For all the Lost Maidens, for Bright Hearth
“Isn’t it beautiful?” breathed Granny Smith, her eyes glazing over as she looked at the book on her lap. Printing was a relatively new development, and Big Mac knew Granny Smith must have spent a small fortune on this book.
She loved the farm more than anything, save for maybe her family. But Big Mac had always detected within her a desire to see more of the world, to reach an understanding their village couldn’t meet.
Maybe this picture book made the old mare feel more worldly. It was easy to do so, holding the leather binding in her hoof, looking at physical words and pictures, tangibility bridging gaps that would be otherwise insurmountable, by either ability or effort. There was no such issue as she stroked the pages, quickened breath at the effort of holding the tome aloft.
In that sense, a small fortune seemed a small price to pay.
Her grandchildren were on either side of her, and Big Mac looked on as his sister, not even a teenager yet, snuggled closer to their elder’s side, eyes similarly fogged with an admiration that bordered on the mystical.
Big Mac looked down, and forced himself to really take in the picture in front of him.
‘The Mona Lisa’.
A painting of a mare, her expression somewhere between longing, amusement, maternal warmth, gentle mocking, spite. All these emotions cascading in a face so distant and yet immediate. Something ephemeral and yet at once, completely tangible.
Oh yes, Big Mac understood what he was looking at.
He felt his insides wriggle.
XXX
Big Mac peeked through the wall of vines at the tree in the centre of the clearing. It was a perfect, unnatural white, aside from the opening in its middle, which pooled with a thick, crimson ichor. A bloody teardrop breaking perfect skin.
Big Mac knew what he was looking at.
He took a moment to steady his breath, and raised his axe.
A flurry of wild, uncoordinated swings felled thorny vines that seemed to fight his every blow, wriggling in outraged protest. They made him work to get closer to the source of that song, his sapped strength and burning muscles the toll for his passage.
The music was beautiful, indescribably so. It floated around him, coming from every angle simultaneously, reminding him all at once of whatever memories he had of his mother’s lullabies, of buxom tavern wenches cooing for their patron’s entertainment, of the perfumed ladies from the darker parts of town, eyes promising a unforgettable night for only a day’s wage.
It was nigh irresistible. Big Mac understood exactly what he was listening to.
He pushed on through the opening he’d made in the vines, a squirming form fighting his way to the centre.
XXX
When the first kidnapping happened, ponies took no notice at all. Some family blood oath unpaid, some arranged wedding gone spurned, some jealous lover exacting an insidious, animalistic revenge. Disappearances were far from seldom, and a quiet, largely insincere mourning was all the departed was honoured with. Any period of grief was supplanted soon and entirely by the hunt for salacious and callous rumour.
Could she have ran off with another stallion? Could she have staged it? What had she done wrong? Who had she led on?
When the second kidnapping happened, largely the same act followed.
But then it kept happening, and happening, and happening.
And suddenly ponies weren’t so sure any longer that this was as simple as their desensitised cynicism had first assumed. And as quickly as the winter fogs, an air of distrust fell upon their village, as neighbour became potential assailant, friend became stranger, and increasingly fearful eyes fell upon the bare trees of the bleak forest circling them.
It was met with a collective sigh of relief when the constable declared that he was going out with his men to find out exactly what was going on, and where the disappeared had been taken to. And what’s more, he would not be coming back until he found them all, alive or dead.
And that was the thing.
He and his force were true to his word.
The forest seemed to encroach, growing bolder as the courage of a crowd dwindled, waning with each shorter night.
The constable kept his word well.
He and his men never came back.
XXX
The song increased in volume, tendrils of sound formed into invisible hooks in Big Mac’s hide, pulling him ever closer. He waded through the clearing, hooves scattering deep red leaves from the long shed tree, cracking white branches and white sticks and white bones beneath. Not a breeze, not a call from any animal, nothing except the oppressive stillness and quiet, all a stage for that interminable, infernal, beautiful song.
He felt his insides wriggle in disgust as he got close to the slick, bleeding void in the tree’s centre.
“Well, who do we have here?” called a voice from within.
The roots of the tree seemed to writhe around his hooves.
He took a deep breath.
Big Mac pressed his body through the void, forcing himself not to recoil from it as every synapse tried to pull him back from the unnatural touch on his skin. And soon he found himself pushing into the cavernous space within.
XXX
“Come on Darling,” crooned the painted mare, her liberally perfumed body an absolute assault on the senses, “It’s all paid up for you.”
Big Mac’s friends had decided that it was long past time he became a man, and his birthday was supposedly the perfect time to do it.
Being honest, he wasn’t even sure that friends was the correct name for them. They were just other stallions to him, other faces and bodies in a sea of ponies needing a drink at the end of a long day’s ploughing, or picking apples.
That’s what it really was around here, you worked and then you drank in the tavern, and then you went home.
The mares remained back at the farmhouse, sorted by accident of birth into domestic humdrum, while Mac found his own lot to burn his body’s youth in exchange for whatever money was available. Only Granny Smith was allowed what one might call a profession, acting as the matron of the entire farm, and that was only since her husband had died.
The stallions leering at Mac behind the mare that was pawing at him had always gone to great pains to make endless, tired jokes about the mares in their lives. How their incessant chatter irked them, how they were so lucky in their domestic prisons, knowing nothing of the real work that only a stallion could know.
These were supposedly Mac’s friends, and they would have to be for the rest of his life, for all he wanted to simply go home and spend time with his family, share in the warmth of their hearth and speak to Applejack, to Applebloom, to his Grandmother.
No no, that would hardly be what was expected of him.
What was expected of him was to drink himself into their same stupor, and to make use of the service that had been paid for.
Her lips were plump, her body proportioned in all the right places.
Lewd remarks from the tavern-goers, filtered through the haze of incense and pheromones, tawdry jeers and crowing about everything that was happening to him, about what was being done to him. They thought they were the funniest stallions in the world.
Mac understood well enough what was happening, even as he felt his insides wriggle, like they did everytime someone asked him when he’d finally settle down, when he’d finally get a wife, when he’d finally do what everyone else did and lay with someone for the fucking sake of it.
And finally Mac did what felt natural. He stood up, and removed his body from that counterfeit love, and as the hooves left his chest, his insides were finally still.
And they regarded him with such a primal disgust, conditioned to repulsion and base anger, flicked like a switch.
Suffice to say, Mac was able to forgo the tavern as he pleased, after that.
XXX
“One by one, from the village they come,” it cooed at him.
The branches of the tree wriggled around his body, as the beast’s voice danced across the space they occupied, languid and leisurely, relaxing his muscles.
It was beautiful, it couldn’t be denied.
Violet eyes, a mouth full of canine teeth, each formed with the same care and craftsmanship as all of the sculptures pictured in Granny Smith’s book. Perfect white skin, shining in rainbows of untold shades, like oil on water, ever in motion.
Even as the inside of the tree pulsed, all deep red and carnivorous, the beast was the sweetest anaesthetic.
What could ever resist a form like this?
Clouds of pheromones swam around his head, heady and sweet like the most luxuriant perfumes.
Big Mac knew exactly what was happening.
He raised his axe.
“Silly little thing,” the beast cooed, voice a watercolour of the most intoxicating shades of masculine and feminine at once, a banquet of sounds to reduce men to dogs, “You think you’re the first to try?”
Big Mac faltered.
“Lower your axe,” It commanded.
XXX
Bright Hearth, the town’s self-proclaimed adventurer, eventually decided that enough was enough, and that he was personally going to go out into the woods and find whatever had blighted their town. And then he was going to bring its still-beating heart back here to show to everyone.
Always the ladies man, he went out into those trees in a flurry of roses, thrown by every man and maiden the town had left.
Always the ladies man, he kissed each of those maidens by the cheek, wolfish grin the only light thing in those wintry woods, gleaming ‘till he passed from their sight.
Bright Hearth had always been a boastful sort, it was true. But he also was someone who had a true zeal for life, someone who was earnest, if exuberant, with all to whom he spoke. He was one of the few who’d never treated Eli poorly, even after all the rumours. He’d was a cad, it was true, but he’d also always been, at heart, a good man.
Bright Hearth, always the ladies man, kidnapped seven of those maidens before one of them screamed loud enough to wake the entire town, and he was wrestled off the terrified mare as he tried to drag her towards the woods, pleading the entire time that she should come with him.
He promised he’d show her something that she’d never forget, something that would enrapture the senses and make her believe in heaven. That she’d thank him, in the end.
Charles Carter had always been earnest with all to whom he spoke. However insane his ravings were, everyone who heard them knew they were something in which he fully believed.
He screamed it right until the end, telling stories of pearlescent flesh and fangs sculpted from the most stunning porcelain, delivering it more and more of his friends. His mad, milky eyes confronting the horrified crowd, scorching themselves into memory for eternity, telling them that even the most beautiful mares from the darker parts of town couldn’t compare to the flesh he’d seen.
Flesh that he’d make us all see. Flesh that he’d kill for.
He screamed it well enough until the guillotine parted his head from his neck, and in the empty air that once contained his screams rang out the dull wet thuds of that handsome visage, dashed by gravity and stone.
An uneasy silence settled amongst the gathered crowd, now fully divorced of their dreams that anyone among them could do what needed to be done. They understood, as well as one who hadn’t seen it could, what was out there, and one by one their eyes betrayed the fears all had been too proud to admit.
Who among them could resist that? Who among them, if not the constable and all his men, if not Bright Hearth, nor the countless fools like him who had sauntered out into those woods, never to be seen again? Or, of course, worse, made slaves to what had settled near their town, to kidnap and drag out fresh victims.
And one by one, those eyes that usually only favoured Big Mac with disgust for his un-stallion-like ways, for his sickening differences and intolerable apathy, all lightened with opportunistic glee.
It reminded Mac of the leers those stallions gave him on the night they tried to make a man of him.
It made his insides wriggle.
XXX
The Mona Lisa stared back at Mac, made fluid with the motion of life around him. Granny Smith’s reverent breaths, moving the book as if giving the painting a pulse. The sighs of amazement for the beauty of the image, giving the most sacred lady her own breath.
It was beautiful, it was irresistible.
Big Mac knew this.
And yet the picture left him feeling… nothing.
He looked at the two mares besides him, saw the way it seemed so effortless to them.
He worried he’d feel this out of place his entire life.
XXX
When it was all said and done, Big Mac obliged the beasts softly offered demand.
He lowered his axe with all of his force directly into its body, and fought back the revulsion as he saw its eternally confident gaze finally give way to fear.
Big Mac might have been unlike the others in his village, but this did not make him heartless, and certainly not cruel. He took no delight in his work, setting about it like the plough to the field, carving red lines in white as sure as he did lines in dying soil. Big Mac found the scene reminding him of the Mona Lisa, something that for so many others, would have provoked so many wonderful emotions, of justice and vengeance realised in a shower of spilled blood.
All it made him feel was the exact same thing he’d felt, staring into eyes who’s emotion was locked into unresponsive pages, never to reveal their secrets easily.
It simply made his insides wriggle.
He guessed this was the toll for keeping the those who hated him alive.
So he brought the axe down again, and again, and again.
And the beast’s eyes showed that it had never needed defend itself, the intoxication of the parade of stallions had been more than sufficient. He couldn’t imagine it had ever felt pain before.
It didn’t seem to understand remotely what was happening, who it was looking at.
He wondered if the beast understood how out of place he’d always felt in that moment.
Sadly, Big Mac’s work was done long before either of them could reach any deeper insight.
XXX
“That Orchard Bloom came round to court your sister again, Mac, they’ll make a fine match I think.”
“If you say so, Granny,”
“And how about you, lad? Is it not past time you were courting as well, there are plenty of eligible mares in town we could pair you with, would be a waste were you not to further the line.”
“...Would it?”
“What did you say?”
“Would it, Granny, be a waste? Would it be an issue if that was… just not… me?”
“What are you talking about?! What young stallion doesn’t want to find a nice young mare?! I’ll hear no more of it.”
Big Mac loved her so much, too much to ever make himself explain, far too much to ever risk the feeling he got from sitting next to her by the fire.
Much easier to just leave it, he supposed.
“Yes, Granny.”
XXX
Big Mac did more than Bright Hearth had promised, in the end. He didn’t just bring the beast’s heart back to the village. He brought its whole body, ruined by axe wounds delivered through tears he’d never speak of.
And after a beat of silence, as eyes made certain that the corpse wouldn’t return to life, or that Mac wasn’t another one of its slaves the throngs fell upon him. It was all celebratory looks and words and smiles, relief to finally be rid of it, to know what to do were anything like it to ever come back.
They’d killed their monster, they had their protection now forever. There was nothing more to the equation, and they’d find themselves at the same tavern they always went to tonight to celebrate rather than cower.
For the majority of them, life really was that simple.
He remembered the way the beast looked at him, an entity it simply couldn’t fathom.
Mac found himself spoken to like he hadn’t been in years, pleas to be the first one to buy him ale, hooves meeting his shoulder. All memories of his unmanly ways cast to the wayside, though he was sure not forgotten forever. This was what had been bought with the beast’s blood.
He looked at their eyes, finding memories of stallions leering from behind the painted mare, wanting to make a man of him.
How they made a hero of him now.
And he wondered what Bright Hearth, ever the ladies man, would have done now, as all the maidens of the village queued up for a chance to kiss him on the cheeks. Bright Hearth would have been in his element, he would have known exactly what to say to stallion and maiden both, would have gratefully received their touches and spurned the ruined body of the beast at his hooves.
But as for Big Mac, all he found was an emptiness, like the spaces between branches of the bare white trees.
It made his insides wriggle.
