Maize

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.