Time seemed to fly by for the next couple months. Between the usual routine and preparing things for the coming winter there was little going on beyond the usual, though some plans were well on the way to completion. In this time I had cleared out enough trees to have my own personal entrance into the forest, and with the help of the spell I had found I had gained a usable supply of lumber. With that and the spare time I had I was able to at least get many of the doors and furnishings replaced in the manor.
Trixie’s wagon had also been repaired enough, with the help of the two colts that caused the disaster to befall it, that it was almost back to its original state. All that it needed to be completed were the spells and delicate parts to be replaced. Unfortunately the books left by the owner didn’t have instructions on those bits of it, though it did have a name of the type of wagon allowing me to get Twilight to order a copy for the library as it is a rarer one.
All that is left until the coming winter now are the final two holidays of the season, The Running of the Leaves, and Nightmare Night. The former is only a couple days away, and the latter the week afterwards. I had no plans for either of the days, so I just spent the time leading up to them getting to know more about Ponyville and the surrounding area. Of course the best place to find that stuff out is to either ask around, or go to the library.
“Huh, nothing in this book either. I can find plenty of things about Ponyville and other towns and cities that are around here, but nothing about a town inside the Everfree Forest.” I must have talked louder than I thought as Twilight spoke up just then, “What do you mean about a town inside the forest? From what I know there isn’t one in there, yet you are the second pony to say that there was one.”
My ears perk up at this, “Wait, second pony? You mean somepony else knows about that place? I only caught a glimpse of it myself, and with the lack of information in all these books I was starting to think I imagined it.” Twilight taps her chin as she digests this information, “Well Applebloom mentioned finding it a few days ago after she got separated from me when we were going out to Zecora’s place. She was talking about finding a town full of zombies after following a ghost to it. I didn’t believe her as zombies don’t exist, still can’t believe that ghosts do either, yet if you say you saw the town then maybe she did find something.”
I sit there for a while trying to comprehend that a filly not only found the town in such a dangerous place, but also escaped from it with it being the home of some form of undead. “I think I may have to ask her about what she found out there. The property of the manor extended into the forest and I saw the town from the edge of it.”
“What reason would you even have to go into the forest anyways?” Twilight asks. “Well this time was mostly curiosity. I was looking into why the property extended that far thinking there may have been something special about it. Unfortunately I didn’t find anything other than that town, which I guess was more special than I thought at first,” I reply with a touch of a lie to hide the real reason.
Twilight accepts it readily enough though, “But aren’t you afraid of meeting any of the monsters in there? The Everfree isn’t somewhere for anypony to travel alone, and even in groups it’s dangerous.” I just grin and pull out a vial of the pepper powder I used for that prank months back. She looks at it blankly for a second before recognizing it, “Ah, I forgot about that pepper you had. I guess that would be a good enough reason to feel somewhat safer in there, that stuff would probably drive away a hydra even.”
“Well I haven’t had a chance to test it on one; I’d rather not have the chance to find out. It is useful for the smaller creatures in there though, even a manticore has problems with this stuff.” She just shakes her head, probably wondering how or why I’d even know that. “I’d probably better go and find Applebloom to ask what she saw in there. You can never be too prepared when dealing with the unknown.”
“I don’t know why you’d even want to deal with it, but whatever. You’ll probably find her with her two friends causing havoc somewhere.” She heads back to what she was doing as I bid her farewell and head out to try and find the trio. Usually it would be easy to find them as they tend to leave a trail of destruction behind them. Today is relatively calm though so they may be doing something calmer today.
It turns out I was only half-right as I find them outside of town with the remnants of their latest fiasco. Somehow they had ended up being covered in tree sap while doing something with a catapult, where they even got it I don’t have a clue. “Well, looks like you three have been up to something interesting.” The three jump at the sound of my voice as I had come up behind them.
The three look tense as they turn to see who had snuck up on them, though they loosen up at seeing me. “Oh it’s you, what, get bored and need some pony to do your dirty work again?” ask Scootaloo a bit rudely. I just raise an eyebrow at this, “Hey, I sent you some cake delivered by Rainbow Dash as an apology. Besides, how many ponies can say they succeeded at pranking her without being retaliated on?” She looks a bit thoughtful at this, “Well it was pretty good cake, and you do make a good point there. Just don’t try to do that again and we’ll be fine.” She gives me another one of her glares as I nod to her.
“Anyways I was looking for you three as I heard Applebloom could help me out with something, and seeing the predicament you all are in I can loan you a place to wash up at and some lunch.” Applebloom seems surprised at this, “I can help you out with something? With what?”
“Well I’ve heard you had a little adventure out in the Everfree Forest recently and I am curious to hear about what happened.” Applebloom seems a bit downcast at this, “Oh that, well I guess I can tell you about that in exchange for some grub. You probably won’t believe me like every other pony I’ve told though.” I just chuckle a little at her look, “Don’t be too sure about that. Seeing as I know where the town is and am living in a once-haunted house I know better than to not believe. Since it’s nearing lunch time we should head over there now so that you can clean up while I get something ready.”
I start laughing as all three of them just stare at me with their mouth wide open and start walking towards my home. Soon enough all three of them shake off their shock and catch up to pester me with questions, though I just shake them off until they are cleaned up and the food is ready. Judging from the questions though, both Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo were included in those that didn’t believe Applebloom’s tale.
While they cleaned up I prepared something quick and simple to eat for all of us. They finished faster than I could get it ready though, so I distracted them from helping with the cooking by having them sets the table. One of them helping probably wouldn’t be so bad, but put all three of them together and something always seems to go wrong. This was enough to give me time to finish cooking; though with some comments on how bad the table and chairs I had cobbled together looked from Applebloom. Hey, at least they are stable enough to hold somepony up.
Once they had settled down and cleared off their plates I turned to Applebloom, “Well now that you’ve finished eating, how about that story? You can skip most of the details if you want to make it go faster, just stick to the important bits.” Applebloom sits there with her chin on her hoof for a bit before nodding and starting her tale.
“Well it started when me and Twilight were coming...” she was interrupted by Sweetie Belle, “Twilight and I.” Everypony turned to look at her, Applebloom and Scootaloo with a bit of a scowl, causing her to squeak and shrink down. Applebloom continues, “Twilight and I were coming home from Zecora’s place. The path home was blocked by a fallen tree and I sorta wandered off while Twilight tried to clear it.”
She blushes a bit at this seeing as she shouldn’t have done that but she continues, “I heard something giggle at me and when I turned I saw a grey pony with blonde mane and golden glowing eyes. Well I followed after her for a while until I eventually came to the town.”
She pauses to shudder a bit at her memories before continuing, “Well the town seemed like a nice enough place, and all the ponies seemed kind though all of them were blank flanks. They called the place Sunny Town though it turned out to be anything but that. After searching through the town I found one that seemed a bit different from the others. She was also a grey pony but had a maroon colored mane and was named Mitta. I didn’t find out much from her, but afterwards I found another house which was where the terrible secret of the town was.”
Her voice starts to get real quiet at this point and she is shaking a bit, “Inside the fireplace of the house I found the bones of a pony. It was as if somepony tried to hide the fact that she was killed there. As I left the house night had fallen around the place and the true side of the town was shown. All the ponies there were some kind of zombie, and they wanted to make me one of them.”
The other two fillies notice how upset she is getting and they both move closer to her to provide what support they can. It does seem to help though as Applebloom seems to calm down some at their closeness. “I did my best to escape from the town, and I wouldn’t have if Mitta didn’t come and protect me from the others at one point. Soon after that I found the one who led me to the town. Her name was Ruby and she was the ghost of the pony I found in the fireplace. She apologized to me and helped me out in the end until Twilight could find me and we made our way home.”
I sit there and ponder the information that she had given me with her story. I hadn’t seen any sign of movement in the town when I saw it, though I believe the ghost I saw was the one she had met. “I believe I saw this Ruby you mentioned just before I spotted that town. I didn’t get any closer though as I wasn’t sure what she was at first, though I can say you got very lucky out there. Undead creatures are usually not very nice to deal with, and finding not one but two that would help you is almost unheard of.”
The three fillies look at me in awe. “You mean you actually believe me?” comes from Applebloom. “Of course, I’ve had some rather… personal experience with zombies and ghosts so I know a bit about them. Though I haven’t met this variety of them before, I can only assume that it’s some sort of spell or curse on the town, and a powerful one as well to have lasted long enough for the town to have been forgotten.”
The three start to rattle off questions at me, “You’ve seen zombies before? Did you have to fight them? Where was this at and how long ago?” I interrupt them before things get a bit overboard, “You’ll have to wait until later for stories about my dealings with them. Some of them are still a bit… painful to remember.” I pause a bit to fight down my rising emotions, “But how about this, I’ll have one of them ready to tell for Nightmare Night. What could be better for it than a ghost story about real ghost and zombies?”
This gets them excited and drags Applebloom the rest of the way out of her funk from telling the story. Once I get them all calmed down, after they extract a promise from me to tell the story during Nightmare Night, I send them on their way. Once they left I think a bit deeper on this Sunny Town.
“This is really complicated. Intelligent zombies are not easy to deal with, and having one of them actually being nice limits the options I could do. Throw in that ghost and things just get complicated. The biggest question I have though is what is keeping them in that state. Is the ghost the key to the curse, might as well call it that until I know more, or did somepony else cast it on them in retaliation for the murder.”
I just sigh at how complicated this has gotten, “For all I know the one who owned this manor did that to them since the lands border the town. I really doubt it though considering the nature of that book that was in the attic. The only ponies that would probably know the truth are the two that I’d rather not meet, the two princesses. I guess I’ll just observe the place and see what I can find out there, while doing what I can to help the two that helped Applebloom.”
With my plans tentatively in place, I head out to finish preparing a section of my garden for the coming winter.
<><><><><><><>
I didn’t have to worry about forgetting about the promise I made to the trio, as they all appeared at my doorstep on the day of Nightmare Night. They even brought in some help to make sure I showed up in the form of Pinkie Pie. I may have mostly given up on trying to figure her out by this time, but from what little I do know disappointing her often leads to bad things.
Still, them bringing her around did give me an idea to try for a costume, though since it is going to rely entirely on magic it is a bit lazy. The plus side it’ll let me hide out for most of the time in plain sight until it’s time for the story telling. None of the four are dressed up yet, apparently they had planned to meets up with a bunch of others to get ready at Twilight’s place. Apparently they are going to be dragging her out around town as well.
When we arrive at the library I find that all of Twilight’s friends except for Fluttershy are there. They had managed to get away from her books, but they hadn’t been able to convince her to actually go out. Since I really wasn’t prepared to go out either, even with the lame costume idea, I volunteered to stay with her to help out making snacks for later when they all returned to tell ghost stories.
After a bit of debate I eventually convinced them and they all left until later. Until then Twilight and I prepared things for later in her kitchen, with me doing anything that required any actual cooking as Spike warned me that Twilight isn’t all that good at it. While we did this we chatted about random topics, mostly involving her studies and how I’ve been doing at getting the manor fixed up. Eventually I guided the topic towards her missing friend.
“I’ve noticed that you usually hang around with the same five friends all the time, yet only four of them were here tonight. Is there something wrong with that yellow pegasus with the pink mane?” Twilight looks over from what she was doing before answering, “You mean Fluttershy? No, nothing is wrong with her, she just doesn’t really like Nightmare Night so she is currently hiding in her cottage. She is very easily frightened so a holiday all about being scared just isn’t for her.”
She frowns a little before continuing, “Granted she gets scared of a lot of things, but you won’t meet a kinder mare around, why do you ask though?” I finish up the last bit of cooking before answering, “Just curiosity mostly, I’ve managed to meet your other four friends, yet have only seen her from afar. Though I really should have gone and talked to her that time I thought I saw her with a parasprite. Doing that could have stopped the town from needing all those repairs.”
Twilight laughs a bit nervously as she remembers that day, “It probably wouldn’t have helped anyways, she would have been too scared to even listen. Like I said, she frightens very easily, and that includes meeting new ponies. If you can find a way to get her to open up though she gets over her fear easily, and those she thinks of as friends she’d go to any length for to protect them.”
“If she frightens so easily, why does she live right next to the entrance of the Everfree? Most ponies seem too scared to go near it, yet she is out there all alone,” I ask as it doesn’t seem to fit with her personality. “That is a good question, though most of it is because she takes care of and has befriended most of the animals in the area. She has the ability to understand them and prefers to be around them more than other ponies. So in a sense she really isn’t all alone out there, though she avoids actually going into the forest unless there is a need.”
We have to break off our conversation there as the others had started to get back for the stories and food. The crusader trio seem even more excited than before they left, probably from all the candy that they are now carrying. Twilight and I finish up the last few things before we start bringing it all out for everypony to snack on while they set up the area for the stories.
Once everypony had settled down a volunteer was asked for to start. Seeing as this was the reason why I was here, the Crusaders volunteered me to go first. “Flarenza said she has some stories about real ghosts and stuff, she should go tell us about that first,” calls out Applebloom, with the other two nodding along with her. “But we’ve already heard from Twilight about the incident at the manor and how they got rid of it, do we really need to hear it again?” This comes from Rainbow Dash in her usual aggressive manner.
I decide to speak up before an argument begins, which I had found happens a lot when it comes to her, “Well luckily for you that wasn’t the story I had in mind. Do you think I would have stayed in there with that as company if I didn’t know a bit about it already? Unfortunately I’ve seen too many things like that, and almost every time it led to problems in some way.” This quiets her down in surprise, so I take a second to compose myself before I begin.
“This happened about five years or so ago, and not long after I was out on my own. I had come upon a decent sized town out in the borderlands areas somewhere between the Gryphon Kingdom, Zebracan and Equestria. I was low on food so I was hoping to restock while I was there, but when I arrived the entire town was empty.”
“Nowadays I would have bypassed the town having found a situation like that, but being as young as I was and being in need of food I still made my way through it. Going through various buildings didn’t turn up anything, though I was able to find some food that was in good condition in some of the stores. That should have been my second clue to get out of town.” I pause a second to drink some punch that Pinkie Pie brought over before continuing.
“Once I had gathered everything I could carry I noticed that it was starting to get dark, so I decided to spend the night in one of the houses. I chose one of the upstairs corner rooms in the local inn to set up in as I hadn’t been in a bed in months. Unfortunately I only got a couple hours of sleep before I was woken up by the most horrid screaming.”
Everypony jerks upright in shock as somepony in the room starts screaming at that moment. We all turn and look at Pinkie Pie who just looks at us all innocently, “What? My bag of candy is empty; you would scream too if you ran out of snacks in the middle of a story.” We all just shake our heads at her, while I get back into telling my tale.
“Anyways, the sound was enough to wake me from what should have been the best night of sleep I’d had in a while. Looking out the window though, I found that it was in fact going to be one of my worst nights instead. I have no idea where they came from, but in the streets were the remains of the townsfolk. While they were obviously dead, they were still walking around the town, hunting for something.”
“Fortunately that thing at the time wasn’t me. It seems that sometime between when I had arrived at the inn, and when I was awoken a small caravan of merchants had made it into town. I could see the lead wagon from where I was, and the scene wasn’t pretty. The guards were doing what they could to keep the undead horde away from the wagons so the haulers could get them out of town, but they were quickly being overwhelmed.”
At this point I was interrupted again, but this time by Sweetie Belle, “What did you do? Did you do anything to help them out?” She shrinks down with a squeak as all eyes turn to her for her interrupting. I take another sip of punch in the following silence.
“Well as I was about to say, I could see that they had never faced creatures like this before as they were making the worst kinds of mistakes when facing undead. I quickly gathered my things, as I knew I wouldn’t be back here again, before heading leaving through the window onto the balcony outside of it.”
“Once I was out there I did what I could to draw the attention of the zombies away from the wagon and onto me. While I couldn’t draw the attention of the ones closest to the wagons, I did get the ones that were on the path in front of them. Some of those in the other group noticed this pretty quickly, as two of them went speeding by as soon as the road cleared up enough.”
“I’m not sure what happened with the other four, but I never saw them again after that. Of course now I had another problem. I was alone out on a balcony with the building steadily being flooded with undead and the building entirely surrounded, and me scared out of my mind.”
“I really didn’t think things through when I tried to help the caravan, and at this point I had pretty much stopped thinking and started reacting. That was when I learned a major lesson when dealing with zombies. While fire may fix many things, flaming zombies are much more dangerous until they finally collapse.”
Finishing off the rest of the cup of punch I took a moment to observe the others. Most of them winced at the last line, probably trying to imagine it, and interestingly enough Spike seemed to be taking notes without input from Twilight.
“Well in my panic I decided to just start lighting zombies on fire to try and clear a path out. This led me to being surrounded by flaming zombies while trapped on a building that was starting to go up in flames from those same zombies. Needless to say I was really in trouble at that time, and probably wouldn’t have made it if it wasn’t for one of those that had escaped with the wagons I saw go by.”
“It was a good thing that at that point I had nearly drained my magic reserves, as in the next moments I felt something grab me from behind and lift me into the air. One of the caravan guards was a griffon, and she was scouting out the town to see if any of the others had escaped. Me setting all the fires was enough to attract her attention, and seeing as it was the building that the distraction that allowed them to escape came from, she came down to help me out of there.”
“I never did find out her name, or any of the others that survived, but I thanked her for the help once we landed, and I gave them all the information I had on what they were facing. I left them the next morning, so what happened from then on I have no clue. Hopefully they got word to somepony that could handle things with the town and be better prepared as well.”
Finishing my story I look around at the others to see how they react. Rainbow Dash was rather predictable though, “Eh, that wasn’t all that scary.” I just give her a look, “Maybe not from your perspective in that you could just fly away, but imagine if the zombies could fly after you. Luckily that town didn’t have many griffons, and the ones they did have had their wings chewed off before they succumbed to whatever caused their affliction.”
Applejack interjects at that point, “What do ya mean by whatever caused their affliction?” I ponder this for a second, “Well even I’m not sure all the things that can cause the dead to rise. I’ve seen plagues, curses, and even random chance create different types of undead.” I just ignore Twilight’s mumbling as I say the word curse.
“Ooh, ooh, I have a question!” shouts out Pinkie Pie making me wonder what bit of silliness will result now. “You said this was about five years ago and you seem to be about the same age as us so you would be about thirteen or fourteen then but you said that wasn’t long after you were on your own but why were you all alone and not with your family?” Everypony just looks at her as this was not a question any of them expected from her, and it hits me especially hard.
“I’d… rather not talk about that…” I respond in a depressed manner and trying to stop my eyes from tearing up. I catch some movement on the edge of my vision as a purple-maned head whips back in my direction again. Thankfully Rarity takes this opportunity to interrupt, “Well I must say that was an interesting story. How about somepony else take a turn now?”
I mouth the words ‘thank you’ to her for diverting things, and try to calm down enough to enjoy the other stories. It takes a while but I am able to do so and enjoy the rest of the time there until everyone heads back to their various homes for the night. Rarity does pull me aside before I can leave for a quick word, “Darling, do you need somepony to talk with about… whatever happened?”
I consider this for a moment before responding, “Maybe someday, but just… not right now.” She nods at this and doesn’t try to push any further so we head off in opposite directions to our homes. I settle down in my bed and think over everything that happened, as well as what to do about the future until I finally fall into a dreamless slumber.