• Published 29th Dec 2012
  • 12,585 Views, 1,189 Comments

Mother of Invention - zaponator



Awake and alone, Applejack will find a way to survive.

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Guilty Filthy Soul

Applejack woke with the sunrise. She didn't get up immediately. For a few minutes, she just lay there. Utter silence surrounded her. The jungle didn't come to life; it never did. Her surroundings were just as dead as they always were.

The dawn's light shone across her clearing and forced its way between her still-closed eyelids. She'd collapsed in the grass outside her shelter last night, and had no cover from the bright rays of the sun.

A low groan worked its way from her throat as Applejack begrudgingly cracked her eyes open and pushed to her hooves. Her vision was filled with blurred shapes and colours, and Applejack rubbed at her eyes to clear the fuzziness away. That always happened when she cried in her sleep. It was something she hadn't experienced for many years.

With her vision cleared, Applejack turned around and ducked into her lean-to. She snatched up her hat with her good foreleg and placed it atop her head. The chicken still sat against the wall, presumably, but Applejack didn't spare a glance at it.

She limped back out into the clearing and stood in the yellow light of morning. A loud yawn echoed across the clearing, followed by Applejack smacking her lips as she felt dryness in her mouth. With a slight frown, she hobbled over to the river and bent down to take a drink. She made sure to be quick, and didn't even catch a glimpse of her reflection.

Her breakfast was less hurried, and Applejack spent a few minutes leaning back against the boulder, chewing a mouthful of wildflowers slowly. Her half-lidded eyes finally observed her clearing, moving slowly across the ground.

The damage of her improvised firebomb was readily apparent, if little more than cosmetic. In the epicenter, grass had been cleared entirely to reveal charred dirt. Surrounding that was blackened and shriveled grass, but only for a few feet in every direction. Applejack would have expected more. She wasn't exactly thinking clearly the night before, but what she did could have— should have burned down half the forest, at least. A wildfire could be started from something as small as an unattended campfire, much less the inferno she'd created.

Then again, she didn't know much about tropical climates. It was fully possible that the soil and plant life on the island had absorbed enough water to resist fires for the most part. That explanation was better than nothing, so Applejack filed it away with a satisfied nod.

She realized that she'd finished her breakfast some time ago, and was staring blankly at the blackened mark her firebomb had created. Applejack shook her head, then stood back up.

Tentatively, she trotted a bit closer to the impact site. The burn marks and bits of melted glass went ignored; Applejack was looking for something else. She needed a sign. Any sort of real, physical sign. She needed to know that she wasn't losing her mind.

Her brows furrowed, and her frown only grew deeper as Applejack pored over the ground. There was nothing. Not even a single hoofprint, clawprint, anything. Not a single identifying mark to indicate that the… creature had even been there.

She wouldn't give up that easily. Applejack concentrated, and tried to remember where the thing had come from. After a few moments, she had a reasonable idea at a direction, and set off once more at a limping trot.

She kept her nose to the ground as she went. Applejack wasn't an expert tracker by any means, but she could see when an animal had passed over ground, and she wasn't detecting anything of the sort.

Her heart was sinking lower and lower as she went, but Applejack could barely feel it. She felt numb, emotionally drained. Her hooves moved slowly, dragging across the grass. She had made it almost to the edge of the clearing, and considered just turning back there, but decided to press on at least to the treeline.

Still, nothing. She even ventured out into the jungle past her spike defence, and couldn't see any indication that something had passed through. Not even a single blade of grass out of place. For the first time that day, Applejack felt strong emotion taking hold, and she didn't like it. Maybe it was just her imagination. Maybe she'd just been seeing things. Maybe she really was going insane…

The emotion bubbled unpleasantly in her chest, and Applejack found herself wishing for the numbness back. Tears pricked at the edge of her vision as she turned to head back to camp. She hung her head low and walked through the wide gap in her spikes—

Wait. That wasn't right.

Applejacks head shot up instantly. She whipped around to stare wide-eyed at the wooden stakes she'd set up around the clearing. Sure enough, there was her sign at last. The spikes were specifically set up to keep things out, which meant as small a gap as possible except in a few places where she'd left tiny spaces for herself to walk through. This was not one of those places.

The spikes had been forced apart, shoved to the sides with enough intensity to crack and splinter some of them. The gap created was large enough for several ponies to walk through easily, and Applejack was standing in the center of it.

For the second time that day, Applejack felt strong emotion taking hold, and this time she liked it a lot. She felt lightheaded, and slumped down heavily to a sitting position. A bright grin spread across her face, and Applejack had no idea why.

Never mind that the thing was smart, and strong enough to shrug off her defences with apparent ease. It was real. The creature that had been ostensibly trying to kill her since day one was real, and Applejack couldn't have been happier about it.

A wild, giddy laugh erupted from her lips as Applejack couldn't hold back her relief. Tears flowed down her cheeks as she fully realized that a real, physical entity was out to get her. Through it all she smiled. She smiled because it wasn't just her imagination. She hadn't just been seeing things.

Yet she was probably still going insane.

Never in her life had Applejack felt so happy to know that something was trying to kill her. Her laughter echoed through the trees.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Applejack limped out of the treeline and back into her camp. Her saddlebags were bulging with firewood, which she dumped on the pile for the third time that day. She paused to wipe the sweat from her forehead and idly flex her bad foreleg. It ached, certainly, but it was holding her up even after a few hours of gathering wood and food. Rest was all well and good, but Applejack figured she'd have to put it to some use if she didn't want the muscle to atrophy.

That, and she couldn't stand to sit around the camp doing nothing any longer.

She stood back up and marched over to the river. There, Applejack took a long drink and refilled her canteen. It still irked her just how tired she would get after so little work, but there was nothing to really be done about it. She couldn't expect to put forth the same amount of work she had back on the farm, when she was healthy and had access to plenty of good food.

A sigh escaped her lips. She would always miss the food. Shaking her head, Applejack slowly hobbled back towards her camp, idly pondering the last couple days as she walked.

It had been two days since her harrowing midnight encounter, and everything had been entirely peaceful since then. She'd spent most of the time resting up, but her supplies could only last so long. Applejack hadn't bothered to fix the gap in her spike defences after how useless they'd turned out. Not to mention the extra effort it would take with only one good foreleg.

As if triggered by the thought, Applejack's left foreleg twinged in pain and nearly folded underneath her. She gasped and stumbled, but managed to catch herself without tumbling to the ground. Her hat had been knocked slightly askew, and Applejack nudged it back into place before trotting onwards once more.

The urge to get out and explore the island still hovered at the back of her mind. She hadn't forgotten the map, and there was plenty of it left to investigate. Unfortunately, said exploration wasn't exactly feasible until her leg was a bit more reliable. It really wasn't all that bad, by that point. It was getting better every day, and Applejack figured it would be one or two more nights at most before she could head out there and continue her investigations.

She reached her smoldering campfire and sat down in the soft grass. The sun was just beginning its descent into evening, but Applejack was already feeling a bit hungry. An early supper wouldn't hurt. She snatched a few wildflowers and a hoofful of blueberries from her recently restocked supply, and ate slowly. Applejack leaned back and sighed. She wasn't sure if it was out of contentment or resignation.

Hours passed, and Applejack whiled away the time in idle thought. Most of that thought was centered on the events of the past couple weeks. She'd nearly died, twice. Even in all her adventures, even when Applejack had feared for her life, she'd always been confident that things would turn out okay. Even since arriving on the island, Applejack had never felt so very close to death's cold grip.

She felt different, somehow. It wasn't an easily definable difference, but it was there. Something deep inside, something in the very core of her being, had changed irrevocably between her nearly bleeding out on the jungle floor and her nearly giving in to an unknown horror of the night.

Not that her entire outlook had been flipped upside down, only changed a little. Her own mortality wasn't something that Applejack used to consciously think about. The few times she'd entertained that line of thought had been when trying to fall asleep during bouts of insomnia, or maybe indigestion. It was never something she seriously, genuinely thought much about.

It was different from thinking about the deaths of others. When she'd found that construction site, filled with the cages and corpses, Applejack had been faced with an entirely different set of emotions. When faced with her own death, bearing down upon her with seemingly no escape…

Applejack sighed again, and poked idly at the fire with a long stick held in the crook of her good forehoof.

Her eyes had been opened, for better or worse. She couldn't escape a new, constant nagging in the back of her mind. She couldn't shake the knowledge that her death, the end of her very existence, waited around any corner. Her flame could be snuffed out in an instant, without any warning, and what would she have to show for it?

That's what it all boiled down to, in the end. Every action she took, Applejack couldn't help but contextualize it against her inevitable end. Things became so frivolous when she would be dead soon anyway. Very little seemed to matter much, anymore. What good was money if you couldn't spend it from beyond the grave? Such things were so deeply ingrained as 'important', but none of them really were. All she had to do was let them go. Fame, fortune, even her own comfort and safety: would any of that make her less dead when her time came? Of course not.

Even in the face of all that, Applejack couldn't help but crack a small smile, barely a twitch of her lips in the dim orange light of her fire.

It wasn't all bad. A lot of things seemed pointless and silly, sure, but some things only seemed all the more important. Applejack saw five friends in her mind's eye, smiling faces, laughter evident even in the silence of the image. She saw her family, content happiness glowing in their eyes as they gazed back at her. Would any of them matter when she was dead? No, Applejack supposed they wouldn't. But they sure as sugar mattered while she lived.

Applejack decided then that her new perspective was a good thing. She'd always been so focused on money and the success of her farm in the past. Not that she would completely ignore those things, but Applejack decided that when she did get home, she would stop caring so much about things that only wasted away with her death. She would put all her heart towards living, instead.

The fire popped and crackled, startling Applejack out of her introspection. She blinked and looked around. Apparently, cataloguing her thoughts had taken long enough for the sun to already move to its setting position, showering the island with a dull red glow.

She felt a little better, but also felt very alone all of a sudden. Her gaze drifted of its own accord towards the lean-to, and a tiny smirk turned her lips up. Applejack stood up, groaning as she stretched out her limbs to a satisfying array of pops and cracks. She then ducked into her shelter and made a beeline for the tiny rubber chicken seated against the rock wall.

Before she could pick the chicken up and take it out to sit by the fire with her, something caught Applejack's eye. She froze, and her smirk was instantly replaced with a frown. The chicken was forgotten as Applejack turned her full attention to the old tome laying on the floor. For all the times she'd tried to open it, the thing remained unopened and unscathed. Even after laying into it with the largest rock she could carry —before her injury, even— the unadorned and keyhole-less lock didn't look any closer to breaking.

Applejack picked it up slowly, and limped back outside, glaring at the book the entire way. Here, she'd spent all that time pondering about focusing her life on what was truly important, and she was hypocritical enough to cling to a useless old book in spite of it all.

That book was exactly the kind of thing that didn't matter in her new outlook. It was useless! She had a map now. She was only holding onto that book so she could bring it back to Twilight, and for what? So that Twilight could allow the damned island to suck up her time too? Applejack snorted. No, she wouldn't allow that. She couldn't allow any of her friends to be tortured by this Celestia-damned island as she herself had been.

Better to just never get them involved at all. When she got home, it would be best for everypony if they never found out any details. That, of course, included the contents of that book.

Applejack took two confident steps over to the firepit, thrust the book out over the flames… and hesitated. Was it really for the best? Her own curiosity bubbled up like fear and doubt, working to overpower rational thought. Applejack quivered, her right foreleg beginning to ache from the effort of holding the heavy book above the fire.

Would the secrets in that book, interesting as they may be, matter one bit when she was dead?

Applejack let go.

The book fell into the flames with a quiet 'fwoosh', but Applejack wasn't sure she felt any better. She would never know what secrets the tome contained. She would likely never find out any concrete information about the island, since that book had been her only lead in that regard. She wanted to believe it was for the best, that she was throwing away things that were ultimately useless, but for some reason she couldn't shake the feeling that the book had been anything but useless.

Yet another sigh, this one she knew came from regret. Perhaps she'd been a bit hasty and excitable about her new worldview. Yes, cutting out frivolous things from her life was definitely important, but maybe tossing away old books filled with even older secrets regarding mysterious islands filled with unexplained buildings, inordinate amounts of death, and shadowy monsters wasn't the best idea.

Oh well, nothing could be done about it now. Besides, she didn't even really know that the book contained any of that. All she had was a vague gut feeling. For all she knew, it was the cabin owner's super-secret recipe boo—

CLICK

The sound was loud enough to echo through the entire clearing, and bring Applejack's train of thought to a screeching halt. It came from the fire. Her head whipped to stare into the flames in a blink, and Applejack leaned forward to squint in concentration.

Sure enough, the book sat in the middle of the blaze, mostly unharmed. The only difference was that the bright golden lock had popped outwards, and the cover of the book hovered slightly open.

For a few split seconds, Applejack didn't move. She didn't blink, she didn't even breathe. Finally, she inhaled a deep breath, leaned back, and calmly said:

"OH, COME ON!"

It came out slightly less calmly than she'd intended. A crackling sound drew her attention back to the fire, and Applejack quickly noted that the corners of the book were beginning to blacken. Wasting no time, she hastily snatched up a long stick and jabbed fiercely at the smoldering book. She managed to fling it free of the flames, where it skidded to a stop in the short grass of the clearing.

Applejack practically sprinted forward, nearly falling as she'd forgotten about her injured leg. She slid to a halt on her knees in front of the book, desperately grasping it between both forelegs. It was warm, but not hot. Her hooves tingled slightly at the touch, a feeling she wouldn't have recognized easily before meeting Twilight Sparkle: The feeling of magic.

She couldn't even smile. Her face was entirely blank as she struggled with how to process this latest development. One thing was for certain, she was going to read it. Now.

The sun had well and truly set by that point, so Applejack crawled back over to the firelight with the book in tow. She laid it out on the ground reverently, staring down at the hoofwriting-covered first page with wide eyes. She reached forward and tried to skip to the middle, to get an idea of what the book contained, but found the pages wouldn't move. Blinking, she yanked with all her might, but was unable to open the book to the middle. An odd thought struck Applejack, and she tried turning just to the next page. Sure enough, the page turned easily, revealing more hoof-written text.

Applejack didn't read it. Not yet. She went back to the first page instead. Magic was at play here, and if somepony had gone to all that trouble to make sure she read the pages in order then it was probably important.

Then, Applejack read.

If you are reading this, then I am likely dead. I am adding this preface on what is going to be the last night of my life. I only hope that it proves worth it. This tome contains my own personal journal, dating all the way back to... well, back to when this began. No doubt you have noticed that the pages prove impossible to turn unless turned one at a time. I have placed an enchantment upon this book, preventing you, the reader, from skipping what I think must be read. My story, the story of this island, must be known. All those that know it now will be dead by tomorrow, so the knowledge falls to you now. When you have learned what this book will teach you, my only hope is that you will find it in your heart to forgive me. And my only regret is that I will not live to see justice for what has been done here. Death, I think, is far too kind a fate for me.

Author's Note:

Edited by the impeccable Pyromitsu, and the lovely Aatxe360.