A small orange filly curled up under the silk sheets, wishing she’d asked Aunt and Uncle Orange to tuck her in after all. Back at the farm, Big Mac or Granny Smith had always tucked her in and chased the nightmares away, but she’d been afraid that her Aunt and Uncle would just laugh in that somewhat mean-but-pretending-to-be-nice way of theirs and tell her she should grow past such a childish need.
She missed home.
Well, it had been a long time since she’d had the nightmares, thanks to her brother and granny, but maybe they’d gone away for good. And if not, then she’d swallow her pride and ask her uncle tomorrow.
One night couldn’t hurt too bad, after all, right?
Applejack found herself standing on the pinnacle of Canterlot Mountain, the whole world seemingly laid out before her. She could see all the way to the oceans to the east and west, and to the north, the shining glaciers.
But like a magnet, her gaze was drawn downward, to her home, to Ponyville. To her surprise, though, it was gone. Just empty grass fields. Her gaze turned to Canterlot, which to her shock, was disassembling itself. Brick by brick, it slowly unraveled, until nothing was left but the natural terrace that had been chosen for it’s site.
Before Applejack could fully take this in, everything went pitch black. She couldn’t even see her own hoof in front of her face, and she crouched down, afraid a misstep might send her tumbling off the mountainside.
As quickly as it came, the darkness vanished, and she found herself sitting in the middle of a brightly-lit cobblestone road, with ponies bustling about her. There was something strange about the scene, but she couldn’t place what. Lost and confused, she stood up and began walking along the road, dodging and weaving through the crowd that was ignoring her presence. The road sloped upward, and as soon as she reached the top of the hill, she took a moment to gaze around. She was in some sort of valley, she saw, with many small hills surrounded by a near-perfect ring of mountains. The city was enormous, stretching all the way across, with a towering castle the size of all of Canterlot sitting in the very center. Ponyville wasn’t even a fraction of this place’s size!
Even as she watched, though, this place, too, started to disappear, the buildings at the edge pulling themselves apart before each separate stone disappeared into nothingness. Applejack tried to run to the palace, tried to escape it, but she wasn’t fast enough. The very street she was on unraveled beneath her hooves, the ponies around her fading into nothingness. Eventually, all that was left was Applejack and the palace, and even that slowly began to shrink, sections cutting off and vanishing. Eventually there was a simple thatch cottage, which sunk into the ground.
Applejack stared in horror at the rise where it had just been, confused and afraid. “And you’ll be left feeling that way for some time, yet, dear Applejack. Even simple answers never come easy, and this, I’m afraid, is something quite beyond most ponies’ perception. Even I’d be lying if I claimed to understand just what you’re a part of.”
She turned to her left, to find a strange creature sitting serenely beside her, licking his paw as though there was nothing unusual about the scene. He was an odd mish-mash of body parts, with leather and feathered wings, scales here, fur there, a paw paired with a set of talons, and pupils that seemed determined not to be the same size. The orange filly jumped up and backed away in a panic, but the creature only held up his taloned hand in a placating gesture. “Relax, I won’t hurt you.”
“Wh-who are you?” she squeaked, sitting down more out of intimidation than anything else. “What are you?”
“Discord the Draconequus, at your service,” he introduced, holding out his paw to shake. Applejack hesitantly reached a hoof up to give it a poke, recoiling immediately at the contact. Discord gave a rueful grin, shaking his head. “I suppose you won’t believe me when I try to tell you I’m trying to help you, hmm? A pity, but I suppose our first proper meeting, in about ten more years, won’t exactly inspire much confidence in my person. Oh, well; there’s the karma of young foolishness for you.”
He took on a distant gaze, watching the far mountain’s slopes with a misty look in his eyes, seeming to forget that Applejack was even there. “Young foolishness…”
Just as she was about to creep away, however, he abruptly turned back to her. “You never know what you have until it’s gone, little Applejack, and sometimes not even for a long time after. Remember that.”
Then he stood up and stretched, and with a snap of his fingers, a pair of ill-fitting flight goggles appeared and tied themselves around his head, though Applejack stifled a chuckle at the fact that he’d put them on upside-down. “I will see you much later, Applejack, but I’m afraid to say that our next meeting won’t be under similarly good circumstances. When that happens, though you will want to turn to lies, don’t let truth leave the deepest places in your heart.
“Until then, Applejack.”
Another snap of his fingers, and he was gone, leaving no sign of his ever having existed.
Just as the orange filly began to think that maybe this dream wasn’t so bad after all, though, the landscape began to change around her once more, small settlements springing up before disappearing once again, a pile of rocks on one slope jumping up and attaching themselves to the cliff-face above to allow a river to flow down into the valley. A long line of ponies traveled by in a matter of milliseconds, and before Applejack realized what was going on, she was being carried with them.
Then suddenly she had wings, and was flying high above, leaving the caravan behind. She didn’t have any destination in mind, but she flew anyways, her wings carrying her with a mind of their own to some far-off destination.
She didn’t know how long she flew; it could have been only a few seconds or a thousand eons, but she finally began to spiral back down to earth.
Bursting through the bottom layer of clouds, she saw that it was night now, in a two-moon sky. Directly below her were a few tiny islands, still too far below for her to make out in any detail, while the rest of the horizon, strangely free of any sort of haze, to the point that she could see the distant curvature of the planet, was filled with water. Or at least her first thought was water; it was unnaturally blue and glowed with it’s own light. As she watched, a bolt of lightning several miles long shot between two points below the liquid’s surface, followed by a rumbling sound… that almost seemed to speak to her. She was scared to hear what it was trying to say.
Fortunately, she was spared from having to dwell on it. Unfortunately, that was because she was once more a pony, and she hadn’t even retained her wings. She fell down, down, down... She closed her eyes in preparation for the end.
The end never came. She opened her eyes once more to find herself on the ground, walking along and perfectly unscathed. She tried to stand still and look around, but it was like she was just a spectator in another body; she couldn’t control her actions at all.
In her peripheral vision, she did make out the strange blue liquid, realizing it was the same scene as before. She must be on one of those islands, then.
Another distant rumble, sounding even more alien, even less like thunder than before, and her body looked straight down at the ground, pulling the hood of the cloak she hadn’t noticed she was wearing further down. Her body’s hoof was trembling with fright.
“It’ll be okay,” A voice said. “We’re almost there,” said another. Or perhaps it was the same; she couldn’t tell. Her body looked back up, to find another pony sidling close to her and offering a hesitant but reassuring smile. Or at least she assumed it was a pony; other than the smile, everything else was an indistinct nebula of flickering shadows and half-forgotten ideas. “Look!”
She turned forward, and over the backs of several other cloaked ponies, she saw that they were all traveling toward the peak of the island, in which was embedded a strange structure. It looked like nothing more than a giant metal box, without any sort of detailing or texturing on the sides. Out of the top rose a single narrow chimney of the same material, which extended twice again the box’s height.
Applejack’s view flickered and warped, and when she could see again, she was watching from an external vantage point, formless, as the front of the line of ponies reached the very edge. Another flash of lightning and a rumble from the blue liquid below shook them, but it was clear that the sight of the building had given them a new hope; the foremost pony threw off their cloak and spread indistinct shapes that may have been wings, taking to the air and grasping one of the other ponies around the barrel. Straining somewhat, as far as Applejack could tell, the Pegasus brought their comrade up, just barely over the lip of the chimney, and the two gently lowered themselves out of sight.
And once again Applejack’s view changed; now she was standing on the top of the box itself, the chimney rising up beside her. As she watched, it slowly sunk into the box, the top sealing itself closed somehow, until it blended seamlessly with the rest of the exterior. Cautiously, the filly made her way to the edge, where she saw that the blue water-stuff had risen almost to the top. Even as she stood there, it began to spill over the top, and when it touched her hooves, she screamed.
Her view changed again, though her location did not. The blue liquid was gone, and as she peered over the edge again, she saw a perfectly flat, smooth rounded plain stretching below her in all directions, an unfathomable distance below. With a shock, she realized the metal box was completely unsupported; in fact, it was floating over this.
The worst surprise was yet to come, however. As she stumbled inward and away from the edge, not wanting to fall to her death, the chimney began to rise back up. This time, a door opened in it’s side, and out stepped one of the cloaked figures from before. As she watched, it threw back the hood, and the face she saw there burned into her mind.
It was her. Applejack. Standing beside her. This Applejack was taller, older, and wearing a strange necklace with an apple-shaped jewel, but it was her. And Applejack stood there, surveying the dead husk of a world below… and she began to laugh. She laughed madly, hysterically, gleefully.
Filly Applejack stood in a darkened hallway, with only a flickering magic strip on the ceiling above, staring at an imposing door, the edges carved with softly-glowing runes. There was a single number on the doorway, a random number, but the way the dim light glinted off the gold gave her an inexplicable feeling of dread. 314, it read.
She woke again, staring numbly at the ceiling. Most of the dream was already gone, but a chilling laugh, some cryptic advice, and a particular number were taking a bit more time to fade.
Realizing that she could actually see the ceiling, she crawled out from under the stifling covers, looking out the window as melancholy bubbled up inside her. Back home, she would be woken when it was still dark, and get to see the new day dawning. Here, though, where Aunt and Uncle Orange themselves rarely woke before nine, she felt like she was missing out on one of her favorite parts of the day.
"Cock-a-doodle-doo..." she muttered to herself, and a tear rolled down her cheek. There had been something else about her dream, too; a strong sense of melancholy that seemed to have followed her into the waking world. She missed her home so badly...
BOOM
A rainbow spread across the sky, a chromatic ring that slowly expanded from a focal point somewhere past Canterlot Mountain, still visible from even this far away. And from that point another rainbow was forming, arching slowly down towards... Ponyville? Indeed, it was Ponyville down there, and the rainbow seemed to be pointing toward it like a huge signpost.
Applejack didn't need to be told twice; she quickly set to packing her items, smiling happily to herself for the first time in the past few months. "Ah'll need ta tell Aunt and Uncle Orange. 'Thank ya kindly, but I...'"
She looked up and laughed to herself, a newfound joy overtaking her features, the mysterious dream magically wiped away by the rainbow blast. "I'm goin' home."
Author's Note
Author's Notes
