Maize

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.