Maize

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.