprising efficacy. Then it began the process of sniffing out the next piece it needed. The cracks in the mended pieces began to slowly disappear, explaining how the hole of missing glass had shrank while she had been gone. “It eats flesh!” She cried, louder than she had intended.

She felt her heart twitch as Bandicoot’s ears fell back, a look of hurt flashing across his expression. She felt bad for speaking louder than she had needed to, but she was upset! Why would Ms. Sweet side with any demon? There was never any reason to do that! There were probably millions of ponies that existed that could have repaired the window just fine, and they wouldn't be monsters. How did Bandicoot know that there were demons that were good, anyway? Just because this thing hadn't tried to eat him yet?

“I-I know,” Bandicoot spoke quietly, his eyes darting between Gizzard and Zolt, “but he isn't evil. If he was, why wouldn't he just kill ponies for every meal? Even for fun? Clearly, there is something about Gizzard that just… works differently than yours does.”

Bandicoot hadn't meant it to sound insulting, even accusatory, but it had. So what? Good demons existed, and somehow, some way, Zolt had managed to encounter a rotten one? Not only that, but was now soulbound to it?

This idea brought a great deal of frustration to the gray filly. “So there are good demons and bad demons. What crazy nonsense are you gonna tell me next? That bad angels exist too?”

“Probably!” snapped Bandicoot, clearly getting a bit frustrated himself. After a tense pause; “If you have a group of ponies that are all unique, you're going to have some that are better or worse than others. So it just makes more sense. You know, that’s just how being different works. I-I don't know for sure, okay? It’s just what I feel.”

Seeing Bandicoot so agitated made Zolt feel as though her stomach lining were made of solid lead. It forced her to take pause, to consider what he was saying, and to - even despite her inner objections - accept that his idea did make logical sense and that it was a reasonable conclusion to come to. It felt like a wrong, blasphemous conclusion, but surely in time his hypothesis would be dashed by the sheer number of evil, heinous demons that they may encounter or learn about in their lives. If demons could be good, then what made a demon a demon? And, likewise, if angels could be bad, then what distinguished an angel from the rest of ponykind? The whole point was for them to be good!

Zolt sighed, looking back at Gizzard. She, at the very least, had to accept that this demon didn't seem to have evil intentions. It was doing them a service by fixing the window and door, and it seemed to be pretty efficient at its job. Even though she wasn't the fondest of the prospect of another demon being so close to her, she didn’t believe that Ms. Sweet would intentionally endanger her.

She slowly walked back into ‘her’ bedroom, casting a glance at the TV screen she had been so fascinated by over the last few days. In Gardenia, ponies had access to a plethora of books from “The Outside”, but not really any other kind of media. There was electricity and heating/air conditioning, but she realized that the only time she had ever seen a screen of any sort was in the different facilities she’d been to. Nobody had explained to her what the weird flat colorful moving thing was. Zolt had been interested in it at first, but she had no control of what was on the screens and there had been several times the images and sounds had frightened her and shown her things she didn't want to see. So, rather quickly, she had reached the conclusion that it was some kind of mind-wiping manipulation device and had done everything in her power to ignore everything that appeared there.

Bandicoot must have been freaked out when, the first time he had turned the screen on in front of her, she had yelled. Zolt imagined what she must have looked like then; clamping her hooves over her ears, squeezing her eyes shut as tight as possible, and immediately positioning herself into a spherical shape with surprising effectiveness. It had taken a lot of explaining for her to understand that this was a different kind of screen, one that Zolt had a level of control over, and that it wasn't the same as whatever she had been forced into watching before.

Now, she looked back at her own reflection in the sleeping pixels.

She went to the fireplace, stoking a fire all on her own. Even though she had a lot of experience with it, fire still scared her almost as much as it comforted her. Any flame beyond the size of a candlelight was, as far as she was concerned, inherently dangerous. But there was something beautiful about it, too. She sat, staring at the way the fire interacted with the logs of wood, slowly eating away at them. As she stared, she contemplated whether there would have been any way, before she had run away, to light her facility ablaze without hurting any of its patients.