Maize

Chapters

1 - Autumn
2 - Gone
3 - Teeth
4 - Drought
5 - Decay
6 - Feed

1 - Autumn

1 Autumn

Applejack stepped from the barn, the ropes draped around her neck and shoulders pulling taut and falling slack again with every step she took. The sun poured its light down in a stream of radiant gold, a hue Applejack always said could only be seen at the precise height of autumn. It bathed her in warmth even as a playful breeze chilled her coat, and she had to pause for a moment just to take it in, this swathe of land she and the ponies who came before her had carved from the wild earth.

In every direction, there was beauty and bounty in equal measure. The fields had been especially productive that year, and leaves still clung to the orchards, painting them in a riot of color. Not fully turned, they displayed the rainbow hues of life, warm and vibrant—green, amber, dusty yellow, all lightly stained throughout with shades of glowing red in the deepest hearts of the boughs.

And before her, the deep sea of verdant green crowned in palest gold that was the northern cornfield.

She breathed deep, taking in the cool scent of rich earth, spiced with the fragrance of ripe apples, sun-warmed corncobs, and the damp, silky sweetness of the pumpkins swollen to bursting in the patch just beside the cornfield. Soon, the farm would be alive with the sounds of ponies plucking those cobs, cutting pumpkin stems, and breaking open all their bright skins in pursuit of seeds, purees, and all manner of treats to toast and bake.

Applejack smiled and resumed pulling her load with renewed vigor. She could hardly wait.

She followed the road down to the cornfield, where a wide passage had already been cut through the rows. It branched almost immediately, different routes wending and weaving out of sight almost as soon as a turn was chosen. The cornfield maze was one of the Acres’ traditional autumn draws, and its opening was almost a holiday in and of itself for the families of Ponyville. Foals came to compete to see who could make their way through the fastest, as well as who could rack up the most scares by jumping out of the rows at their friends. Parents, for their part, came for the chance to distract the foals for a precious few hours, but also to remember their own younger days taking hayrides and getting lost among the warm stalks.

Applejack made her way through those paths now, ignoring all the wrong turns and misleading straightaways, taking instead a crooked path towards the center. The dead remnants of cut plants crunched and snapped below her hooves, little clouds of dust rising with every step. Soon, she reached an opening in the maze, a place where five different paths intersected and split apart, each at random and odd angles to each other. She shrugged herself out of the ropes, walked around to the other side of her load, and braced her hooves underneath the limp mass of fabric and straw.

“Alrighty, up ya get,” she said, easily levering the thing upright on a pole. The scarecrow swung into the sky, limbs ragdolling a little as Applejack shoved the sharpened stake into the earth. A few firm pushes saw it securely planted, and Applejack stepped back and nodded in satisfaction.

“You best take your job seriously this year, y’hear?” she said with a wry grin. “Don’t need all them varmints out here snacking on more o’ the harvest than we can help.”

The scarecrow made no acknowledgment of her words. Its blank cloth face sagged down and off to one side, staring out into the corn as its body twisted slightly in the breeze. It wore her oldest flannel, but only for the harvest; once Granny had the chance to patch the newest round of holes, it would keep her own withers warm through the winter once more. An old hat left behind by a hired hoof last season completed the look. It hung from its forelegs on a wooden crossbeam, a recognizable—if not terribly convincing—imitation of a farmer waving furiously to drive away thieving crows.

For Applejack’s part, she didn’t really think such things did much to protect the crops. She had seen more than a few critters munching away at pilfered goods right underneath the scarecrows, and it was one more chore to take care of every year. But Granny always insisted. Placing “guardians” in the field was tradition, she said, an important thing to never forget. But when Applejack had once pressed the matter, asked why exactly it was so important if it didn’t keep away the birds, Granny had just chuckled and patted her head.

“It ain’t about reasons, Applejack. Some traditions are older than reason, you know. Older than memory. Sometimes, the tradition is the only part of the memory left.”

“Does that mean that nopony remembers, or that you don’t remember?” Applejack had asked with a snarky grin.

“I’ll be remembering a few more chores for you if’n you don’t watch that mouth of yours. Now git!”

Applejack chuckled and shook her head at the memory. If nothing else, ponies did expect to see such things decorating the farm when autumn came, just as they expected winter starflies lighting up the trees a few months later. It completed the experience, somehow, and so Applejack supposed she would be obligated to keep the tradition up, regardless of whether the namesake role of the scarecrow was true or not.

She turned, ready to make her way back down the paths she had sketched and then cut herself. But as she stepped away, something crackled in the field behind her, something out of sync with her own hoofsteps. She turned and fixed the scarecrow with a stern glare, half-expecting to see a crow or two already perched on the dummy out of spite. But there was no bird or other varmint to be seen. There were only the draped and spiky leaves of the field swaying gently and the fabric figure watching her depart with its sagging bag head.

She waited a moment longer, watching for any telltale sign of sneaking raiders, then turned once more and left the clearing, following the path directly back to the farm and the myriad chores still awaiting her.

* * *

“I just wanted you to know the offer’s always open,” Twilight said with a chuckle, holding her hooves out in mock surrender.

“And we appreciate it sugarcube, don’t you doubt that,” Applejack said, lifting her cider mug to Twilight in acknowledgment. They sat basking in the warm afternoon sun at one of the many tables the Apples had brought out for the Acres’ Harvest Festival, listening to the volunteer Bluegrass band Pinkie had assembled.

Ponies milled all around them, browsing the various stands and events that had popped up all over the farm. Some were run by ponies from town, others by distant Apple family members who had come to visit for the event. Braeburn was running the hayrides with Big Mac this year, and Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo were eagerly “helping” with the pumpkin toss—Scootaloo especially launching just as many if not more of the reject produce as the actual participants. Families were in and out of the corn maze constantly, and just around the corner, Apple Bloom was taking her first solo shift in demonstrating the apple press, and the clear, aromatic cider she beamingly served sparkled in the many mugs clustered around their table.

“And o’course,” Applejack continued, “you’ll always be welcome to kick some trees with us any time you want. Help’s always appreciated.”

“Always?” Twilight asked. She tilted her head and gave Applejack a knowing grin.

“Always,” Applejack emphasized with a chuckle.

“I still don’t understand why you don’t let Twilight harvest the way she did that one year,” Rainbow said. “You’d be done in no time.”

“Maybe,” Applejack said with a gentle smile. “But that was an... how’d you say, ‘exceptional circumstance?’ ” At Twilight’s nod, she continued, “And there might be time and place for that again sometime. But farming’s about more than speed, especially in the long term.”

Rainbow snorted. “Yeah, sure, whatever.”

“It’s the truth,” Applejack said with a shrug. “It’s a give and take kinda thing.”

“I thought that was siblings?” Rarity offered.

“Well, it’s both, kinda,” Applejack laughed. “Granny always said, if you’re gonna take from the earth, you always be sure to give something back in equal measure. Us earth ponies, we do that with our time. Our time, strength, love, and attention. And a fair amount o’ sweat and tears, sure. We coax the earth, and it feeds us in good time.”

“What, are you saying magic doesn’t take effort?” Rarity asked, raising a sharp eyebrow towards Applejack, who shrugged and gave Twilight an apologetic look.

“Hey, I’m just talking traditions and whatnot. But it’s true, we’ve always seen magic as a kind of... shortcut, I guess. I mean, just look at how you harvested them trees. You busted through half the orchard without breakin’ a sweat. I guess magic don’t seem to be about what you put in, it’s almost about… gettin’ around those sort of rules. Imposing, in a way. Pulling what you want out of thin air with power that ain’t even yours to begin with.”

“Is that really how earth ponies see magic?” Rarity asked, setting down her mug with a huff. “Because I must protest that it seems a myopic view, to say the least! Why, to even suggest Twilight hasn’t shed sweat and tears over her years of study!”

“She's certainly shed tears,” Spike said with a smirk. Then, “Ow!” as Twilight bopped him playfully on the noggin.

“But don’t you worry none,” Applejack continued. “We’ve been doing real well these past few years. Got a good rhythm going. Shoot, if things keep up this way, we’ll be able to hire seasonal help every year.”

“Well, I’m glad,” Twilight said with a contented smile.

“And who knows,” Applejack said. “Might be plenty of seasons yet when we’ll need one o’ them… er… what’d you call what you did?”

“Logarithmically iterated levitation spell,” Twilight said immediately, “with some logical filtering charms overlaid, of course.”

“Of course,” Rarity said approvingly.

“Yeah, that was it,” Applejack said with a nod. “Knew logging had something to do with it.”

“Duh,” Rainbow said. “Trees and all.”

“Even so,” Granny Smith interjected. “It don’t do to rely on doing things the easy way. The earth can be funny about things like that, if’n you ain’t careful. Can get used to the wrong sort o’ thing. No, best to do things the way they’ve always been done, the way our forebears learned was best over years both long and bleak.”

Twilight couldn’t help but feel a pang of irritation at that, and not a small amount of surprise at the older pony’s sudden adamance. She wasn’t about to get into a cultural debate with the older pony on a festival day, though. Tradition and pride went hoof and hoof, she supposed; far better avoid bruising egos and just enjoy everyone’s company. “Of course, Granny Smith.”

Twilight took another sip of her own cider and sighed in happiness, sinking down a little deeper against the hay bales they reclined against. Pride or no pride, no one could deny the Apples knew their craft.

“Applejack?”

The circle of friends and the Apples looked up as Cheerilee trotted up to them, giving a rueful grin. “I’m so sorry to interrupt, but could you maybe help me over at the corn maze? I’m worried Pipsqueak may have gotten lost. He’s been in there nearly an hour.”

“Sure thing, Cheerilee,” Applejack said. She grabbed her hat and tugged it down atop her mane, then got to her hooves with a languid stretch.

“Pssh, you stay here Applejack, I’ll look for him,” Rainbow said. She pushed herself up, swaying alarmingly as she did so, and set her cider mug so close to the edge of the picnic table that it nearly toppled right off. She gave Cheerilee a wonky salute and added, “I can fly over and find him in… like, no time. Just watch.”

“No,” Applejack said with a laugh, stepping on Rainbow’s tail and pushing her back onto her rump. “You ain’t flying. We agreed, if you were gonna get that extra cup.”

Rainbow sulked, but pulled her mug back to herself protectively.

“Won’t be but a minute,” Applejack said, following Cheerilee over to the field.

“Yes, the earth and its progeny are funny things,” Granny Smith continued, as though she hadn’t noticed the change of subject. Her head was nodding, and her eyes were unfocused, as though seeing something far away. “Most ponies don’t feel it these days. You don’t want to go giving it a… taste for things it oughtn’t. No, neither root nor shoot. Best to… go slow with ‘em…”

Her head drooped, and suddenly she was asleep, her rocking chair rolling gently. Twilight grinned, sharing a knowing chuckle with the others. The conversation meandered to the doings of her friends, to subjects of work and future plans. When they all rose some time later to put away their mugs and rejoin the festival, Twilight wondered briefly whether Applejack had found Pipsqueak yet. But as a still-lightly-swaying Rainbow Dash led them over to the horseshoe toss, already arguing with Rarity over whether the shoes could be cleaned after each toss, the question was pushed from her mind.

* * *

“Hey Twilight? Have you seen Applejack?”

Twilight turned at the sound of Apple Bloom’s voice. She and Spike were picking over the pumpkins to carve for Nightmare Night, and while Spike favored the biggest one she could possibly levitate, she was holding out for one that wouldn’t take hours to clean up after. Her eyebrow rose in puzzlement, glancing around the farm grounds over Apple Bloom’s head. “Um, not for a little while, I don’t think. Why?”

Apple Bloom stamped a hoof in frustration. “She was supposed to take over the apple press around one o’clock, and it’s nearly two now.”

“Hmm, that is odd. Did you check the hayrides?”

“I checked everywhere! I coulda missed her, o’course, but…”

“I’m sorry Apple Bloom, I’m not sure where I saw her last. I’ll take a look around though, and if I find her I’ll let her know you’re looking.”

“Thanks, Twilight!”

Twilight sat for a moment, thinking back. When had she seen Applejack last? They’d had lunch together with the others, and then Cheerilee had asked her to help find Pipsqueak, and…

Had that been it? She supposed it was, but that had been more than two hours ago. Surely Applejack was long since finished with that. Perhaps she had gotten caught up in one of the other activities and their paths hadn’t crossed, or she hadn’t noticed if they had.

She stood up and stretched her wings, rotating them and flexing her back the way Rainbow had showed her so long ago. “Alright Spike, new deal: You can get whatever pumpkin you want, if you can carry it back to the library yourself. And no asking anypony else to carry it for you.”

To her dismay, Spike’s smile only widened. “Yes, ma’am!”

She shook her head ruefully as he set about trying to lift a pumpkin easily three times his size, his draconic strength allowing him to make some impressive headway. Oh, well. If he wanted to put in the effort, she supposed she could deal with a messy kitchen.

She took to the skies, attaining a bird’s-eye view of the farm in only a few wingbeats. She flew in a slow circle, expecting to see Applejack’s signature orange coat stand out in a matter of seconds. She cruised over the vendor stands, the games, the picnic tables, and the Bluegrass band, her frown growing as she was unable to pick out her friend. It was certainly curious. She had no trouble spotting anyone else: Pinkie, Rarity, Rainbow, Fluttershy, even the other Apples. Granny remained asleep in her chair, and Big Mac was still pulling the carts through the trails around the farm. Perhaps Applejack had gone inside the house for something?

Twilight swept into an easy dive as she spotted Cheerilee chaperoning some of the foals through the games. It was a long shot, as she and Applejack would have finished up the search ages ago, but maybe she could still point Twilight in the right direction. Cheerilee glanced up and smiled as Twilight landed next to her.

“Hey Cheerilee,” Twilight said. “Have you seen Applejack?”

“Oh, hello Twilight. Hmm, no, I don’t think I have. Not since she brought Pipsqueak out from the maze.”

“Huh.” That was as expected, sure enough. “Did you see where she went after that?”

“Well, you know, now that you mention it, we didn’t actually meet up when she found him. We both went in to look for him, and we took different directions to cover more ground. After awhile, I found myself back at the entrance, and Pipsqueak was there playing with the others. I assumed she found him and then went to rejoin you.”

“Darn,” Twilight said.

“Is everything all right?”

“Oh, of course, Apple Bloom was just looking for her. Will you tell her that if you see her?”

“Sure thing, Twilight.” Cheerilee nodded, then her head snapped around. “Snips! Snails! I told you before, we do not drink directly from the caramel barrels!”

Twilight covered her mouth to hide her laugh as Cheerilee left to corral her charges. Recovering, she gave the festival another once-over.

“Strange…”

There were a dozen easy explanations, of course. For all she knew, Applejack had gone into town to fetch something or other they’d run out of early. Granted, she couldn’t imagine what the farm itself wouldn’t supply, but she wasn’t as familiar with the logistics of this particular festival as she had become with other Ponyville events. Her face brightened as she saw another possible lead.

“Oh, Pipsqueak!” she called, trotting over to where the little colt was playing some made-up game or other with Featherweight and Rumble. He looked up, dropping the suspiciously sword-like stick he held in his mouth at her approach. “Oh, hi Princess Twilight.”

“Just Twilight is fine,” she chuckled, waving off his dramatic attempt at a bow. “I was just wondering if you’ve seen Applejack since she brought you out of the corn maze?”

Pipsqueak tilted his head, obviously puzzled. “Applejack?”

“Yes. Cheerilee said you got a little lost in the maze? Applejack said she’d go in to help find you.”

“Oh, not really. Well. I guess I did, kind of. Did you know the maze is absolutely huge, Ms. Twilight? I thought it was going to keep going forever! I ran and ran and ran, and I sure started to think I might not find my way out. But then I heard the music, and I followed that back.”

Twilight’s frown shifted from confused to worried. “So… Applejack didn’t find you?”

“Nope,” he said with a careless shrug. Then, with sudden concern, “You don’t think she got lost, do you?”

“I doubt that,” Twilight said, giving him a reassuring smile. “I bet she left just after you did. Thanks, Pipsqueak. You go on and catch up with the others.”

“Okay Ms. Twilight!” Pipsqueak snatched up his stick and bolted, following the others deeper into the orchard.

Twilight turned back to the festival, an unsettled feeling sinking into her gut. No one, it seemed, had seen Applejack for a few hours. Of course, someone had to have seen her, but it wouldn’t do to start going from pony to pony. It wouldn’t be very efficient, and the alarm she would provoke with a crowd-wide announcement was hardly warranted yet.

Still…

Twilight took off again, gaining just enough height to fly over the corn maze. Despite Pipsqueak’s usual wild imaginings, it wasn’t really that large, for all the land the Apples had for it. “Six or seven hoofball fields,” Applejack had said? As she flew over, she could see the bright coats of at least twenty or thirty ponies wandering through in various states of amusement and frustration, but no familiar orange or telltale brown hat.

She squinted, flying lower and checking as thoroughly as she could, though the flickering lines of path and leaf quickly made her dizzy. Could Applejack have gotten hurt somehow? It seemed the least probable thing of all, but anypony could trip and fall… and if, say, she had stumbled in among the mess of plants themselves, she would certainly be harder to see.

Twilight pulled up and gave the farm grounds another survey. No, it was odd, and she didn’t want to seem frantic—or worse, make others frantic. But it was time to expand the search. Seeing Big Macintosh and Braeburn arrive back at the festival grounds, she descended towards them.

“Big Mac, Braeburn,” she said, greeting them as soon as she had touched down. “Hey, um, I don’t want to worry anypony, but we’ve been looking for Applejack for a bit here and haven’t been able to find her. I don’t suppose she was helping you at all?”

Macintosh’s shoulders tensed, and his expression turned a shade more serious. “…nnnope,” he said slowly.

“I sure haven’t seen her,” Braeburn said. “Have you checked the games? Maybe she’s with that short-tempered friend of hers.”

“I have,” Twilight said, biting her lip. “I’ve flown over the festival a few times now. I’m sure it’s nothing, but maybe you’d both like to look too?”

“Eeyup,” Macintosh said, tossing his harness aside. “Sorry folks,” he said to the waiting line of festival attendees. “Taking a break. Be back before you know it.”

“Any idea where she was last?” Braeburn asked.

Twilight shrugged. “The corn maze, but that was hours ago. I’m gonna take a closer look at it just in case. I’ll let you know if I find her.”

Macintosh nodded and set off across the grounds at a brisk trot, Braeburn nearly having to gallop to keep up. A hop and a flap of her wings carried Twilight back to the corn maze entrance, where she caught the attention of Apple Fritter, who was selling tickets.

“I don’t suppose you saw where Applejack went after she left the maze earlier?” Twilight asked.

Fritter looked thoughtful, but shrugged. “I remember her saying to watch out for a little white and brown colt she was going in to look for, but I must’ve missed when she brought him out. That was awhile ago. Need any help?”

Twilight’s heart sank, but she shrugged off the feeling and shook her head. “No, just let me know if you see her, okay? I’m going to…”

Twilight’s ear flicked, and she felt her gaze pulled to the entrance of the maze. Something had drawn her attention, but staring down into the first walkway, she struggled to determine exactly what. A glimpse of movement? A flash of color at the edge of her vision, just for an instant? Or had it just been the swaying of the countless layers of leaves?

She frowned, taking a hesitant step closer as the uneasy sensation she had felt earlier grew. It made no sense, but something about the field was making her coat stand on end, almost as though she could feel something looking at back her, hiding just around the corner and out of sight.

For a moment, she wondered if it could be Applejack, but there was no one there. She turned back to Apple Fritter, but not before giving the tall stalks another lingering look.

“I’m gonna look around,” she said, and trotted to the first path of the maze.

“Don’t get lost!” Apple Fritter called with a cheerful wave.

Twilight stood at the intersection, wondering whether to go left or right. She hadn’t bothered to watch which way Applejack might have gone. Not that she intended to search every inch of the maze. If she flew over the rows now and then, she would be able to cover most of the field in a matter of minutes, and it would be clear whether Applejack was there. Even if she had gone off the path, Twilight couldn’t imagine Applejack would be very deep in the shadows; the corn was planted so densely, and their stems so healthy and strong, Twilight doubted she would have been able to push through them very far.

Hoping Big Mac and Braeburn would soon render the search moot, she trotted down the path, took the next available turn, and plunged into the heart of the maze.

Author's Note

Well look at that, somehow a new story after more than four years of burnout. Not what I'd planned on finishing first, but art can be funny about things like that, can't it? In any event, Happy Nightmare Night! 🎃

2 - Gone

2 Gone

Twilight trotted at a steady clip, head on a swivel to catch any sign of her friend’s presence or passage. The cool, moist soil muffled her steps, and only the rustle of the hay that covered the path marked her movements. The Apples’ corn, she noticed with some awe, had grown more like weeds than produce this year, with the stalks easily towering to almost twice her height. The leaves were nearly as broad as her mane, and the ground beneath them lay in darkness nearly as deep as nightfall. The cobs wrapped in their husks were thick and ripe, and judging by the discarded bits Twilight could spy on the ground along the way, more than a few ponies had helped themselves to samples on their way through the maze.

She sped through a few more turns, keeping an eye on the sun and the shadows to maintain a sense of direction. The afternoon heat was in full swing, and not a cloud was in sight to provide relief from its rays. Twilight hadn’t realized how warm it was up until that moment, but after a few short flights and now a brisk trot, she supposed it made sense that she would be working up a bit of a sweat.

“Good practice for the Running of the Leaves in a few weeks,” she said aloud. Although she had a task to accomplish, it was hard not to be distracted by the spirit of things and simply settle into enjoying the maze and the clear air—the lingering atmosphere of the festival and effects of the cider, no doubt.

A few more turns took her farther afield, and the sounds of the music and games began to fade behind her. Once or twice, she heard the rustle of hoofsteps one or two rows over, and she kept hoping to meet up with another festival attendee so she could ask after Applejack. Somehow they always seemed to take another turn though, and Twilight’s paths remained empty.

Soon, she found herself in a broad clearing where several passages met, almost resembling the shape of a lopsided star as they branched off in every conceivable direction. She paused, wondering which direction she ought to take.

“Which way would Applejack head first?” She mused. Applejack was good at getting into other creatures’ heads, anticipating their movements and how they thought when under stress. If Applejack was looking for a lost foal, she would be able to guess how said foal would behave—perhaps taking increasingly random turns in a panic, trying to force their way out when really they were only moving as far away from the entrance as possible.

Applejack, then, would probably have tried to make her way towards the farthest edges of the maze first and then work inward, looking for the most remote corners a wandering pony could make their way into.

With that in mind, Twilight decided to try a northeastern passage first, then fly over the rows if it turned out to be the wrong way later. She had just taken her first step when a flash of color caught her eye: a scrap of fabric peeking from behind a few hay bales left at the edge of the clearing. Curious, she stepped closer. There was something familiar about the color and pattern, something that made her think of—

“Applejack?”

There was a pony there, lying crumpled on the ground at the base of the bales. Its limbs were bent every which way, and though the shadow of the corn and hay obscured the finer details, she recognized the weave and pattern as one of Applejack’s shirts—and as she stepped closer, she saw it also clearly wore a hat.

“Applejack!”

She dashed closer, leaping over the hay bales with a single flap of her wings. Whirling around, she stooped to examine her friend, to see what had happened… and then pulled up short, staring down in befuddlement and feeling her cheeks color with more than a little embarrassment.

It was clearly not Applejack, though she soon felt a little less silly for her mistake as she got a better look at what she had found. It was a pony-shaped thing, after all; it was wearing one of Applejack’s old winter shirts; and from what she could tell, the hat perched atop its sagging head was one of Applejack’s older stetsons. But it was also most definitely a simple scarecrow. Its hooves and face were made of rough-spun flax, and its mouth was indicated only by a row of thick black stitches. In the crudest touch of all, it had no decorations for eyes, and only a pair of darkened, depressed hollows marked where they might have been.

What gave Twilight pause, though, and in her view most excused her quick jump to conclusions, was that for whatever reason, the scarecrow had been made to resemble Applejack.

Not only did it wear her clothes, but the cloth body had been dyed a vivid, almost citrine orange, and a mane and tail of soft, golden yarn stitched to the head and flanks. They had even been braided in Applejack’s simple, no-nonsense style, the only differences being the hairbands were black instead of the red she always wore.

“Why,” Twilight wondered, gently taking the head and turning it to get a better look, “did Applejack make a scarecrow to look like herself?”

She had no answer to give to that. While she could imagine other farmponies venturing to make more lifelike scarecrows in their spare time, maybe even going so far as to model them on ponies they knew, she had a hard time imagining Applejack going to that level of effort—particularly with the yarn. It wasn’t like her to use bespoke materials for something that would just fade and fray in the outdoors, and she always said she couldn’t wield a sewing needle to save her life.

So who then? Apple Bloom? Granny? Big Mac, of all ponies? None of them seemed quite the type to do something like… this. Particularly to leave the face so crude after the effort that had been put into the rest of it. She imagined they would have at least bothered to give Applejack eyes.

Twilight shuddered and looked away, finding it suddenly uncomfortable to keep looking into that expressionless face. She saw that the scarecrow was mounted to a pair of simple, crossed wooden slats, salvaged from a fence somewhere if the pointed, picket ends were any indication. The top plank ran clear through the roughspun forelegs, pinning them in a spread, waving motion. How it had fallen, Twilight wasn’t sure, but she saw no reason to try and put the thing upright again. She had more important things to do.

With a confused shake of her head, she turned her back on the strange dummy and stepped towards the passage she had chosen.

“…fffiieeelll…”

Twilight froze, ear twitching and swiveling backwards at the strange, rasping noise. It sounded briefly like something moving behind her, like the crackle of brittle leaves and the crunch of dry sticks rubbing together. But it had also sounded almost like a word, or like the imitation of a word, an accidental pattern hidden beneath the dusty sigh. Another strange chill crawled up her shoulders towards her neck, that same sensation of someone, somewhere, peering at her from just out of sight.

She turned back towards the scarecrow. It lay where she had left it, and nopony else had come into the intersection. There was no one in sight.

Strange, for there to be no one, she thought, looking over the clearing one final time. It was a big maze, sure, but she thought for certain she would have passed one or two more ponies by this point. No matter, though. She had a search to continue.

She rounded the corner and left the scarecrow behind.

* * *

Twilight didn’t bother keeping to the prescribed lanes much longer. As much as her methodical instincts prompted her to give the maze a truly comprehensive search, she knew it wasn’t the most efficient use of her time. Better to rule out the most likely places, then check in with Big Mac again. Hopefully by then, Applejack would be waiting at the maze’s exit, and Twilight could cajole another pint of cider from her in payment for this whole goose-chase.

And yet, even with her leaping and occasionally just pushing through the stalks of the thinner partitions, Twilight had yet to reach the edge of the field.

She sat down for a short rest, wiping drops of sweat from her face and looking up at the sun in bemusement. “No wonder poor Pipsqueak got lost,” she told it, shaking her head and puffing out a tired breath. “Discord himself would be proud of this maze.”

The sounds of the festival were entirely gone now, replaced by the steady drone of some distant insect. Cicadas? Twilight thought it sounded right, but it seemed late in the year for that. On went the buzzing though, frustrating Twilight’s efforts to listen for other ponies in the maze. She had still not met anyone else.

“I think the Apples overdid it,” she said with a wry chuckle. It was just like Applejack to go above and beyond, even when it came to how large a maze should be. Giving her back another stretch, Twilight spread her wings, backed up a few steps, and took off at a gallop down the leaf-enclosed lane.

Swaying rows of golden spikes spiraled out farther and farther beneath her with every beat of her wings, and she kept her eyes as focused as she could on the individual paths. She didn’t have a good grasp on how the measurements she remembered translated to actual scale, but she thought she would be near a corner of the field by now. From the look of it, though, she still had a ways to go.

How far, however, she didn’t get a clear view of, because just below her, off to the right of the route she had been following, was a flash of orange.

“Applejack?”

Twilight dove, angling for where she had seen the bright color. It was gone now, hidden from view by the angle of her flight, and she had to do two more passes, peering downward intently, before she spotted it again. A quick flip and a slightly rushed landing brought her to it, and as she skidded to a halt, she overbalanced and landed flat on her rump, staring at the figure before her.

“Another one?” she asked, incredulous. There before her was a scarecrow just at the edge of the path, posed as if sat on its haunches much as Twilight herself was, though it slumped down low, the rod in its back forcing it to hunch. This one had its legs free, though they were still supported by sharp sticks that jutted out from above the hooves to dig into the soft ground. It looked for all the world like a weary farmer resting in the shade before getting back to work.

The hollows in its face were angled away from Twilight, for which she felt strangely glad. Like the other one, this scarecrow was dyed and dressed to resemble Applejack, and if Twilight didn’t know better, she would have suspected it was the same one. The shirt, at least, she thought had to be identical, or very nearly.

“Well, ‘Applejack,’ ” Twilight huffed, getting back to her hooves and brushing herself off. “I don’t suppose you’d care to explain what you’re doing out here all alone, making everypony worry about you?”

The dummy remained silent.

Twilight rolled her eyes, unable to resist a playful jab at the thing’s shoulder. Straw crackled beneath her touch. “Not shirking your chores, are you?”

The scarecrow reacted with none of the furious indignation Applejack would have had at such an accusation. More to the point, no one else reacted nearby either, which assured Twilight that if there was some prank afoot, at least Applejack was not the one watching it unfold. After all, the question of why there was not one, but two rather creepy replicas of her friend out in the middle of a cornfield remained unresolved, and Twilight couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t more going on than she was seeing.

She looked around, half expecting to hear Rainbow’s stifled cackle, or else Pinkie’s familiar prank-snort. “Don’t suppose you’d care to point me to, you know, the real Applejack?”

She didn’t play at waiting for a response, and stretched her wings once more. “Right, well, I will be very curious to hear what the story is concerning you weird things as soon as I find Applejack. Good luck out here.”

“…eeeed…”

Twilight whirled, glaring down the passageway. The scarecrow remained slumped at her hooves, and she could see no giggling faces or eager eyes watching her from the distant turn. Yet she would have sworn…

She frowned, looking down at the scarecrow. Once again, the sound had been… not a word, but at least something like a whisper, the sigh of some living thing speaking just out of earshot. And as inexplicable as it was to her, the sound hadn’t seemed to come from the fields around her, but rather from the figure just in front of her hooves.

She bent closer, putting her head down to examine the scarecrow’s crude head.

“…tttttttt…”

It was there, the quietest scrape of a sound. An insect dragging itself along a countertop could barely have been quieter, and Twilight wasn’t even sure she was really hearing anything over the droning all around her. She reached out a hoof and gently, hesitantly, touched the fabric face.

“…tttttttttTWIIIIIIIII—”

A cold feeling of revulsion filled Twilight’s stomach, as though she had touched something not scratchy and coarse, but soft and spongy, yielding in the manner of wet, wormy soil. The voice, that prickling, scratching voice that she now knew rose from that parody of a face, shuddered with the creaking of branches and the crackle of gravel. Worst of all was her certainty that at her touch, the sewn rows that stood in place of lips had twitched and stretched, as if the mouth that wasn’t there had tried, feebly, to open.

Twilight yelped and tumbled back, her mind going blank. Her heart had slammed into overdrive and the taut, time-narrowing panic of an adrenaline rush kicked in as something deep and raw inside her screamed to get away. She scrambled across the dirt and straw, unable to tear her eyes from the strange, limp thing that still sat hunched on the ground. It did not move, and she did not want it to move, couldn’t believe she somehow expected it to move. Scarcely able to hear the rational part of her mind desperately insisting she was being foolish, she opened her wings and, turning her back on the scarecrow, launched herself into the sky.

As she climbed higher into the air, she realized she couldn’t control her breathing. She was hyperventilating, and the physical exertion was making her light-headed and sick. She leveled off, clutched a hoof to her chest, and finally dared to look behind her. The figure sat, slumped and motionless—lifeless, she told herself—where she had left it.

She hovered, trying and failing to catch her breath between the beat of her wings. “Okay,” she said, noting how the pitch of her voice had risen. “Okay. I’m willing to consider heat exhaustion—perfectly plausible—and weirdness, which unfortunately also has a non-zero degree of probability. I would really rather it not be weirdness! But either way, we are done here.”

She clacked her forehooves together with a little giggle and turned, scanning the field to determine the way back to the festival. “We’ll head back to the farm, hydrate in the shade, and then find Big Mac to… to…”

Her eyes kept following the lines of corn, eagerly searching for the edge of the field, the tall frame of the farmhouse, the edge of the forest, the…

She scanned higher, higher, and higher still, looking across greater and greater distances. Her nervous grin pulled tight into a stunned, slightly wild stare, and one eyelid started to twitch. She looked for the distant flagpoles of Town Hall, for the pointed, colorful roof of Carousel Boutique. She looked for the Whitetail Woods, she looked for Canterhorn Mountain, for the silhouette of Canterlot and the royal palace.

None of it was there. Everywhere she looked, in every direction she turned, were the jagged, twisting lines of green and gold corn stalks, rising and falling in gentle and unfamiliar hills as far out to the cloudless horizon as she could see.

* * *

Twilight sat with her back to the stalks, head down low over her forehooves, trying not to think about the thing her own pose was closely mirroring. She had landed in some path or other, though very deliberately one not connected to the place where she had found the second Applejack lookalike. There was plenty to deal with, and trying to address more than one crazy thing at a time would only serve to overwhelm her further.

She took a deep breath, let it out, and straightened. “Okay. Sweet Apple Acres is gone. Corn is everywhere. And judging by the lack of other ponies, this may have actually been the case for longer than I care to imagine.”

She tried to think back to when she had last noticed familiar surroundings. She hadn’t been paying attention to the line of the forest as she leapt over the cornrows, or the sound of the band, or any other familiar markers. It had all been background noise to her, and her mind was filling in the gaps with assumptions and possibly false memories.

“All of which only begs the question… what precisely am I facing, or experiencing?” she asked, tapping her hooves together. “Possible options: cerebral anomaly. A mental landscape overtaking my reality and pulling me inside. Can I be inside my own brain and still have a brain? Oh, I wish I’d read that treatise on paralayered dimensional constructs…”

She shook her head. “Other possibilities… Well, a simpler option is I’ve simply passed out from the heat, and I’m dreaming right now. That one would be okay. It would just mean I have to wake up, usually by scaring myself. Which… I’ve kind of already tried that.”

Still, it certainly seemed like a good explanation. She took another deep breath and wiped her forehead again, wishing that she had brought water. It felt as though it was getting even hotter, though the many bouts of flying certainly weren’t helping that. If only the corn provided more shade; she feared she was going to be sunburned before too much longer.

“Or…” she continued, looking up at the sky with a grimace, “…magical alternate reality, which is probably the worst outcome. But also the least likely, so that’s great news!”

She gave a short, mirthless chuckle. “Unfortunately, the one common factor to all explanations is that, wherever I am, the rules of existence have likely changed—as evidenced by the limitless cornfield. But, there are probably still rules. All I have to do is figure out what they are.”

She wished immediately that she had been carrying her saddlebags, or had any paper and ink with her. She would feel calmer if she could only begin putting things down, taking the first steps to ordering and rationalizing them. It wasn’t impossible, though. It would be a bit magic intensive, but she felt confident she could cobble together a chain of spells that would take the leaves around her, then shred, pulp, reform, and dry them into something serviceable as paper. Ink was harder, but she thought she could still figure something out if she really wanted.

But before any of that, there was something else she needed to do.

Spreading her wings once more, she took off and pushed herself back into the sky. She rose higher and higher through the heat-thick air, clawing at it with what seemed more force than should have been needed to gain altitude. She paused when she had reached a suitable height, giving herself a moment to just hover and let her breathing slow again. She was not quite so high as Cloudsdale would have been, but high enough that she could only just make out the myriad and minute lines cutting through the fields below.

When she had recovered, she let out a long breath, then puffed her chest out as wide and deep as she could. She sparked her horn, and was relieved when she felt the familiar power surge almost at once; wherever she was, magic was still present. Focusing her intent, she pulled in a huge lungful of the hot, dry air and, throwing her head forward, bellowed out in her best imitation of Luna’s thundering, magically amplified voice:

“APPLEJAAAACK!”

In any other circumstance, she would have expected flocks of birds to swarm up from the fields in every direction. Down below, she could see the stalks of corn shudder and sway, a great shadowy ripple spreading out towards the horizon as the pressure wave of her voice bent them before her.

Twilight flew in a slow circle, ears turning to catch every shred of possible sound as she watched the fields fall motionless again. No echo of her voice reached her, and she couldn’t catch the faintest hint of any returning call or cry. She waited, circling five more times, but she heard nothing beyond the distant murmur of the insects down below.

“Applejack!” she called out again. “If you can hear me, yell back!”

Silence fell across the interminable land once more, and the field billowed in its wake.

“Set a fire!” Twilight yelled, wondering immediately whether the green plants could be made to burn for any length of time without magic. “Send up smoke! Call out to me Applejack, help me find you! Can you hear me? Applejack!”

“Applejack…” she murmured once more, letting the magic die away. There was only the feather-swish of her wings, soft, dry, and repetitive, marking her place in the sky. She felt herself drifting lower, almost as though the sky itself were pushing her faintly but inexorably back down—a tiny, dark speck beneath the infinite and heavy expanse.

“Is there anypony?” she asked, her magicless voice sounding tiny and frail in her ears. For all the answer she received, she might as well be the only pony there had ever been.

3 - Teeth

3 Teeth

For a time, Twilight simply glided, curious if the world was truly as infinite and uniform as it appeared, or if she might still find some answer in a break between the golden rows. Twice more she had called out to Applejack, and both times she had gotten no response. Once, she had thought she heard something, a faint and distant note that sounded almost like a wavering, plaintive cry, but it had faded before she could get a fix on it and had not reoccurred.

She glided farther still, conserving as much energy as possible as she let herself descend back into the field. When she finally landed, she pushed as far into the shade of the row as she could and sat wearily in the dirt. She was thoroughly worn out, and she had little more to show for it than she had when she started.

There was no way to know whether Applejack was really here, but also no way for her to conclude that she wasn’t. Perhaps Applejack had heard her calls, but she had flown in the wrong direction without hearing her friend’s desperate replies. Perhaps Applejack was also tired, too tired to answer. But whatever this place was, it was clearly too vast for her to search physically. She needed a different approach.

“I don’t think there can be any question that some kind of magic has to be at play here,” she said, glancing around. While it was hardly the outcome she wanted, at least it left her with the tools she was most familiar with. All she had to do was figure out what kind of forces might be at play here—where the boundaries overlapped between where she had come from and… wherever, whatever, this place was. And she had more than a few spells to try that might yield helpful results.

“Let’s see… spatial analysis… thaumatic mapping? Or maybe a physical forces test? Or, hock, why not just a basic energy read?” That, at least, would tell her if some kind of powerful spell was active anywhere nearby, or all around her. Information—any information—would help her determine good next steps. She lowered her horn and closed her eyes, allowing her other senses to recede as she probed the air for the familiar, subtle currents of power.

Then her eyes shot open as a shrill, piercing screech tore the air. She scrambled to her hooves, spinning around wildly as she searched for the source of the sound. It carried on for several seconds, thinning to a high, keening note, before dying away in a stuttering, broken series of something almost like chirps. Twilight realized her breathing had gone shallow again, and she made an effort to bring herself back under control.

“What… in Tartarus…” she whispered.

As if in response to her words, leaves rustled somewhere close by. Her eyes darted around, but no motion could be seen yet. Even so, the sounds of something moving towards her were unmistakable. A stem creaked somewhere as it bent, then snapped, wet, brittle, under a heavy tread.

Twilight’s skin crawled. She suddenly felt, with the kind of instinctual certainty she had only experienced in nightmares, that something knew exactly where she was, even though she couldn’t see it. She took a hesitant few steps backwards, then spread her wings and took off without a backward glance. She flew ten, twenty, fifty rows over, throwing a few swerves in for good measure. When the overpowering urge to run finally started to fade, she let herself drift back to the yielding earth.

She sat still for a few minutes, ears turning in every direction as she listened for any sound of pursuit. There was nothing, at least that she could hear over the relentless drone of the cicadas. She sat back and put her hooves over her eyes, pushing down on the emotions that welled up inside her. The scream had been like nothing she had ever heard in all of Equestria—not Everfree beast nor changeling nor magical construct. It had sounded deeper; older. Like the shriek of stones in a crumbling cliff, or the creaking roar of a house collapsing under its own strained timbers. But what truly terrified her was the distinct impression that it had not been the sound of something in pain or fear or anger.

It had sounded triumphant.

Twilight took off again, not bothering with altitude, working only to put as much distance as she could between herself and the source of the scream. Row after row of corn vanished beneath her, the crowns brushing the tips of her hooves as she rushed by, and only when the stitch in her chest returned did she consider landing once more. She needed to consider her next course of action—after as short a rest as she could stand, anyway.

As she searched for one of the wider paths to land in, or better yet another clearing, she instead spotted something off to her left, a little blot rising just above the leaves. It looked like a plant that had risen above the uniform rows of the rest, a tiny, dark hole in the horizon with little leaves radiating out like cracks into the sky on all sides of it. Twilight’s brow furrowed and she veered towards it, curious to investigate any change in the unbroken expanse of the fields.

She was upon it in no time at all, and she was surprised to realize that it was not a corn plant, but a sunflower, the most enormous one she had ever seen. It rose nearly five times her height on a stalk nearly half as thick as her leg, bristling with white hairs that looked sharp as needles. Its head was bigger than her own and looked as weighty as a watermelon, thrust into the sky to copy the sun’s burning rays with its own vibrant yellow petals.

Beneath it, she saw the golden crowns of more sunflowers, more than a dozen, all clustered in one single spot like a little thicket. Why they should be growing here and apparently nowhere else, however, was hardly the most curious thing.

No, that was what the sunflowers had sprouted from.

Twilight landed awkwardly among the corn plants surrounding the sunflowers, shoving them unceremoniously aside to try and get a closer look. Hunkered down among the stalks was an enormous cart or wagon, lying at a mournful, dejected angle with half its wheels broken and their axles stabbed into the dirt.

Twilight frowned, putting a wary hoof onto the side of the wagon. It seemed somehow familiar, though she couldn’t imagine when she would have seen such a derelict conveyance. The wood was bleached gray and brittle with age, and most of the boards had pulled apart, leaving rusty nails to stab viciously out into the air. A few brownish flecks of paint remained that may once have been red; it was impossible to tell. Strangest of all, though, were the metal pipes and cables that punctured and wove around the wagon’s body, leading to large, shattered glass reservoirs bolted to the top of it.

Reservoirs… Why did the vehicle look so familiar? There was a memory, she was sure of it, lingering just below the surface of her consciousness, but she couldn’t match the shape of the wreck to anything she knew.

The entire thing was overrun with the sunflowers, which seemed to have sprouted from somewhere within and pushed their way out through every crack and crevice they could find—or make. The largest, the one Twilight had seen from afar, grew right out of the top of the wagon, and the snarl of its brown, veiny roots shrouded the broken remains of what looked like an enormous glass bulb of some sort. A memory sparked in Twilight’s mind, a sight of captured lightning sparkling inside a sealed tube…

“A thaumatic vacuum valve?” she asked, climbing carefully up onto the wagon’s rail. It was hard to be sure—the casing had deteriorated more than any device she had ever seen, and the wagon on the whole looked to have been abandoned out here for years, if not longer. Even so, it matched what she knew of mechanisms for regulating current in a magically driven engine, the kind only seen in advanced and wealthy cities like Canterlot or Manehattan.

Twilight put her face carefully against the fracture in the wagon’s hull and peered inside. Sure enough, the interior was a snarl of cables and machinery, and with what little knowledge she had of magical engineering, she could spot the places where the vehicle’s magic would have been concentrated and channeled, where arrays of gems and glass would have held the power that charged and propelled it. Every such node was choked and strangled with roots, and in many places, it almost seemed as though the shoots had burst forth from the crystals themselves.

That hardly seemed possible, though. A seed would have needed to be placed somehow inside the gems, or else they had been broken before the seeds were scattered. No flower had roots strong enough to break quartz, ruby, or sapphire.

She pulled away and climbed carefully onto the front of the wagon, up to a wide platform that probably served as its control seat. The whole thing shifted with a groan, ancient springs grumbling and crackling as they shed flakes of rust below the running boards. Something crunched under her hoof, and she stepped back to see the dry, crumbling remains of a notebook lying open on the deck. She prodded it gingerly, wincing as paper crumbled. It looked as though it might fall to pieces if anyone so much as lifted it.

She needed information, though, and this was the closest she had come to meeting another soul in what had begun to feel like days. She carefully, carefully applied a levitation spell, maintaining as equal a distribution of force vectors across every surface as she possibly could, and lifted the book up to her eyes.

It was in bad shape, worse even than the wagon. Adding to the apparent years of baking unsheltered in the sun, the paper had been shredded by what Twilight guessed were probably vermin and insects. Massive swathes were missing entirely, and what remained had been written in pencil, most of it faded beyond recognition. She turned the pages with utmost care, cursing herself when nearly every leaf disintegrated or tore free.

From what little she could discern, the notebook had belonged to some kind of tinkerer or inventor, with mechanical diagrams, sketches of prototype circuits, and models for the integration of various systems laid out across the surviving pages. Designs for custom spells were evident in the latter pages, with the writing growing increasingly shaky and disorganized as they went on. Twilight couldn’t make out a single one in its entirety, but she could see that at some point the spells had shifted from mechanical manipulations to dimensional analysis and drafts—bad drafts—for teleportation spell variations.

“There were other ponies here,” she breathed. “This didn’t just appear. Someone had time to realize what was happening to them, just like me.”

She wondered if they had gotten anywhere. She looked at the ground behind the wagon, and saw the faintest remnants of shallow tracks. It looked like it had been driven straight through the corn, unless there had been a path at the time? Either way, the crumpled body and the wooden prow driven down into the dirt made her think the breakdown had happened while it was in motion.

She turned back to the notebook.

The last span of pages gave way to plain writing, and Twilight guessed it had been a logbook of some sort. Unfortunately, these pages were in the worst condition, and most seemed to have been chewed right down to the binding. Only a few paragraphs remained remotely legible, gouged into the harder paperboard of the back cover, and even these were so smudged she had to spend several minutes picking the letters apart.

“…’absolutely no evidence’…” she murmured. “…something, something, ‘corn’, no, ‘corns’? ‘Corns can be found emp’… ‘employ’? Not sure what that’s supposed to mean. …‘farms throughout Equestria, never heard… perhaps a question of… intensity’? Yeah, intensity. Hmm.”

She squinted, bringing the book as close to her muzzle as she could without touching it. The last line had been nearly obliterated, and it looked as though the cover had been both stomped on and soaked with drops of water, turning the writing to a smudged scrawl. “Something, something… ‘He won’t’… ‘He won’t’…”

Twilight blinked and sucked in a soft gasp, and the notebook nearly fell apart as her spell wavered.

“…‘He won’t stop following me.’ ”

She pushed the book away, feeling a shiver hunch her shoulders together in her back. She couldn’t help but glance around; the plants suddenly felt clustered in far too close around her, their shadows too thick and deep. She felt once again that she was being watched, felt the pressure of unseen eyes lurking somewhere just out of sight in the dense foliage. She suddenly wanted desperately to leave.

She hesitated, looking back to the notebook one more time. Was it worth taking it with her? There was almost nothing left, and she doubted it would survive even a few steps of her carrying it. Still, it was the only connection to Equestria she’d found, and she was loathe to part with it. She gave the wreckage another questioning look, wondering what had happened to the inventor who had driven it here.

Inventor. Contraption. She could practically hear the sound it would have made bulldozing through the breaking stalks, the hissing exhaust of its valves and clattering, clockwork song of its transmission…

Song.

“…What?” Her ears fell flat, and she backed off the platform, looking at the whole of the wreckage once more. The oversized front wheels, the showy, almost stage-like driver’s seat…

“It… that can’t be…”

But it was, and she knew it. She couldn’t imagine how, but here it was. She knew how the engine would have sounded, because she had heard it before, once, as the rattletrap vehicle had rolled up in a different cider season not so long ago, not nearly so long ago as to look so decayed and dilapidated as she had found it.

An echo of voices rolled out over her from her memory, as though she could hear them singing again far, far away through the rows of watchful corn.

“Super Speedy,” the voices sang, “Cider Squeezy…”

“Six Thousand,” Twilight breathed, turning to the side of the wagon. It would have been there, she recalled, just above the shattered glass window and dust-crusted indicator lights of the quality monitor—

Logical filtering charms…

—that the name of the contraption would have been painted in bright, flourishing letters of gold paint, but nothing remained of it now; nothing but wood splintering to sawdust, slowly sinking and crumbling into the ground. But even so, there could be little doubt: The brothers Flim and Flam had arrived here, just the same as her. And now, their most prized possession rotted in the dirt, and neither hide nor hair of them was to be seen anywhere.

Twilight swallowed dryly and set the notebook down. She couldn’t decide if this was good news or bad; after all, it seemed a hopeful thing to find evidence of other ponies here. Other ponies meant other ears pricked for danger, other eyes searching for patterns, other heads working out solutions—even if these particular ponies would hardly have been her first, tenth, or hundredth choices of allies in any circumstance. But the desolate state of the vehicle seemed an ill omen, and she couldn’t persuade herself to feel much hope of finding the brothers. If Applejack hadn’t heard her, and they hadn’t heard her when she was so close above this neglected wreck…

She looked around one more time, feeling more alone and lost than she had even in the sky. She stooped, and as carefully as she could, gathered up the few pages she had dropped and wedged them carefully, respectfully, back between the covers of the book. She had no love for the brothers, but there was no reason to cause more destruction to their property than the sun and insects had already done.

But as she set the last page in among the others, she paused, then pulled it back to hover in front of her again. The page was nearly gone, chewed along the entire length of it. She frowned, noticing the spacing of the marks, their ridges and edges. Then she slowly, carefully brought up the edge to the rim of her own lower teeth.

The arc of the bite lined up almost exactly with her own jaw, the tear only a little broader than her own muzzle. It was almost as though the notebook hadn’t been chewed on by bugs at all, but rather by a pony.

* * *

Twilight stood up and stepped back, surveying her progress with a critical eye. She spat the broken stem she had used for a pen out of her mouth, then wiped her forehead again.

It was no longer a question of her imagination—the heat was definitely getting to her. Sweat was running freely down her body by this point, tracing hot rivulets through her coat before dripping away to vanish in the dirt. Worse still, a simple examination of the scant shadows confirmed one of her worst suspicions: The sun was still in the same spot in the sky as it had been when she had first entered the maze. In spite of how long she’d flown that day—putting another valley’s worth of distance between herself and the remains of the SSCS 6000, to say nothing of the hours she had spent searching for Applejack or fleeing that strange, piercing cry—the day hadn’t advanced towards night in the slightest.

Time not behaving normally wasn’t much of a surprise to her now, and in a strange way, it did offer one source of comfort. It gave a possible explanation for the advanced state of decay of the Flim-Flam Brothers’ machine, and she would take any scrap of sanity this place cared to restore to her. The endless heat, however, was still proving to be a hazard in and of itself.

“The world couldn’t have waited until sunset for things to go totally crazy, could it?” she sighed. “A nice, cool evening with plenty of shade?”

At least she had light to work with. She could have ended up here in total darkness, if it ever got dark in this place. She couldn’t imagine that would be better under any circumstances.

Still. If time was not behaving normally, her body was. She was thirsty, and dirt had begun to cling to her sweaty coat like a second skin. The ground beneath her hooves was dry and hard, and little puffs of dust had begun to spring up wherever she stepped.

Twilight felt her gaze pulled from the work at her hooves over to the edge of the clearing, to where the rows of corn hemmed her in. She could see plenty of cobs, thick and heavy in their wrappings of leaves, and even the shine of plump nuggets of gold peeking out from the openings of the ripest husks. Her stomach grumbled, and her dry mouth yearned to tear a cob free and bite into their cool, juicy flesh.

She forced herself to turn away again. Her body needed nourishment, and if she didn’t find a water source she could trust soon, she knew she would start to feel truly sick. But she was wary of consuming anything she found in a world she didn’t understand, and so long as she felt she could continue on, it seemed best to play it on the safe side while she could.

“If I had just brought more materials of my own,” she sighed. She could conjure wings from spiderwebs and dew, or a door from splinters and the bile of annoyance itself, but food and water of any substantial benefit were far more energy intensive, and even she couldn’t make them from nothing but air. As for the plants, any water she pulled from them would be just as suspect as anything else from this world. She would consider it only as a last resort.

Besides, the feeling of being watched, that something knew where she was even after the long, winding flights she had taken to reach this spot, still remained with her. It had weakened, settling from a deep, sour terror in her chest to a vague, squirming nausea in the corner of her gut. It never fully left her, though, and the sooner she could find a way back, the sooner she addressed the majority of her problems.

As for Applejack…

“I don’t even know if you’re here or not,” she whispered. “But either way, I need help. We both need help. My best chance of helping you is to get more resources on our side.”

She took another long breath, then looked down and reviewed her work.

A “Spatial-Reversion Spell,” she called it—a reworked teleportation charm to essentially “reset” herself and bring her back to a region she was more intrinsically linked to. For her, that meant Ponyville, and ideally her castle. The Flim-Flam Brothers had been on the right track, she thought, working to circumvent the lack of boundaries by simply blinking out of them. Where they had been lacking, so far as she could tell, was the technical acumen to create a strong enough external anchor for their spells.

She had written her own notes in the dirt, in the center of one of the widest clearings she could find while flying. Satisfied she had done what she could, she rose and dusted herself off. “Only one thing left to do: practical trials.”

And yet, she hesitated. Her wings twitched and unfurled partway, and she shuffled her hooves uneasily. The shriek had come when she touched her magic. The feeling of being hunted, of being noticed, had intensified then too, and she couldn’t believe the timing was unrelated. But she didn’t have a choice. She had just steeled her nerve to begin the test when a soft rustling brought her head around in alarm.

There, in the pathway leading to her clearing, stood the scarecrow. Twilight jumped away, clearing the space with a single beat of her wings. She didn’t take off, though, and allowed herself to settle in the passage opposite the scarecrow, watching it with teeth set on edge.

It didn’t move, though it seemed to be swaying slightly, as though somepony had only just stood it there on its four stiff legs. But as she watched, its head seemed to twitch. With a soft creak and a rasp, its baggy face moved upwards, turning its hollow, shadowed eyes towards the sky.

Twilight felt her skin go cold, as though the very veins in her skin were recoiling from it. It can’t be real… it can’t be. But the rules had changed. Who knew what was senseless and what was possible? She bit her lip, fighting the urge to move farther away. She hadn’t detected anything earlier when she had searched for sources of magic beyond her own, but with this… thing… directly before her, there was a lot more for her to work with. She pulled on the tiniest fraction of energy, sending a minute tendril of it towards the scarecrow.

With a faint but immediate crackle like a root breaking beneath a spade, it lowered its head, its empty eyes coming to lock directly on her.

Twilight cut her connection to the magic and took an instinctive step back, the bile in her empty stomach rising in protest at the sight. Every sense, every instinct she had told her to run. But before she could make any decision, the sound of the scarecrow’s voice reached her from across the clearing.

“…nnnnsssshhhh… sssshhhhh…”

“…What?”

She waited, every muscle tense as a harp string as her ears strained towards the scarecrow. Was it trying to—was it even possible that it could—speak to her?

It tilted its head, almost as though puzzled by her. Twilight felt herself waver. One hoof lifted, though whether it was to run or step closer again, she didn’t know. But running, she realized, wouldn’t get her any information. And there was no apparent danger, was there? Could it be that she had an opportunity to learn something?

“What…” Twilight’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, and she licked her lips, her throat having gone suddenly dry. “What do you want?”

“Ssshhhhh…”

Twilight frowned. Was it telling her to be quiet? A warning? She took a careful step forward. When the scarecrow didn’t react, she approached it cautiously, stopping a few good jumps away. “Can you tell me what this place is? What are you? Why do you look like… like my friend?”

The scarecrow stood stone-still for a moment, seeming to regard her. “Shh… shh…”

“I don’t understand,” Twilight growled, feeling her teeth clench together. “Are you… are you anything? Can you even understand me?”

“Shh… shh… Shu. Shuuuu… guh… guh… cube.”

The blood drained from Twilight’s face.

…No. No, it couldn’t…

“Shhhuuuu… guh… cube. Twi… light. Twilight.”

Twilight’s mouth opened, but only a choked sob emerged. She held her hoof over her mouth, refusing to think, refusing to consider. Her thoughts had fled again, shutting down in the face of the unreal and unthinkable. She lowered her hoof, stepped towards the scarecrow, and stooped her head to look into its sightless face.

“…Applejack?”

The scarecrow wobbled, and for a moment looked like it was going to topple over. Then its foreleg jerked, and it planted its hoof stiffly in the soil, taking a halting step forward. Twilight’s throat seemed to squeeze shut, her mind howling that something was wrong, something was horribly wrong, but she was frozen to the spot. Obviously, something was wrong, Twilight thought, everything was wrong.

But if this… if she could actually be… if it was even possible this was, somehow, her friend…

“Ffffffeh… ffffeh…”

The voice, Applejack’s voice, seemed to be getting stronger. Twilight could hear it now, the barest echo of her friend’s hearty warmth beneath a covering of coarse and desiccating dust. It took another step forward, rolling on the joint where the stick plunged into its shoulder. “Fffff… feeeeed, Twi… light. Ffeeeeeeeed…”

“You… feed? What? I don’t understand. Applejack, is that actually you? Show me… show me that it’s really you.”

The scarecrow stepped up to Twilight. She searched the pits in its face for any sign of life, any movement or expression she could recognize as Applejack. The blank expanses of orange stared back at her, the black stitches of its grin giving nothing away. The strings twitched, stretched, and then began to snap one by one as a tear opened in the creature’s face. A mouth crowded with dim shapes and shadows spread open, pulling apart with the soft popping of stitches.

Twilight stared, transfixed. Dimly, she realized that the clearing had gone utterly silent. The cicadas were gone, and in the stillness, her own breathing suddenly sounded horribly loud and ragged. It took her a moment to realize it was only hers that she noticed—that from the strange, horrible replica of Applejack, there was no sound of breath at all.

“Feed,” Applejack whispered, leaning in close to Twilight, “the field.”

Applejack’s head shot forward, her body lunging with an agility Twilight hadn’t imagined it could have. Before she could flinch, Applejack had toppled onto Twilight’s shoulder. A sharp, searing pain shot through her, and Twilight screamed as her hooves flailed, trying to push herself away, but Applejack’s face latched to her shoulder as firmly as a tick. Twilight could feel the skin of her shoulder stretch, tear, and then something deeper down crunched—the feeling of something scraping—

Twilight screamed again, swung her other foreleg up, and slammed her hoof down on the scarecrow’s head with all her might. She was rewarded only with an infuriating, soft little whumpf as the fabric absorbed the blow entirely. Thoughtless in her agony and terror, Twilight reared again, punching down and down, her unrestrained alicorn muscles striking with enough force to shatter the trunk of a tree.

It was like punching a pillow, and it accomplished nothing. Applejack’s sightless eyes seemed to return Twilight’s horrified stare, her mouth twisted in a wicked grin, before the cloth lips sank just a little closer to Twilight’s skin, biting down ever harder.

Twilight opened the channel of her magic, spooled a nexus of energy into focus above her, and then lanced it directly into the scarecrow’s face. It was a weak blow; somehow, Twilight couldn’t bring herself to unleash the full fury of her magic on something that resembled Applejack, however monstrous it had become. With a piercing shriek, Applejack released Twilight and stumbled back, filling the clearing with her unearthly howl as she pawed and swiped at her burned face.

Twilight fell to her side and clutched her shoulder, staring at Applejack in mute shock. The creature staggered, spun, and finally toppled over, rolling over and over in the dirt, its stiff limbs causing it to flip and jolt. But then Applejack was up again, regaining balance and clattering towards Twilight like a spider. The mouth’s gaping grin dangled wide, and Twilight saw now that it was filled with jagged, dripping splinters of wooden teeth, as though someone had driven the shrapnel of a smashed wall into the stuffing of the head.

Twilight felt her reservations evaporate—this could not be Applejack, and whatever resemblance it bore no longer mattered. Almost without considering, she summoned another burst of power as Applejack galloped towards her, and this time, she didn’t hold back.

The scarecrow disappeared in a deluge of crackling purple light, hot as the sun and ruthless as a storm. Twilight held the channel for a heartbeat, two, then three, willing Applejack to be gone when the light faded. She felt suddenly ill at the thought. Certain as she was that this was not Applejack, a part of her still recoiled, mortified at what consequences her reckless defense might have. Even so, she allowed the blaze to ebb only when she realized the field was catching fire around her.

She blinked several times, pulling herself slowly to her hooves as she waited for her eyes to readjust to the normal light. A black scar spread out before her, the corn obliterated for as far as she could see. She staggered as she put weight on her hooves, then looked down in momentary bafflement when her leg wouldn’t move freely. But as she caught sight of the wound, two crescents of pulsing, glistening blood streaming from jagged lines of torn skin, the pain returned in full. She gasped and nearly fell again, tears welling up as she stared down at the ruined flesh of her leg. She lifted it protectively, and a dark, sticky circle was left behind in the dirt.

Her attention was caught by the sound of scraping and shuffling. She turned back to the scar, and her ears fell flat against her skull as she saw something rising from the ash and soot.

It no longer even faintly resembled Applejack. She had burned it beyond recognition, yet it somehow, impossibly, still retained some functional form. Skeletal limbs shuddered upright, and a shrunken, scorched lump rose up on a thin rope of a neck to stare at Twilight. The sense of terror and revulsion returned, the urge to run and get AWAY rising stronger than ever.

“Ttttwiiiiiihihihi…” The mouth parted, squeaking and squealing with a sound like bits of coal rubbing together. “Feed… FEEEEED…”

Twilight gathered her magic once more, allowing it to swell all around her. As she attempted to focus it, though, her shoulder flared in agony, causing her to wobble on her remaining good legs, and the magic to drain away, dissipating into the soil like water. At the same moment, the thing lying in the field lurched upright, screaming in a higher, thinner and more grating pitch than ever before.

Twilight had just enough time to leap into the sky. She clutched at her shoulder with her hoof, jaw clenched, eyes forced almost shut by the speed of her ascent. Her only thought was to get as far away from the thing as she possibly could.

4 - Drought

4 Drought

Twilight pushed hard against the air, forgetting everything Rainbow had ever taught her. Her body wouldn’t relax into a proper flying posture, couldn’t settle into the wind. She sank like a stone, hauled herself back up, sank again, and finally pulled up one more time before she fell into a pathway. She tumbled head over hooves as dry hay crumpled beneath her, then came to rest on her side, panting in agony.

Her thoughts drifted in and out of coherence as she lay there, staring up at the sky. The cicadas were back, filling her ears and drowning out the sound of her own pounding heart. If it weren’t for the sun, its heat pressing down on her with an almost tangible weight, she might have let herself drift off into unconsciousness entirely. But she could feel her skin starting to cook, and so she pushed herself slowly up again with a groan, bits of hay clinging to her mane and tail.

She sat back and breathed for a second, her stomach churning for want of a drink. Her throat was parched to nearly raw, and her lips had bled in a few places during flight. She could only imagine what she must look like, and she cracked a weak, painful smile imagining the paroxysms of horror Rarity would be thrown into if she could only see her.

Rarity. Rainbow. Spike. Had they started to look for her too?

Applejack…

Twilight licked her lips, wincing at the pain. She knew she needed to deal with her shoulder. But for all the preparatory books she had read on the subject, first aid was never something she had practiced to any great extent, and even the sight of small injuries was usually enough to make her queasy. But she didn’t have the luxury of burying her head in her wing, so to speak.

Her thoughts drifted, wandering from where she was, to the spell, to Applejack, back to her throbbing shoulder, to how utterly bone-tired she felt. A pressure was building in her head, and she knew she was experiencing the early stages of dehydration.

Food… water… These things were also priorities. Her mind flicked from one objective to another, seemingly at random. She shook her head slowly, feeling it droop heavily on the loose joint of her neck.

“Come on, Twilight… think. Priorities. Step by step. Order of operations. Water first… no. Shoulder. No solution to the… the water. Just now. Knock out… easy part first.”

A single, choking laugh escaped her at labeling her injury the “easy part,” but it was the most concrete thing she could deal with. Clamping her jaw shut to brace herself, she turned down to examine her shoulder.

Her stomach clenched at the sight, and she had to turn away again and take a deep breath. The blood had partially coagulated, and much of it had turned black and crusty during her flight. It hadn’t closed fully on its own though, and deep red streams still welled up to run freely down her leg and across her back. She realized she was lucky Applejack—No, the scarecrow—hadn’t hit any major arteries, or she likely wouldn’t have made it this far.

But the longer it went untreated, the fewer favors it would be doing for her growing headache and clarity of mind.

If only there were spells to heal wounds, she thought wearily, or even just to stop the bleeding. But even Celestia couldn’t mend flesh, or so the princess had assured her when Twilight had fallen from that ladder in the archives and broken her pastern so, so many years ago. Like Rainbow Dash, she had spent a restless few nights in the hospital instead, fuming at the nurses for not letting her have her heavy textbooks.

She leaned back against the stalks, trying to think. She had no supplies. She could try to refashion the leaves, not into paper but gauze, or at least something like it. But the thought of doing something so mentally intensive set her stomach to churning, threatening to make her vomit on the spot. And even were that not the case, she was more certain now than ever that whatever this place was, it was sensitive to magic, and that creature especially seemed to be viciously drawn to it.

“Maybe that’s why… it bit me.” Was it something like a changeling, something that fed on magical energy? She had encountered far stranger beings.

Wrong priority. Focus, Twilight.

With actual bandages off the table, she decided she could still work with a simpler solution. Turning to the plants, she bit down on some of the broad leaves, breaking them off at the stalk and laying them on the ground beside her. She started by setting down a base layer, which would just be to protect the others from getting dirty on the ground. Were there germs in whatever kind of place this was? Best not to risk compounding her problems anyway.

She had to gather more leaves than she thought, scrutinizing them with bleary eyes as she tried to find the widest and thickest ones. They were stiff and brittle, and not nearly as broad as she had thought from her casual glances at them earlier. Even their color seemed off, looking more gray than green, and most were struck through with lines that looked dry and dead. Still, it would have to do. Summoning as little magic as she could, she unraveled a few of them, twining their fibers together into decently strong threads.

The air remained still, or at least she heard nothing above the incessant, reedy droning of the cicadas. With the string, she stitched the leaves together into a layered pad. She then took the leaves that remained, shredded them into tiny fragments, and hesitantly placed them into her mouth and started to chew.

Funnily enough, it was Applejack who had shown her how to make a poultice, using oak leaves to treat a cut she’d received helping Twilight replace a sagging bookshelf. Applejack had spat the paste onto her ankle, let it dry, and kept working like nothing had happened. Twilight had been aghast at the lack of sanitation, but her friend had just shaken her head.

“You worry too much, sugarcube,” she had said with a laugh.

Twilight could only hope the same would be true now. Though she had barely any moisture to give, she managed to grind the shreds into a thin, crumbly mash that she spat out and packed carefully onto her shoulder, hissing with every tender push and prod.

“Thanks AJ,” Twilight whispered. She picked up the leaf pad and, as gently as possible, packed it down onto her shoulder before applying as much pressure as she could stand.

The pain erupted and seemed to blossom through her body like liquid fire, and it was all she could do to turn her face to the sky and bite her lip to keep from crying out. It wouldn’t be enough, she knew. These were puncture wounds, ragged ones at that, and they needed suturing if she was going to pull through, not to mention entire bottles of disinfectant. But she doubted her plant thread would be strong enough for that, and she lacked a needle or any way to make one.

Finally, the pain subsided to a dull, pulsing heat, and she tied the bandage in place with more string. Breathing fast and shallow, she leaned against the plants again to rest, and then to plan her next move.

There was still the spell. She was in no condition to cast it now, but after just a little rest, if her mind cleared, she could make an attempt. And there was the scarecrow to consider, Twilight thought, her head drooping down over her uninjured shoulder. If her spells before had drawn its attention, her effort to leave would pull it towards her like a fish on a line. So long as the spell worked, though, it wouldn’t be a problem.

I’ll have to be careful. Have to be… ready for…

“Applejack…” she muttered, sinking down low onto the ground, “I won’t… leave you… I’ll figure… something…”

Her eyes slowly shut.

* * *

When she opened them again, she had no way of knowing whether she had merely blinked, or instead slept for hours. The sun still beat down on her, so bright that it seemed to have bleached the sky closer to white than blue, and the drone of the cicadas still made the air thrum in its intensity. She grimaced and shifted, then immediately felt the searing pain in her shoulder flare anew. The leaf bandage had crusted against her skin, and she felt the weak bonds stretch and tear with her slightest movement.

She groaned, shifting herself upright again as delicately as she could. She looked up and down the path, searching for any sign of the scarecrow that was apparently pursuing her. For now, at least, she was still alone.

Alone. She coughed a feeble laugh, grimly amused that any word could be both so wonderful and so horrible at the same time.

“…Right…” she whispered to the sky. “Priorities.”

Water. It could be put off no longer. Her eyes itched and her tongue felt as though it were made from the dust beneath her, and so as much as she felt it was taking a foolish risk, she could no longer ignore the only answer she had all around her. All vegetables retained water, and even with her limited studies on the subject, she knew corn was an especially water-intensive crop. It wouldn’t be enough to slake her thirst completely, but it would strengthen her enough to risk using magic to pull water itself out next. Hopefully, she would be able to harvest enough to fly again before anything came to find her. She pushed herself to her hooves, staggered forward, and reached out to grasp one of the stalks.

A dry crunch met her ears, and her heart seized for an instant as she thought the sound perhaps came from nearby—perhaps signaled the approach of the scarecrow. She realized sluggishly it was only the sound of the leaf she had touched… a leaf that was as dry and scratchy as paper under her hoof. Twilight leaned closer, willing her exhausted eyes to focus.

The leaf was as yellow as straw, and it had shriveled in on itself until it resembled a brittle ribbon more than a leaf. Twilight blinked in confusion, staring around herself in growing horror. The leaves of the fields had been green, she knew that—green even after she had found herself in this limitless expanse of it, green even when she had pulled leaves from these very plants to craft her bandage.

“How… how…”

All around her, every plant was as brown and dead as the dirt she stood on. Not a single one held an ear of corn, and when she looked down, she saw the cobs lying desiccated in the dust. She stooped and snatched one up, and found the kernels as hard and dry as pebbles.

She gasped out a sob and threw the husk, digging out a few more for good measure and peeling their dry, papery shrouds back in desperation. It was no use. The field was dead. All moisture, all nutrition, all life—drained away.

“What is this place?” she cried out, hurling the last cob off into the distance.

“The… field…”

Twilight turned, tripping over her own hooves and only just avoiding a fall. There it was, the blasted scarecrow, the malevolent thing that seemed to be tracking her relentlessly. Only…

Twilight couldn’t help but pause, squinting at the creature in the blazing light. It was the same scarecrow, it had to be, and yet it couldn’t possibly be. It was burned, no question of that. However, it wasn’t nearly as burned as it should have been. She knew that when she left it before, it had been a blackened, withered ruin. Now, it stood full and strong before her again, and only the dark scorch marks covering its orange fabric indicated anything had happened to it at all. Its shirt remained gone, but its hat sat crumpled and askew on its head, decidedly not disintegrated.

Damaged, yet repaired. Twilight was the only one who could have left those scorch marks. This demanded the unsettling question: Who had rebuilt it? Or was it capable, somehow, of healing?

Her eyes flicked back to the rows of dead plants walling them in, to the hard, dry dirt that she knew had once been pliant and damp. Withered, even as the scarecrow was strengthened.

Is there a connection?

The scarecrow took a step towards her, moving faster and more steadily than it ever had before. Twilight backed away, keeping pace with it and maintaining a good, wide distance between them. She hadn’t forgotten the way it lunged at her, the incredible bursts of speed it was apparently capable of when it wanted to be. She swallowed, feeling her throat flex and scratch painfully against itself in her thirst.

“What are you?” she croaked.

The scarecrow stopped, straightening and directing the shallow pits of its eyes toward her. Of all the pieces of it, these especially seemed to retain the most damage from the fury of Twilight’s magic. They were burned to charcoal, and she thought she could see, deep in their shadows, rough holes opening into something nested below. Not eyes, yet she could feel the regard of something terrible—something unknowable—lancing out towards her from the depths of those crude, ragged openings.

“The… field.”

The voice was stronger now, clearer than it ever had been, and Twilight’s stomach lurched to hear such a close mockery of her friend’s voice. Her heart broke in her chest, and she had to suppress a painful sob. “What have you done to Applejack?”

It was a guess, of course. She had no idea what had happened to Applejack, or if she had ended up in this place at all. The evidence suggested as such, of course, but correlation was not causation, and without further knowledge…

“In… the field.”

Twilight blinked in surprise, pausing in place as her ear flicked in confusion. “What did you say?”

“App… ple… jack. In. The field.”

“So she’s here,” Twilight said, and felt a cold, hard core of anger begin to coalesce within the waves of fear still surging deep inside her. Like her, Applejack had been brought here—been taken. And whatever this thing was, it knew enough to answer that much.

It could answer for that much, then. “Where is she?” Twilight demanded.

“Not… here.”

“I can see that.” Twilight scowled. “Why do you look like her? What are you?”

The scarecrow tottered and leaned over on one leg, seeming to lose its balance for a second. There came the low creaking and groaning of bending wood, and Twilight realized it was growling. But when it raised its face to her again, it was smiling, showing all its splintered teeth.

“The… field.” Then, it resumed walking, pulling itself towards her one sharpened stake at a time, dragging the rest of itself behind.

“At least answer this: Did you do something to Applejack?” Twilight felt her horn sparking involuntarily, and she grabbed hold of the thread of magic and held it with a thought. “Did you hurt her?”

“…Safe…”

“Who is? Applejack? Is she safe? Answer me!”

“Will be… will feed… will feed…”

Twilight felt herself shrink back in disgust. However strong it seemed to have become, it was still apparently only barely capable of speech or thought. And that, she realized, was still a major assumption on her part. There wasn’t much to suggest this wasn’t just some imitation of life, some trick meant to get itself closer and closer to her—exactly the way she was letting it do. In any event, she was starting to think bad things were especially likely to happen when it started talking about “feeding.”

“Well,” she said, straightening and holding herself as steady as she could. “Thank you for clarifying something, at least. If you’re not Applejack…”

It was now or never, she decided, pulling on the stream of magic, unraveling and collecting it around herself. Patterns emerged, shells of energy bracing against reality at precise angles. Lightning crackled and danced, and she felt her mane stirred in the first wind she had felt in this horrible place.

“…Then I don’t need to waste any more time here with you.”

She expected the scarecrow to react somehow, to lunge, to emit that terrible howl she had heard before. To her surprise, though, it seemed absolutely unfazed, standing and watching her with its head canted ever so slightly to one side. It looked, she thought with a fresh surge of dread, almost as though it were amused by her.

Twilight grit her teeth and pushed her misgivings aside. With a flick of her horn, she looped the end of the spell into its beginning, completing the structure and setting it into motion with a surge of willpower. A spike of pain cut through her skull, and she nearly lost focus on the spell before she was able to anchor it around her. But the magic took root, and she felt space begin to warp and bend around her.

There was a tearing sound to her right, and a corn plant suddenly rocketed into the sky, trailing dust and stones as it vanished into the sky. Another shot upwards, and then several more, followed by dozens. The ground itself bent around Twilight, rolling up and over her like a scroll of paper. “Applejack” stood unmoved, grinning, as Twilight felt gravity turn and start to pull her backwards off her hooves.

“I’m coming back, AJ,” Twilight whispered. She felt herself fall into space, hurtling down the twisting path of the corn maze as though it had become a bottomless pit.

The scarecrow receded into the distance as plants tore apart and swirled in a vortex around Twilight. She plummeted into an impossible distance that opened up beneath her, and the world collapsed into a maelstrom of brown and white. There was a spectacular crack of thunder, and she lost sight of everything.

* * *

For a few moments, there was only the wind. It beat and tore at Twilight, tossing her wings and mane about as she spun through darkness. She couldn’t tell which way was up, or even if her eyes were open. She opened and shut them frantically a few times, or thought she did. There was simply no way to tell, until all at once, the world snapped into view.

Twilight yelped, flailing her wings and hissing as she felt new tearing in her shoulder. She was tumbling out of the sky, the ground spiraling in a sickening whirl below, above, below, and above her again. She felt as though she were trapped in a rolling marble, its glass patterns spiraling past her with nothing to grab hold of. As the sky grew smaller and the ground larger, though, she finally caught the surface of the wind and, lurching upright, was able to get a clear view of the world as she flew down towards it.

Her heart withered in her chest, and she let out an incoherent, strangled cry of despair. Below her, beneath the sun-blasted white of the sky, was an expanse of sandy brown, featureless, with dizzying spirals and patterns of tracks cut through dead stalks of corn. The spell hadn’t worked. Whatever flaws she had overlooked or particulars of escaping this world her magic required, she hadn’t returned to Equestria. She was still trapped.

Except…

Hold on…

Twilight groaned, straining her burning wings to keep her from falling just a little longer. There was something on the horizon, a dark fleck at the line where gold met silver, larger than a pony, perhaps even larger than a tree at this distance.

She didn’t turn towards it so much as she began drift languidly in that direction, almost as though pulled on a subtle, cold current that had picked up beneath her wings. She was too tired to think on it, too parched to try and plan or question. If something had changed, whether she had manifested it or it had spun out of the alien workings of this pastoral perdition, she felt she had to investigate it. Anything to keep from trudging through more endless rows of dry, dusty, rattling plants.

She swayed on the wind, head and eyelids drooping as she struggled just to stay aloft. The spot had been at the utmost limit of her vision, she was certain of that much, and she doubted whether her wings would carry her that far. Yet with each heavy blink of her eyes, the shadow seemed to blossom and grow, swelling with each beat of her wings, yet faster than they could possibly be carrying her.

“I’m dozing off,” she realized. She shook her head furiously and bit her tongue, fighting to stay conscious.

Another blink, and the shadow was an hour’s trot away. Another, and it was just over the next hill. Twilight’s head throbbed. The sun was in her eyes, and she couldn’t make out the shape she was approaching through its searing rays. As she crested the hill and soared higher, however, carried by a sudden thermal that billowed her wings and seemed to fling her triumphantly skyward, she realized what, impossibly, she was looking at.

“Swe… the Acres?” she rasped, eyes wide in disbelief. Sure enough, there before her was the Apple farmhouse, perched on an enormous hill like a monument. It appeared almost larger than life, tall as a castle, looming almost like a mountain in her vision. And like a mountain, it brought shade—blessed shade!—as she swept under the spire of its vane and away from the punishing light. She heaved a sigh of relief, feeling almost as though she could snuggle up against the cold wall and sleep for days.

And yet… there was something off about the farmhouse, something beyond its sudden appearance and tremendous, almost otherworldly height. She couldn’t bring the house into focus, no matter how hard she squinted. It was a smudged and wavering blot on the sky in front of her, and seemed to shift as she watched, as though she were looking at it underwater.

The heat, Twilight thought. It’s distorting the air, a mirage.

She almost froze in mid-wingbeat, realizing for one dreadful instant that the wavering air might not be the mirage, but the building itself—a terrible false promise, a last cruel trick to drive her down into the dust for good. Before she could consider that for long, though, she cleared the final rows of dead stalks and, looking down into the clearing that surrounded the farmhouse, felt her heart suddenly soar higher than even her wings had allowed her to do just seconds earlier.

“Rainbow Dash!” she croaked. “Spike! Fluttershy!”

There in the center of the clearing that lay in front of the darkened farmhouse, at the picnic table where she had left them, were all of her gathered friends. Rainbow, Rarity, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, and Spike were visible as faint dots of vibrant color, and Twilight thought she could see Big Macintosh and Apple Bloom there at the table with them.

She thought she would cry with relief, if only her itching eyes had any moisture to spare. The spell had worked after all; she had made it. Whatever strange fields she had flown over must have been the outermost limit of the other place, a limit her spell had brought her to. She swept down towards the table on trembling wings.

“Girls!” she called out, barely able to manage more than a scraping whisper. “Girls, you can not imagine how glad I am to see you, I…”

Her smile faltered as she glided towards the table, hooves almost brushing the ground. For an instant, she had the impression—or had she imagined it, still dreading a trick, that she might still find herself in that horrible place?—that it wasn’t her friends around the table; that instead, she looked up to see not a group of smiling faces, but the blank eyes of canvas dyed in blues and reds and purples and whites, empty gazes and stitched grins all turned to stare at her as she came in to land.

Her hoof was wrenched out from beneath her, catching and snagging on the dry soil as she descended faster than she expected. She gasped and looked down, stumbling forward at a broken, disjointed canter as she fought to keep her balance. It was no good. One hind hoof became twisted up with the other, and she pitched forward with only just enough time to turn her good shoulder into the crash and protect her face from the ground. But where she expected to feel packed dirt and rocks smashing into her, she instead came up hard against a soft and yielding body, almost bouncing off it in the speed of her fall.

“Whoa, take it easy there, Twilight!”

At first, the voice didn’t register. She lay there tucked in a loose ball, eyes clamped shut, her thoughts a confused jumble. Then, she felt a hoof prod her gently on her back, and the voice spoke up again.

“Hey, you alright?”

She coughed, groaned, and lifted her head, squinting into the light.

Rainbow Dash stared down at her, blurry lips quirked in a wry smile, with her hooves wrapped around Twilight’s withers where she had arrested her stumbling fall. “Wow, way to make an entrance there, Twilight.”

“Rain… bow?” The blue pegasus above her seemed to ripple and fade, a smear she could barely make out against the sky.

“Geez, you look terrible, and coming from me, that’s saying something.” Rainbow offered a hoof that swayed in front of Twilight like a snake, and after a moment’s bewilderment, Twilight stretched out her own and took it.

Rainbow hauled Twilight upright with a grin, an expression absent any trace of thread of stitch, Twilight was sure. But before she could check again, to be certain there was no hint of stick or sprig about her friend, the others came blearily into view. Pinkie, Rarity, and Spike were smiling at her, and Fluttershy and Big Mac were watching from farther away with friendly concern. Apple Bloom was trotting around in excitement, and Twilight found her eyes had trouble following the filly. She seemed to fade in and out of sight around her, never becoming quite solid. She turned back to try and focus on Rainbow.

“Rainbow… am I…?” she rasped.

“Shh, now just settle down for a moment, Twilight,” Rarity said, stepping up to her. “My goodness, what a state you’re in. You look like you’ve been through something positively dreadful, darling.”

“We were getting kinda worried,” Rainbow said. “Glad to see you made it back.”

“Back? I don’t…” Twilight shut her eyes, feeling the world tilt and sway beneath her dangerously. “Is this… really the Apple farm? The real one?”

“Ha, duh, of course it’s the farm,” Rainbow laughed. “You hit your head out there?”

Twilight could scarcely believe it. Was it true? Had she escaped after all? But if that were the case…

“Applejack,” she managed. “Applejack, did she make it back? Have you seen her, is she—”

“Easy now, Twilight,” Fluttershy said gently, stepping up and supporting her from the side. “You found Applejack, remember? You brought her back to us. It was so wonderful, Twilight, you really are amazing.”

“I…” Twilight’s head swam. “No, she… the scarecrow, I…”

“She’s just up at the farmhouse, getting cleaned up,” Big Macintosh said. His low voice seemed to resonate from the dust under Twilight’s hooves. “Why don’t you go see for yourself? She’s prepared a mighty big supper for y’all. You look downright famished.”

Food. Twilight felt an aching stab in her gut just thinking about it, and the air seemed suddenly scented with the warm, golden-brown fragrance of toasted, flaky, buttery bread and hot, soft, baked fruits. Her mouth opened of its own accord in utter want, and her tongue felt as though it was caked in dirt as it tasted the cool, dry air.

“Water… is there water?” she asked in desperation.

“ ‘Course there is,” Big Mac murmured. “Pitchers of it.”

“Bathtubs!” Rainbow said.

“Whole oceans of water, cool and clear as the sky,” Rarity chimed in. “All for you.”

“Go on, now,” Mac said, though he hardly needed to have spoken. Twilight’s hooves were moving with a mind of their own, carrying her towards the towering shadow of the farmhouse. It was still vague and indistinct, Twilight realized, still wavering and tilting in her vision, a dark swathe of ink spilled into the sky. But she thought she could hear the splatter and stream of running water from just inside, and her mind was wiped clear of all other considerations.

“We’ll be waitin’ for ya,” Macintosh said, somewhere far behind her. Twilight stepped inside.

5 - Decay

5 Decay

Twilight stood in the living room of the Apple family home, blinking and looking around in sudden confusion. It was exactly as she had seen it last: A cozy circle of farmhouse furniture, heavily worn and many times patched, all on a sturdy rug the color of autumn leaves; shelves and tables cluttered along walls papered in warm tones and plain yet homey patterns; paintings and photos representing four generations’ tastes and sensibilities hung on nearly every surface; and all of it bound together by the solid ribs of the house, the wooden posts, beams, and floors all stained a rich cherry that shone almost crimson in the gentle light. In the corner, Winona lay curled in a soft straw bed, gnawing on a long, thin bone in between soft, curiously plaintive whines.

The room was almost overwhelming in its clarity and detail, and it took Twilight a moment to realize she wasn’t having any trouble focusing on any of it. Gone was the bleary, washed out impression she’d had of the outside world, though in contrast, this was nearly as bewildering. There wasn’t an inch of the room that wasn’t in perfect focus at all times, and she could perceive details ranging from the minute grains worn into individual boards to the spacing between threads on quilts and cushions.

It was as if she had stepped into a theater and been blinded not by the sun, but by a projection, a mélange of information pushed upon her and overwhelming her senses in their painstaking clarity. It was so much to take in that she didn’t notice the humming voice right away.

As soon as she did though, she wondered how she could have missed it. It was unmistakably Applejack’s voice, and she sounded, to Twilight’s surprise, both happy and content.

“Applejack?”

No one answered, nor was there any change or pause in the wordless tune issuing from the kitchen. Twilight stepped forward, and was momentarily surprised that she could walk so easily. She had, for some reason, expected to be limping, or to have trouble keeping her hooves in line, or some such.

Why had she expected that? Oh well. It didn’t seem important.

She followed the sound of her friend’s voice, the walls and floor of the house sliding past her as if on rails. She felt oddly distant from herself, like she was an audience to her own perspective—removed, and yet still behind her own eyes. What an odd sensation.

She stepped through the door to the kitchen. There was Applejack, standing at the stove with her back to Twilight, humming that strange, tuneless, yet pleasing melody while she worked at something on the cooktop with her forehooves. In between them was the kitchen table, and—

And oh Celestia, what a table. Twilight’s eyes went wide at the sight of it, whether it was from hunger or simply to take in all the myriad colors and textures, she couldn’t have said. There were fritters and pies, a pumpkin stuffed to overflowing with bouquets of orange-and-gold mums and sunflowers, an entire ring of vibrant winter squash varieties sliced and presented, baskets of rolls swollen to bursting beneath crowns of butter, dishes of lettuce and kale tossed in glistening dressing with bright points of radishes, and mounds, mounds, of glowing golden corn, grilled and dripping with butter, paprika, cayenne, and black pepper that Twilight could smell even from where she stood.

She felt weak with yearning, and a pang of hunger rose up inside of her stronger than anything she thought she was capable of feeling. But stronger even than all of this was what drew her eye to the left side of the room: The water pump over the sink, and the clear, silver drops of water that were even then falling lazily from its spout.

“Twilight!” Applejack exclaimed, her hat cocking ever so slightly as she heard Twilight approach. “I thought I heard ya. Thank Celestia you’re back safe and sound. I hope you’ve got an appetite. We fixed you something real nice as our way of saying thank you.”

Applejack waved a hoof, gesturing to the room as she worked a spoon through the dish on the stove. “Y’all go ahead and get started. Whatever suits your fancy, it’s yours. Anything for such a good pony.”

Twilight didn’t hesitate a moment longer. With a single flap of her wings, she was at the sink, glass in hoof, straining against the pump with all her might. It took only one firm push, and water, sweet, clear, icy water, gushed out of the tap, spraying so hard it drenched Twilight’s hoof as she tried to fill the glass. She threw the cup back and drained it in one long pull, barely breathing as she stuck it back for another fill. It was a little strange for water, possessing a surprising substance and weight. It felt almost… thick, in the oddest of ways, as it dribbled from her lips and down her chin. But no matter. Her thirst overpowered all other thoughts.

She downed another glass, and then a third, before she finally set the glass aside and stuck her head under the pump, all but wrapping her lips around the spout as she strained for more. The pump seemed to be running dry, and the pipe shook and heaved as she forced more water through it. The liquid gurgled and spluttered, coming slower and slower until Twilight was practically sucking it out of the nozzle.

She fell back, panting for breath. “Oh, that is good…” When had simple water tasted so good? So rich?

She glanced over to Applejack, suddenly sheepish for the lack of manners she had displayed. But Applejack was gone, apparently having left while Twilight had been drinking. Perhaps she had gone to the cellar or the pantry to fetch something. And what remained was the food.

Twilight paused for the briefest moment, thinking that surely she ought to wait for Applejack or the others. It would be rude beyond imagining to start digging in to such a wondrous feast without even waiting for those that had prepared it. And there was something else, something nagging at the edge of her attention, insisting she wait, insisting she leave even, that she shouldn’t touch the food for… some reason.

But Applejack had invited her… and the smell was positively overpowering, a medley of smoky spices and salt and sugar, and something else, something she couldn’t quite put her hoof on beneath it all, that made her think of the texture of hair and skin beneath teeth.

She recoiled again, feeling more uncertain than ever. But why would that be? This was Applejack’s home, the ponies who had first given her food as a guest the very day she arrived in Ponyville. Nothing they served would ever be anything but the absolute finest—if a bit simplistic for some ponies’ tastes, maybe.

Ponyville. The name jarred something in her mind. Where was Ponyville?

“Outside, silly. Down the path.”

Twilight frowned, her ear twitching. Had that been her own thought? It sounded like her voice, although…

“What am I waiting for?” she asked herself—she was asking herself, she was sure of it. “All this food is being given to me. It would be rude not to take it. It’s all part of the cycle, after all. A pony needs to eat.”

The light from the lamps on the table flickered, dancing over the glossy, oily surfaces of the feast before her. Twilight moaned involuntarily.

“It’s time to feed, Twilight.”

Without another thought, she dove forward, practically falling onto one of the floor cushions surrounding the table. With manners that would have given Rarity an aneurysm were she not at the picnic table outside, Twilight scattered the silverware to the floor as she seized the nearest plate and sank her teeth into a massive buttered roll. Her teeth broke the tender, thin skin, pulling out rich fibers of warm, steamy crumb with audible tearing. Grapes burst, tender flower petals were minced, and she set to work on a butternut squash with a vengeance. Her mind was blank, wracked with the sensations of taste and texture flooding her mouth, drowning out the odd little notes that appeared in the food. Here, the squash had something oddly crunchy—a stray seed, no doubt—and there, the skin of a potato was oddly tough, and the dust that still coated it felt strangely long and tickly, forcing her to rend and rip it almost violently with her teeth.

Twilight tore through the table until she was full to bursting, pulling plates towards herself as if her legs were scoops. She groaned, wondering if this was how Spike always felt, if he actually was this hungry all the time as he claimed, and if she was maybe too harsh on him for his lack of manners. She was certain she would appall even the Apples if they came in and saw her going at it like this, and she was grateful she had been left alone for so long.

And she had been left alone for quite some time, she realized. The sun had disappeared outside, and the light came only from the oil lamps on the table. The rest of the kitchen was draped in shadows, and she imagined that soon it would be time for bed. She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten so much.

Why am I so hungry, anyway? She wondered.

“It’s hard work,” Applejack’s voice said from somewhere behind her, “tendin’ the field.”

A gust of hot, rattling wind tore through the room on the tail of that last word, shaking the timbers of the room. The lamps on the table trembled, and the flames in their hurricane glasses guttered and vanished before Twilight could blink. Twilight choked and coughed, spitting out the glob of food that had turned suddenly soft and sour in her mouth.

“Applejack?” she asked, looked wildly around her. There was still light—a number of pale, dim shafts cut through the slats of the ceiling and cast white, dusty lines across the room, but they revealed nothing.

Twilight backed away until she hit the wall, yelping in surprise at the sudden thump. Her heart beat against her ribs, sending a heavy, repetitive thud throughout the room. When no answer came and nothing moved around her, she took a long, slow breath, concentrated, and launched a single mote of purple light from her horn.

The room appeared before her in stark shards of monochrome splintered by black shadows. She was in a room of plain, unfinished timbers that had shrunk and splintered over centuries of wear. The floor was hard packed dirt, and the fixtures, cabinets, and appliances of the kitchen were nowhere to be seen. It was more like the corner of a barn that had been long abandoned than the home Twilight knew she had just been inside.

Twilight’s eyes fell to the table still present in the center of the room, pulled from the inky blackness as the mote drifted over it. It was piled high with mounds of dark, shapeless matter, and lumpy protuberances rose at odd angles all throughout. She stepped closer, struggling to see clearly in the weak light, as the steady thud continued to beat inside her, above her, all around her. Then her jaw dropped, and her eyes flew wide in horror.

The table was piled with earth, a heap of black, spongy soil glistening with moisture that overflowed in slow clumps and trickles over the edges. For a moment, she thought that was all it was.

Then she saw the limbs.

Long, withered legs of every shape and size were visible in the dirt, lying barely exposed to the air atop its surface and scattered in broken and severed fragments along the edges. There were paws, and claws, all covered in shrouds of gray and black skin pulled taught with ruin. Farther in, there were glistening cavities of ribs still enclosed with the stringy matter of softened flesh. There were teeth, broken and scattered like seeds, or still implanted in mouths half buried in the loam and gaping wide at the half-tasted air.

Something wet was seeping and trickling through channels in the mud, pattering softly on the floor. Mold and mushrooms erupted in damp crowns and curtains all throughout, the pale veins of their mycelia stretching down where clods and bones crumbled against the slow and ceaseless advance of decay. And with the sudden crinch and scrunch of shifting earth and dry, tearing skin, Twilight realized that the mound was not motionless at all, but alive with the glinting and scuttling of thousands and thousands of insects.

She let out a revolted groan and backed away again until she collapsed, one hoof covering her mouth and another clutching at her stomach. Beetles, ants, and centipedes with their myriad needle legs coated the corpses and peeled and nibbled with their sharp little jaws. Some had even been killed and devoured in turn by their own kind, or by glistening, swollen-backed spiders that tickled and danced across their prey, all tumbling, all buried and emerging in turn from the black, churning soil.

Twilight looked down at herself, and screamed. She was coated in filth, her lips and jaw and neck and chest caked in black mud, and the wetness of something beneath it, something black and sticky and smelling of metal and rot. Something tickled at her cheek. She reached in, probing haltingly, and plucked out the white, friable shard of a little paw’s bone.

Her stomach churned and clenched, and she had only enough time to turn away before she vomited. She heaved over and over, mind blank except for the primal desire to rid herself of every ounce of corruption she now felt settling lazily into her core. She sat there for some minutes, choking and sobbing between heaves, until her body collapsed to the side, her strength utterly gone. She lay there, panting, listening to the repetitive, droning thump… thump… thump… that seemed to echo and pulse through the splintery wall she lay against.

Her body shook, and she just managed to raise her head, every muscle feeling like strings pulled to breaking. Thump… thump… thump… Her thoughts were bleary again, all nourishment expelled along with the sickness and decay. What she wanted was nothing more than to curl up and fall into oblivion, to stop thinking and feeling and, above all, not to ruminate on what had just happened.

Thump… thump…

“What is that?” she croaked, glaring at the ceiling. Could this place not even let her fade away in peace?

CRACK.

With an explosive shattering of timbers, the ceiling in the corner caved inwards. Twilight’s eyes snapped to look in the purple light, watching as the slats sagged at a lopsided angle. With a deep, long rush, almost like a sigh, a river of dirt flowed in from the hole and began piling into the corner of the room.

CRACK.

Halfway across the room, just behind the table, another hole burst open, vomiting soil downwards. Another hole burst, then another, and Twilight scrambled to her hooves, moaning as her muscles protested and her head swam. The room swayed and turned in her vision, and she fought to stay upright. She turned and took one halting step towards the door.

CRACK.

A hole opened in the ceiling directly above her head, a thin fissure that slit its way right between two slats, like a wound swelling and peeling open. Twilight had only an instant to see the dirt tumbling down on top of her, mouth open in a strangled cry, before it slammed into her and shoved her down to the floor. Twilight’s limbs tried to flail, and it was like swimming in syrup, pushing the clods and piles away with every motion. The weight grew and grew on her back, and it was all she could do to drag herself along the floor, emerging from the fresh heap like a worm and gasping for air. The mote of light flickered, swaying and darting erratically in the air as her ability to maintain even this most simple of magics wavered.

Another stream burst open above Twilight, sending the crushing weight sliding down on top of her exposed face. She swatted and dug with a foreleg, shoulder screaming in pain as she dug herself free, pulling and grasping at the swelling mounds with weak hooves as she fought to pull herself on top of them. The light dimmed, and she could barely see the ground rising in front of her—But she could still see the bones, the skin, the hollowed sockets of eyes rolling and tumbling in the dirt around her. She shoved her hoof down to push herself up and felt it sink into something both wet and sharp, like the bones of a fish. She coughed, spewing out dirt, and lunged towards the door, trying to gain momentum to slide down the earth and towards freedom.

Another stream burst open immediately above the door, blocking the dim view of the passage beyond in a cascade of black clods and white bone. Twilight floundered, feeling her back begin to sag deeper beneath the mound piling on top of it. Her light sputtered, on the brink of sparking out altogether. In one final, desperate heave, Twilight forced her head upwards, clenched her eyes, and poured her magic into the room.

Lightning sparked and crackled, searing her in its hot claws as it snaked across her skin, but the spell wouldn’t take hold of her. A resounding pop filled the room and starbursts flashed around her, but nothing happened. Again she poured out her power, and again the teleportation spell cut apart the space surrounding her, but vanished to leave her in exactly the same place.

Why isn’t it working?!

Twilight swam against the earth, climbing and climbing and climbing but getting nowhere. Darkness closed in, and her view of the door vanished as her light disappeared into the dirt. For a moment, there was only the rumble and groan of settling earth, and the roar of more crashing down from above. Then Twilight gave one last, guttural cry, heaved free of the dirt in a surge of desperate strength, and threw herself through the rain of decay towards were she thought the door to be. If she was off by even the slightest degree, she expected she would smash her skull against the wall and disappear beneath the tide.

But the wall didn’t come. She tripped, rolled down a slope of soft earth higher than any hill in Ponyville had ever felt, and came to bone-battering halt as her body tumbled onto the bare floor. The sound of rumbling dirt grew muffled and subdued as the door filled up behind her, then settled into silence.

Twilight lay panting on the floor, chest heaving. Sporadic twitches and spasms wracked her body, and her thoughts drifted in and out of coherence as black spots swam and blinked before her. The only thing that kept her from falling into immediate oblivion was the steady thump… thump… thump… coming from somewhere just above her.

She blinked, tilting her face to try and get a sense of where she was. She didn’t have the strength even to lift her head, but she tried to steady her breathing. If the ceiling began to cave in here, she knew she would have to run again.

Or, perhaps she wouldn’t. Perhaps should would just let the place bury her, and drift into blessed, blessed silence.

But the ceiling did not break. She was in a dim, cavernous space that was made of the same weathered wood as the kitchen had been, but far higher and more open. It seemed to be the interior of a barn, possibly the Apples’ barn, or something that resembled it. She didn’t know it well enough to say, but in any event this one was empty, stripped of hay, tools, or anything else familiar. It was like a coffin for dust, and dust seemed to be the only thing there, aside from Twilight. There was no sign of the bright, cozy living room she had come in through, but that hardly registered to her. She could barely remember having seen that place at all, wasn’t even sure she had seen it in the first place. It was like the vapors of a dream, granting her the ghost of warmth, fading with every second.

Thump. Thump.

Twilight turned her head sluggishly. She could see, by the light of the pale beams coming in through chinks in the walls, that there was a narrow stairway leading upwards, bare boards on a rickety frame nailed to the wall. It didn’t even have a guardrail. It ran to what she guessed was the hayloft, where the rhythmic sound seemed to be coming from.

Twilight whimpered, gathering her legs under herself and pushing her body slowly up. Her bandage was gone, ripped away in her struggle to escape the kitchen. Her shoulder wept gently, sending thick and slow rivulets to cut crooked paths down the mud caking her coat.

But no sooner had she managed to stand than she froze as something answered her pained moan. She turned to the shadowy corner, to the place where Winona had been and which she thought lay empty in the darkness. Now though, she saw it was not truly empty; there was a hunched shape, a vague, quivering mass that she would have mistaken for just another blot of darkness, a trick of her eyes, had it not begun whispering.

“…hooves… path… follow…”

She waited with her breath trapped in her chest for it to make some movement towards her. Was it the scarecrow, the thing that had hunted and lured her here? It certainly seemed broken and twisted enough, but somehow she got the sense that this couldn’t be one of the monstrous figures. There was no aura of malice emanating from it, no halting steps as it began to force its way towards her.

She almost turned and left it anyway. There was nothing here that could be of benefit to her, nothing whatsoever anymore that she could gain from searching or seeking. There was nothing in this place but death and ruin now, she was certain.

She would have turned and gone upstairs if not for the quiet, miserable sob.

Gritting her teeth, she held her breath and stepped hesitantly towards the thing, halting every few steps to try and determine what kind of threat it might be, all the while accompanied by that distant thump… thump… thump. She could see the shape of heaving, shuddering shoulders, a dark mess of what might be a mane, but little else. It wasn’t until she was almost close enough to reach out and touch it that she realized who she had found.

“Flim?” she gasped, putting a hoof to her chest in horror. “Or… Flam?”

The unicorn was the palest shadow of a pony that she had ever seen. She wasn’t even sure he was alive at first, as his skin hung in thin, limp shrouds over his skeleton, not unlike the half-glimpsed corpses in the room behind her. His mane hung down below his shoulders in limp locks glistening with grease, and his face was buried beneath a wild, unkempt beard.

But worst of all were his eyes. He never looked at Twilight—he didn’t even seem to be aware that she was standing there. He stared unblinkingly off into some great distance, looking up as if at an unseen sky, and his pupils were so small his eyes appeared almost white and blind at first. He sat on the floor, clutching his hooves around his chest, as he rocked and whispered feverishly to himself.

“Hooves on the path, follow it home… hooves on the path, follow it home…”

“Flim, or Flam, can you hear me?” Twilight asked tremulously. She reached out a hoof, but thought better of it and withdrew it once more. “What happened to you?”

He made no answer, muttering and shuddering.

“Flim,” she said again, tapping her hoof sharply against the wall. “Flam. What happened? Where’s your brother?”

His voice cut off mid-word, and he froze in place. Twilight half expected him to just keel over on the spot, but he sat perfectly still, as though listening for something.

“…Flim?”

“He’s in the field,” he whispered. “Him, and not him. Because he stopped. He stopped talking to me. Oh, brother of mine. But he won’t stop. No, he won’t stop, don’t you see? He won’t stop… following meeeee. Him, but not him. Out there. In the field. The ones in the field.”

“What do you mean?” asked Twilight, taking a step closer. “Is your brother… one of them? A scarecrow, out in the field?”

He made no response. He turned his face in a slow arc from left to right, as though watching something cross the room. Then, “We shouldn’t have done it, brother. We shouldn’t have fed them. We shouldn’t have let them… learn our taste… no way out, brother. Can’t find a way out. Oh, Flim. I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…”

“It… it wasn’t your fault,” Twilight offered, lifting her hoof towards him once more. “There wasn’t anything you could have done. This place, it…”

She gasped and shrank back, snatching her hoof back and clutching it to her chest. Flam’s skin had startled her with its heat, seeming as hot as a stovetop in the cold, dank air of the barn. It was as if he had been sitting in the hottest desert sun until that very moment, and she thought she could smell the sharp, acrid scent of burning hair.

“What… what is…”

She stepped carefully around Flam, trying to get a clearer view of his face. It was only then that she saw there was something else in the room with them, lying on the floor in front of Flam, partially blocked by his emaciated body—a ragged shadow, a stain of darkness on the earthen floor that Twilight at first took to be a broad puddle. But as she gained a clearer view, and the dim light from outside brought it into greater clarity, she saw it was no stain, but a misshapen lump, a mess of scraps and stringed bits dangling from sharp, jutting bones…

She could see the wet glimmer of viscera still lying at its core, and the whites of its milky, softening eyes as they stared up at her from beneath a tattered straw hat and long, spiraling horn.

“I’m sorry, brother… I’m so, so sorry…”

Twilight’s body heaved, but she had nothing more to bring up. She pushed herself away from Flam, and he didn’t notice her go. He reached down and dug a skeletal hoof through the piled mess, prodding something wet and soft free with a feeble tug. Twilight turned and staggered away, but the whisper-mutter of his words followed her towards the stairs.

“Hooves on the path, follow it home… Hooves on the path, follow it home…”

She reached the steps just as the sound of a wet, gurgling bite reached her ears, like the crushing of a soft, rotten fruit, and she fell against the wall with a nauseated grunt. Up above, the steady thumping continued, louder now, she thought. She glanced blearily around the barn once more, searching for any other alternative she could take. There was no door she could see aside from the one now filled with dirt. There were no windows or hatches, no way out.

The path led only upward now.

Twilight swallowed, forcing herself to take a long, shuddering breath, then turned back towards Flam. Whatever had happened to him, whatever state he was in, she couldn’t just leave him, a fellow pony, to languish there alone. She looked up, bracing herself to approach the foul corner once more—

But Flam was gone. The corner was empty, and where the dark shadow had been in front of Flam, she could see clearly that only a clean, dim spread of dirt remained.

Twilight stared at the patch for a few moments, scowling at it with what little vague anger she had the strength to hold onto. Then, haltingly, she turned and began to climb.

6 - Feed

6 Feed

Her steps carried her at a slow, unsteady gait up the steps, dragging her good shoulder along the splintering wood for support. At the top, she found herself on a wide platform facing a thin wall that rose up to meet the peaked roof, and a plain door set in the wall. The sound was coming from there.

Twilight stepped forward, then glowered at the door, face slack in exhaustion. Finally, she let herself in.

The steady creak and groan of wood echoed in the empty room, bouncing off the slanted beams of the ceiling. After every creak came the thump, a rolling, soft beat of timber upon timber. Twilight squinted, trying to see into the darkness. The room was like a tunnel stretching into a vast distance, and at the far end, she could just see what appeared to be a square window or door opening into blinding sunlight.

And in between her and the opening, a spindly, shadowy shape rocked backwards and forwards, its back to Twilight, every detail washed out by the light shining behind it.

“You struggle so hard, Twili-girl,” came a voice, higher and scratchier than Applejack’s. “Wearin’ yourself out. That’s fine, if’n you want it that way. The field never tires. The field waits for you, always.”

“So you’ve learned riddles,” Twilight said through gritted teeth, her voice a husk of what it used to be. “Should I be impressed? Or should I ask why you’ve decided to look like Granny Smith this time? Would it get me anywhere?”

The chair froze as if nailed suddenly in place. “There are other shapes in your mind that you could grow,” came the voice, young and airy and bright, “if you wanted them here.”

“What does that mean?” Twilight asked. “You’re saying I have some sort of… control over this?” She eyed the pale light beyond Granny, not really interested in what the impostor had to say. It seemed stronger now, more coherent than ever. But as far as she was concerned, that only meant it was more dangerous now, more capable of luring her. She was hurt and sick, but if she could only summon the strength for a run, if she could get past the chair before the figure within had a chance to react…

A low, weighty thrum rolled through the room, or perhaps beneath it. It seemed to vibrate the wood beneath Twilight’s hooves, and it almost sounded, for an instant, as though the air and the ground themselves had laughed at her.

“You affect the field,” Granny said, “and the field affects you. There ain’t no ‘control’ or ‘making things so’ here.”

A pair of hooves settled on the armrests, muscles stiffening beneath a smooth, supple coat as they pushed the figure up and out of the chair. Granny turned, and Twilight saw it was Granny, and yet decidedly not Granny. This scarecrow, this doll, had been made to resemble Granny as Twilight might have imagined she looked in the prime of her youth. Her white hair was now a platinum blonde, almost incandescent in the radiance of the distant doorway, and her once-loose skin had tightened over her face into a coy, cocky sort of smirk.

Strangest of all, she had eyes—eyes that sparkled with the cool, sharp light of glass as they caught the daylight beyond, lending a sickening simulacrum of life to that pulled-on face. But below the veneer, Twilight could still sense the dark, lurking pressure she had felt in the crude hollows of the false Applejack—a ruthless, wicked hunger, a sense of deadly, insatiable, and immeasurable need. She could feel the weight of its regard, a pitiless interest that seemed to reach out to Twilight and pull at her, as if coaxing her towards the scarecrow with a faint but terrible gravity.

“I don’t understand,” Twilight said, taking an unconscious step back. Her eyes flicked between the door behind her—a door that led nowhere—and the light beyond.

The doll that was Granny Smith only shrugged, a gesture so mild and fluid that it made Twilight’s skin crawl. When she spoke, her little mouth opened and flexed, but the motions never quite seemed to match the words.

“Maybe you don’t. ‘Tain’t no matter either way. You barely knew anything about the other place, and you got along there just fine. Why should it matter here?”

“What is ‘here?’ ” Twilight snapped. She stamped a hoof, then toppled and fell to her knees, her weaker leg unable to support her. “Why did you bring us here?” She asked, hissing as she gripped her shoulder.

“ ‘S the fieeeeld, Twili-girl,” Granny said. She chuckled a firm, high laugh, like she was telling a little private joke to a friend behind the schoolhouse. “The roots of every field, the wellspring of life, and the final bed of every flower. The loam at the heart of the world, and the crack in the mountain through which the spring pours. This is every field, everywhere. You’re a smart filly, you should know about this.”

Twilight scoffed, cradling her throbbing leg as pained, hot tears washed the dust from her face. “I don’t have a clue what you’re babbling about.” But as she spoke, the fragment of a memory sparked somewhere back in the recesses of her muddled thoughts, a lecture of Celestia’s on the nature of shape and transformation; something about the notion of true forms, of absolute ideals or even original manifestations, that lay behind perceptions of matter and motion. But whatever it all meant, they weren’t the answers she needed.

“Why don’t you let us go?” Twilight whimpered. “What could you possibly have to gain from all this?”

As suddenly as it had appeared, the smile vanished from Granny’s face, and the sensation, the pressure, from the vastness deep below her eyes intensified. She took a few slow, almost delicate steps towards Twilight, as though sidling up shyly towards her.

“If’n it were your place to leave, the way would simple,” Granny said. “Just put your hooves to the path, and follow it home to your doorstep. But I think you’ll find it won’t work that way for you.”

“You stay away from me,” Twilight growled, her horn sparking. “Or I’ll do to you what I did to that thing out in the field.”

To her dismay though, the light of her magic didn’t seem to faze Granny in the slightest. It barely even reflected in her eyes, a dim glow that flared only briefly before sinking into an intensifying and deepening darkness. Granny took a few steps closer.

“You can burn a branch,” Granny said quietly. “You can burn a forest. But you cain’t burn the roots, Twili-girl. Haven’t you seen by now? You cain’t kill with what feeds.”

“What…” Twilight swallowed. “What does that mean? What feeds?”

Finally Granny paused again, looking down at Twilight with momentary puzzlement. Then her head tilted back, and she gave a strange, rattling sigh that sounded downright exultant. “Why, everything, Twili-girl. Every creature, from the littlest mouse to the tallest tree, has the stuff of the field in it, and it all returns, to return and then return again. Give and take. Grow, and die, to become the flourishing and the decay and the flourishing again of what comes after, and then return to our embrace once more.”

“…‘Our’ embrace?” Twilight asked. “You mean you and that thing that looks like Applejack? Just what are you, anyway?”

Granny lowered her face again, mouth quirked in an expression of mild disgust, as though she had just decided she was talking to an idiot. “I told you, Twili-girl. We’re the field.”

The slats creaked and flexed beneath Twilight, and for a moment, she thought the barn was moving, stretching beneath her and around her like a cat beginning to wake up. Then she realized the floor had bent beneath new weight, and she turned to see there were ponies beginning to enter into the room.

No, not ponies, she realized as the blood in her veins turned cold. The faceless figures of her friends, of the Apple family, the little diminutive doll-shape of Spike, filed slowly through the door one by one, shuffling and dragging their stubby soft feet across the floor. They each took a different path, following slow and seemingly random turns as they fanned out across the room, managing to form a line hemming Twilight away from the door. None of them looked at her, their heads limp and lolling, as though they were being pulled by invisible strings from the ceiling.

“We are the field, and the field is us,” Granny said. “All one and the same.”

The scarecrows shuffled closer, still looking anywhere but where they were going. Twilight pushed herself against the wall, holding her hoof over her shoulder as it ached and throbbed.

“What about Applejack?” Twilight asked desperately. “My Applejack, where is she? Why are you doing this? What did we ever do to you?”

“Applejack’s in the field,” Granny said, gesturing to the square of radiant sunlight beyond the opening. “Where she needed to be. Where you belong, Twili-girl.”

“I don’t belong here,” Twilight growled. Her eyes darted around the room again, searching, calculating, shifting herself to keep the distance between herself, Granny, and the others as balanced as she could. Her gaze settled lastly on the sunlit portal one last time before returning to Granny. “I belong at home, with my friends, with Applejack. Give her back, or I swear to Celestia—”

“You belong here,” Granny cut her off, and her face warped into a furious scowl. “You’ve taken from the field, Twilight. You’ve taken her nourishment, fed your bones with her remains. Why, you’ve taken today. Taken so, so much of what we have to give.”

Her expression softened again, and as she stepped closer, Twilight realized the fabric face and the false eyes were weeping, somehow, tears shining on the cold glass and soaking gently into the soft skin. “But you’re able to give, too. We felt it from afar, so long ago, the light that burns in you. A heat brighter and stronger than a hundred of your kin, than a thousand years of the sun’s provender. It strengthened us, brought us closer to you. And so we’ve grown and grown, stretched our roots out to find you and return you here at last. To become ours.”

The faces of the scarecrows lifted, turning faceless eyes in slow unison to fix their gazes on Twilight. Softly, like the peeling of skin from a fruit, the stitches of their mouths popped and spread, splinters of wooden teeth sprouting from the infinite blackness of their jaws. Straw whispered as they moved closer, inch by inch, almost as though wary of startling her. Granny Smith edged closer too, smiling gently at Twilight.

“And you hold such an abundant well,” she whispered. “So much deeper than the others… more than even the strongest of your kind. More even than when first we felt you reach out to us, how can that be? But no matter. You need to feed the field, Twili-girl.”

“What…” Twilight swallowed, glancing briefly at the figures of her friends, now clustered within a wing’s reach of her back. She leaned closer to Granny, looking for just an instant into those cold, hungry eyes; into the depths of what seemed to be a limitless chasm yawning open before her hooves. “What does that mean, Granny?”

Granny’s face settled into smug, satisfied contentment. She appeared almost lazy, and closed the distance between herself and Twilight with a few casual, sashaying steps. “Even just one pony,” she said gently, “returned to us, keeps the fields rising and falling for a generation. But you…”

Something broke in Granny’s voice then, the snapping of a crisp sprig of straw. A wheezing rattle entered it, and beneath it, something sharp and cruel and hungry. Tiny shards of wood began to sprout from her lips as she said, “You will nourish our roots for seasons beyond count. It’s time, Twili-girl. It’s time to—”

Twilight’s hoof lashed out, striking Granny square on the muzzle. The scarecrow emitted a howling moan, muffled by the implosion of its face around Twilight’s hoof. But before Twilight could make another move, the rest of Granny’s face collapsed around her leg, and she felt the shards of jagged wood rip into her ankle from all sides.

Twilight screamed, reflexively trying to pull her leg back, and felt the splinters hook deeper in response. Behind her, she felt the stubs of soft limbs wrapping around her hind legs, her barrel, her wings. Twilight thrashed, horn igniting, and a sizzling wire of flame erupted around her, spiraling like a whip as it snapped and lashed around her. Granny howled, scorch marks appearing on her face as she fell back and away.

Twilight lurched to her hooves, hearing the heavy thuds of sack-like bodies tumbling around her, and didn’t waste another moment. She ran, and as the Granny-doll flung itself up in front of her, baring its splintered teeth in a deranged grin, Twilight lashed out with the final sputtering fragment of the whip.

Granny’s left foreleg fell from her body with a thud so gentle, it was nearly a sigh. Something soft and glistening poured from its limp form, and clods of luscious soil spilled out over the floor as lights like hundreds of tiny eyes danced within its moist depths. Granny howled, falling to her back once more to lie thrashing on the floor. Twilight leapt into the air, stamping down with all four hooves on Granny’s body before springing over her and galloping towards the light.

As she hurtled down the passage, she turned to look over her shoulder, fearing at any moment to feel the grip of fabric hooves and cutting splinters. She was startled to see instead that the scarecrows simply stood where she’d left them, lined up almost as if for a family photo, with the legless Granny sitting motionlessly at their fore. They watched her go with dark, leering grins, none of them moving so much as an inch, except the Spike doll, which raised one little claw and waved mockingly to her.

The floor vanished from beneath Twilight, and she found herself flailing at empty space. She yelped, feeling her body pitch forward, and she tumbled head over hooves into the searing light of day. The heat from the sun struck her as if from an open oven, and the baked golden ground rushed up to meet her. Twilight felt a single, percussive “Guh!” punched from her gut as the ground slammed into her, and her body crumpled into the dust amid the dry, splintered corn stalks.

* * *

How long she lay there, she couldn’t have said. She had little doubt she lost consciousness once or twice, but if she did, she had no way to mark it. The sun didn’t move, and the plants stood motionless as stone. The farmhouse was gone, if it had ever truly been there. The only signs of life were the little waves of dust that puffed up in front of Twilight’s eyes, driven by her wheezing breaths. Even the cicadas were gone.

A minute, an eternity, and Twilight twitched, forced into movement by the cramps in her clenching, battered stomach. She rolled, grimacing at every movement and every contact with the ground, until she could lift her head and look around.

The plants were utterly dead. She could practically see through them now, withered and dried to the thinnest of sticks. They had gone gray, and their leaves were shriveled to wisps no thicker than a vein. They sprouted from ground that was as hard as bricks, caked in a layer of sand as fine as sawdust. Twilight coughed and scuffed a hoof in it, not even knowing what she was looking for.

The loam at the heart of the world.

Twilight didn’t give thought to what the changes might signify anymore. Her faculties of reason and intuition had failed her, and now it felt as though her brain itself was shutting down, leaving her with nothing but her senses and dimmest instincts. With what little awareness she had remaining, she noticed that she was only a few rows over from a path, a simple, straight track leading from left to right, which turned in different directions just down the way.

What was left, except to follow her eyes and her hooves?

Twilight stood, the pain seeming to recede as she stepped onto the road. She didn’t feel her muscles exerting, didn’t feel her own body as it sweated and bled. She just started walking.

* * *

She walked. And walked. The maze led on and on, and she followed its turns unthinkingly, never choosing which way to go when a branch was presented, following either at random or some deeper sense she could no longer understand. She gave no thought to magic, nor to flight. Her teleportations had failed, her strength was gone, and she could see plain enough through the dead and gray cracks in the world surrounding her.

When she passed by the sand-white bones lying stretched out in the center of the path, one leg arced out before it in a final, scraping, eternal grasp, she paid it no mind. She barely noticed the ribs and spine and skull still draped in the leaf-dry shawl of skin that once clung so possessively to them, or the brown, bald head of the sunflower that had bloomed and faded between its shoulders. One brittle joint snapped as she stepped upon it in passing, and when the husk of a circular straw hat dropped away from above its horn, she didn’t notice it roll away.

She followed the left-hoof path its reaching leg pointed towards without knowing why. And when she had left it behind, there was nothing in the field once more.

There was nothing, and there would be nothing.

Set your hooves on the path, and follow it to your doorstep.

Twilight kept walking.

* * *

At some point, Twilight stopped walking. When that happened, she crawled, pulling herself along the ground while protecting her raw skin as much as she could. Eventually, she stopped crawling too.

In the field she lay, foreleg draped over her side, panting in hot, shallow gasps. Her belly had stopped hurting some time ago, and now there was only what felt like a light little hollow there, a hole in the center of her that held only the air in her lungs.

Somehow, Twilight found herself standing up again. She took a few steps, tripped, fell, rose, walked a little farther. Another bend in the maze met her.

Just another few steps, she thought. Look at… a view a little more distant… than just these dead rows.

A long, wide path, one that led to the horizon. That would be nice. It would be nice not to turn anymore, to just follow one easy line into the sky, with her eyes if not her hooves. Twilight rounded the bend and raised her head.

A wall of gray met her just a few steps ahead, blocking her path. She had reached a dead end.

Twilight groaned and sat. Her back collapsed from under her and sent her sprawling into the dirt once more. She had come so close, she felt sure of it. Just a little farther, and there would be answers, or options, or something. Anything.

Twilight closed her eyes.

* * *

The sound of distant laughter roused her from whatever stupor had claimed her. Light flooded into her mind as the slightest gap appeared in her eyelids, curiosity compelling her one more time to see, to investigate what was happening around her.

The dead end was before her. But beyond it, through the dried sticks and drooping shreds of the plants, Twilight could see a clearing. A wide space of rich, brown soil opened up beyond the cornfield, and it was crowded with ponies. Foals were running between stands, playing games, sharing and stealing sweets as their laughter filled the sky. She could see Granny Smith leaning on a walker, talking and pointing animatedly to different areas of the farm while Big Mac nodded and Braeburn listened gravely.

It was Sweet Apple Acres. It was just a few steps away, a trot through less than half a dozen stems so thin that a carriage could drive between them.

It was home.

Twilight heard the faint, distant thumps of hooves stepping heavily on the ground somewhere close to her. Somepony was walking through the field close by. She heard them pause, meander away in some distant direction, then approach again, coming so close she thought she could feel the ground shake just beneath her head. She turned, blinking into the colorless sky.

Applejack stood above her, looking down on Twilight with a slight, curious tilt to her head. The hot, white blaze of the sun burned just over the edge of her soft brown hat, casting her into shadow; yet even so, Twilight could see the gentle, affectionate smile on Applejack’s face, and the warm, bright shine of her emerald eyes.

“App...lejack...” Twilight croaked, feeling her lips crack as they broke into a relieved smile of her own. “I... found you...”

Applejack knelt down, sinking to her knees above Twilight. “You sure did, sugarcube. You sure did.”

“I didn’t think...” Twilight’s words snagged in the tough brambles of her dry throat, and she swallowed painfully, feeling as though she had eaten sandpaper. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. Or anyone. What... Applejack, is this... are you… real?”

“Shh...” Applejack leaned closer and reached out to Twilight. Her smile was as kind and soothing as a mother’s. For a moment, Twilight wondered why Applejack looked so well, so healthy, when she had to have been wandering for at least as long as Twilight. Applejack touched Twilight’s cheek and stroked it gently. Her hoof felt rough and scratchy. It was the dust, Twilight thought, the dust and blood and grime, which Applejack now brushed away.

“Everything’s fine now, sugarcube.”

Twilight sagged in relief, nuzzling gently into Applejack’s touch.

Then her eyes snapped wide as she felt the pointed, splintery tip of the stake slide into her neck, just below the jutting bone of her jaw. Flesh snagged and tore, dragging against the dry wood jutting from Applejack’s leg. Somewhere deep in Twilight’s throat, she felt something tug and stretch, like the last lingering root of a baby tooth, before it severed with the faintest pop. Twilight opened her mouth, and it filled with thick, bubbling warmth. She coughed and spat, then spluttered and spat again, but her words remained submerged beneath the rising tide coating her tongue.

“It’s time to join the field, Twilight,” Applejack whispered lovingly. Bits of straw and soil dropped from her mouth as she bent down, casting Twilight’s body entirely into shadow. The stake crunched into the ground beneath Twilight’s head as she twitched and writhed, pinned in place. Instead of coarse dirt, she suddenly found her limbs churning through thick, warm mud that coated her fur and turned it sticky and heavy. Where had the water come from, Twilight wondered weakly.

“It’s time to feed the field,” Applejack said, and bent her face to meet Twilight’s.

* * *

The dusty, sun-scorched pony limped forward, rounding the turn in the field without taking even a moment’s notice of it. There was nothing but the field, nothing but the path, and the sun, and the sky. Walking took her from the field, and walking brought her to the field. She had no thought for anything else, no memory for whether there had ever been anything else. And when she took that final turn out from among the desiccated stalks, stepping out into the gray clearing on a cold winter morning, she looked around in puzzlement at a place where there was no corn, but buildings—a barn, a well, a house, a mill. She didn’t recognize any of it. Nothing like this should exist in the field.

She felt nothing when the strange little yellow pony froze in shock, staring as though she had seen the dead rise. She took no notice when that filly, screaming strange words like “Granny” and “Big Mac” bolted into the house, then came charging back towards her, other strange ponies in tow.

In the months that followed, the pony’s memories gently returned, carried to her on the currents of dreams each night while she slept. She remembered that she was Applejack. She recalled the names of her family, and the names of her friends. She remembered Twilight Sparkle, that strange, bookish, and determined pony who had come from Canterlot and become such a fixture in her life, and then just as suddenly walked out of it again without ever saying goodbye.

She learned that the farm had prospered in the three years of her absence, that in spite of her family’s crushing grief, the crops had grown and blossomed like never before, almost without need for the Apples to tend them at all; and not just on their farm, but the gardens of Carrot Top, of Roseluck, and Green Bean and Spring Onion, of the orchards of Appleloosa, of the Oranges out to the east and the vineyards of the Grape cousins to the west. All of Equestria, it seemed, had come to overflow with bounty.

She never remembered the day of the Harvest Festival, never remembered going into the corn maze to search for Pipsqueak, and never remembered what happened between then and when she had come wandering back out of the field. She had never heard the search parties, never seen any of the ponies that had combed through forest and farm day in and day out to search for her and her friend.

She could never answer the question of what had happened, even to herself. All she had were the words Granny and Shining Armor and Nurse Redheart told her she had said when first questioned that day on her return, when they and their princess, whose name she eventually remembered was Celestia, had all asked desperately, “Where is Twilight? Do you know what happened to Twilight?”

All she knew was what they told her: That she had answered, eyes blank and staring into someplace far away, “Twilight’s in the field, that’s where she is. Where she’s meant to be. She’s in the field.”

“She’s in the field.”