Maize

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.”