The Apprentice Witch · 10:52pm Oct 13th, 2019
Hey.
Hey.
It's October. You know what that means.
Source: Moenkin
The first thing Rainbow Dash noticed when she woke up was all the flies.
They swarmed through the air like snow in a blizzard. Curtains of them, black and fetid, their little wings beating so hard they filled the air with a constant droning thrum. Her teeth vibrated in sympathy. They alighted on her nose and danced around the rim of her ears and a few daring ones edged closer to her delicious eyes, hoping for a sip.
She shot to her hooves with a disgusted shriek, spitting and shaking her whole body like a dog. She whipped her tail around, smacking hundreds of them out of the air. Her wings beat so hard a little cyclone spun out from her, tossing twigs and leaves and even tiny stones all about. The flies could hardly stand up to such a windstorm, and they fled into the trees, vanishing in the damp and leafy shadows. Within seconds the horrid buzz of the swarm was gone.
“Ugh!” She spat enthusiastically into the mud. “Agh! Gah! Oh Celestia I can taste them! Ptah!”
After a few seconds of this she stopped to catch her breath and took note of the many other sensations competing for her attention. Her entire body ached, for one – several feathers had been sheared off near the root on her left wing, leaving little crimson smears in the blue down. Her left shin throbbed in time with her pulse, and the ankle was already a bit swollen. A map of scrapes and bruises covered her mud-smeared coat. Her tongue hurt, and when she spat again, it was tinged with pink and tasted like iron.
A normal crash, in other words. She groaned and looked around to see where she’d landed this time.
The woods, that was obvious. Probably the Everfree Forest again, judging by how angry the trees looked. They leaned over her little crash site, leering and waving their branches, though no breeze stirred the air.
The flies were starting to return. She snapped her tail at the bravest ones, knocking a plump bottlefly senseless. The rest retreated again, but she could still hear them buzzing through the leaves. They’d be back, of course. Flies were too stupid and hungry to stay away.
She stretched her wings and flapped again, cautiously this time. The right was fine, but the left complained loudly. The air flowing over the broken feathers was like sandpaper on her teats. She grunted and folded her wings at her side. In a day or so the blood would dry and the wounds crust over and she’d be able to fly again, though not with much grace or speed. Until then, if she wanted to get back to Ponyville, she was going to have to walk.
“Hey!” she shouted at the trees and the flies and anything else that might be listening. “I know what this looks like, but you’re wrong! Wonderbolts don’t crash! We just land aggressively!”
Her institutional reputation assured, she spun in a circle, found south, and started walking back to Ponyville.
* * *
The Everfree Forest sucked.
It was hot. It was muddy. As this was both summer and the rainy season, it was even hotter and muddier than usual, and through some wonderful accident Rainbow Dash had managed to land on the opposite side of a part of the forest known as the Great Dismal Salt Marsh. The explorers who’d discovered the marsh centuries ago were earth ponies, and they preferred names that were simple, descriptive and accurate.
Fields of sedge stretched away from her for miles. They rose about chest-high above the stagnant waters, some of them anchored to the mud beneath, while others had grown together over the years, rooting into the fallen, rotting mats of their kin, until they formed floating barges of sharp grass that drifted with the weak currents like living rafts. The dead, skeletal trunks of trees stood every few yards, their bark stipped away and the bare wood bleached white as bone. Thousands of waterfowl hid in the reeds, and they filled the air with a constant raucous chatter that left no room in her brain to think. She trudged through the bog, her hooves weighed down with pounds of mud and grass, her body painted with rivulets of sweat. Water moccasins and snapping turtles and kimigawas fled from her path and hissed at her when she passed.
She panted with each step. Her wings were like sodden cotton blankets. The air was thick enough to chew. And the damn flies were starting to come back. She snapped her tail half-heartedly in their direction, to no avail.
But hey, at least the sun was going down. So that was nice.
Like most pegasi, Rainbow Dash wasn’t afraid of the dark (Rainbow Dash, of course, wasn’t afraid of anything.) She knew there was nothing tangible to the darkness, nothing inherently malevolent or evil about it. Night was as natural as the day. It just meant you couldn’t see as well. In the specific context of the Everfree Forest, however, it meant she couldn’t see the horrible pony-eating monsters sneaking up behind her.
She stopped and lifted her head as high as she could. Off to her left, about a mile out, the dark shape of living trees swirled in the shimmering air. She could make it there before sunset, build a little nest in the branches, and wait until morning.
Good plan. She waited in the slender shadow of a dead tree until her pulse slowed to something more normal, and began trudging through the bog again.
* * *
The sun was just below the horizon when Rainbow Dash reached the copse of trees. They were on a little island of dry land, the remains of some odd current in the marsh that deposited sediment here, until over the centuries enough silt and mud had built up to rise above the stagnant waters, where trees then took root. If the marsh were a desert, this was its oasis, barely the size of a hoofball field but crowded with life. She jumped up on the sandy bank and kicked her hooves against a fallen log to knock off the mud and gunk.
“Finally,” she muttered. With any luck the monsters would find the marsh as unpleasant as pegasi did and hesitate to cross it. She scowled at the barren swamp one last time, then turned back to the trees.
A cool breeze kissed her face. It carried with it a clean, floral scent, nectary and divine in a way Rainbow Dash lacked the vocabulary to describe. Wildflowers, she would have called it. Fluttershy could have told her it was the scent of moonflower and hibiscus, two plants that had no business growing in the center of a swamp, but Fluttershy was not there to pass on that bit of knowledge. To Rainbow Dash it was a touch of perfume after hours crawling through a sewer, and she let her nose drag her into the trees. A mat of soft sphagnum moss caressed her hooves with each step.
Pop. Something crunched beneath her foot. She froze, blinked, then peered down.
Intertwined within the moss, woven through its little creeping stalks, were thousands of tiny bones. Bird bones, lizard bones, rodent bones and more. They crackled like dry twigs as Rainbow shifted her weight from hoof to hoof.
Huh.
Rainbow held still, barely daring to breathe. Her ears strained at her scalp, but all she heard was the faint rustle of the breeze and the hammer of her pulse through her veins. Her wings stretched out, ready to fly at the first sign of danger, injuries be damned.
But there was nothing. Only the refreshing cool breeze and the scent of wildflowers that teased her muzzle. It filled her mind like a drug, and she followed it deeper into the trees. Numbly, unthinking, she walked forward, one hoof following the other. Bones crackled beneath her with each step.
The cool breeze grew stronger, soothing her. The wildflower scent flowed over her mind like a balm. The trees parted around her like a curtain. And there, in the center of the island in the center of the marsh, Rainbow Dash found a cottage.
It was old, older than any house she had ever seen. The wattled mud walls were riven with cracks and overgrown by ivy. Discolored stains, barely discernible in the twilight gloom, dripped down from the thatched eaves. Wild holly and juniper bushes grew in a ring around it. But most odd of all was the foundation – she could have sworn that, for a moment before the light fell too dark to see and the bushes swayed in the breeze to conceal it, she saw an enormous, scaled toe, as large as her entire body, tipped with a claw like a chicken’s foot. She blinked and peered again, but it was gone.
Weird. For a moment a bit of clarity returned to her thoughts, but just as fast the intoxicating scent of wildflowers returned, and she forgot the toe. The illusion, a fragment of her tired mind. Nothing real.
A rickety wooden porch clamored up out of the moss toward a rotten door set in the cottage’s side. Surely, Rainbow Dash thought, nopony was home. Surely this house was abandoned. An artifact of some long-past day, like the castle of the Two Sisters in the Everfree’s heart. Surely she would close her eyes, and when she opened them only the trees would remain.
She blinked and blinked again. The cottage waited for her.
Rainbow Dash stepped up onto the porch. The cypress planks were slick with water. Something moved on the walls. The door swung open as she approached, and a swarm of flies rushed out. Inside, an iron potbelly stove filled with coals painted orange lines on the floor.
The door closed behind her. The coals in the stove went out. And in the darkness, the witch found her.
* * *
“Hello little birdy,” a voice as dry as paper whispered. “Come to join us?”
Dash spun around. She tried to shriek, but her throat had closed to a pinhole, and she could only gasp for air. Like a dreamer waking into a more horrible dream, she grasped the nature of the trap. She lashed out with her hooves but only stumbled on something soft and rotten and smelling of death.
“Calm, calm,” the voice whispered again. Enough light remained in the room, creeping in beneath the door’s threshold and pouring in from holes in the roof, for Rainbow to see her host. A dark shape humped and piled high with rags lurched toward her. A wrinkled, ancient muzzle filled with sharp, tiny teeth leered at her from within the hood of a cloak. The scent of wormwood and honey flooded Rainbow’s nose and set her retching.
“Stay back!” Rainbow shouted. She flailed with her hooves and stumbled again, nearly falling to the floor. “Get away! Let me out of here!”
“Let you out?” The witch cackled. A sick, wild glee filled her voice. Rainbow Dash could hear the leer twisting her lips. “Let you out? But Madam Hazel is still hungry, little birdy! Won’t you stay with me?!”
The dark shape rushed toward her. Without thinking, Dash jumped, her wings beating for height and her hooves slashing at the air, she felt them connect with something made of fabric and bone. The papery voice squawked in surprise, and a loud rattle filled the air.
Dash landed hard on her side. Her ribs popped, and her breath exploded out in a rush. She staggered back to her feet, unable to breathe, and stumbled away. Her rump struck the iron stove, knocking the grate open, and the orange glow of the coals inside suddenly filled the cottage with light.
It was… empty, mostly. A pile of rags lay on the decrepit wood a few feet away, where ‘Madam Hazel’ had attacked her. A little spider, disturbed by the all the clamor, crawled up the walls toward the shadows in the rafters. Behind the stove, a single table and a few chairs were set up in what looked like a kitchen that had seen better days. Ransacked cabinets hung along the walls. A sack of potatoes mouldered in the corner.
“Uh…” Rainbow Dash turned slowly. “Is… uh… is anypony here?”
Nothing. Dash opened the stove’s grate wider and turned the choke, letting more air in to the coals. Their glow went from a dull orange to a bright yellow, filling the room with heat and light. She jerked her hoof away before the hair of her fetlock could singe, and she walked over to the rags. Little pieces of broken bone littered them and spilled out onto the floor.
Huh. She nudged the rags with the tip of her hoof. The ancient linen crumbled and broke into pieces. A simple wood rattle, like a foal might use, tumbled out. It muttered a quiet complaint and fell still.
Silence returned. She leaned down to sniff at the rattle, and in the scent of wildflowers and dry linen and old wood she smelled something else. A half-imagined hint of sweat and the coat of a pony who hadn’t washed in too many days. Her muzzle wrinkled, and she took a deeper sniff—
A frantic scuttling, of hooves tangled up and beating against wood, sounded behind her. Rainbow spun around with a brave shriek to see a pile of rags beneath a low bench along the wall. They shivered and jerked away from the rattle of her hooves.
“Who’s there?” Rainbow shouted. She fell into a fighting stance, legs wide, head low, wings stretched out to grab the air. She pawed at the wood floor, ready to charge. “Get out here, witch!”
The rags whimpered in response. They shook and pressed further beneath the bench, as though trying to squeeze into the cracks in the wall.
Um. Rainbow faltered. She was many things, but a bully wasn’t one of them, and even after defeating a vile, pony-eating monster, her first response to such a clear sign of fear was sympathy. Her wings lowered, and she stepped slowly toward the bench and the rags. They trembled in time with her hoofsteps.
“Hey, uh, it’s okay,” she said. She lowered her head to address the rags directly. “You can come out.” She waited another moment to see if the rags would respond, and when they didn’t, she gently nipped their tattered edge with her teeth and pulled.
A little unicorn filly was crouched beneath them. Her coat was a grayish pink in the weak light of the stove, and her mane a dark umber. She shrank away from Dash and covered her head with her hooves.
“I’m sorry!” she squeaked. “I’m sorry! Please don’t hurt me!”
“Hey, hey.” Rainbow back away and sat on her haunches. “It’s okay. I won’t. Are you, uh…” What was it the voice had said? “Madam Hazel?”
The filly shook her head. She lowered her hooves to the floor and stared up at Dash, though she didn’t quite meet Dash’s gaze. Her eyes were cloudy and fixed unmoving on Rainbow’s chest.
“Madam Hazel was my master,” the filly said. She paused and swallowed several times before continuing. “She died a few, uh… a little while ago. I’m Foxglove.”
“Oh. Uh.” Rainbow glanced back at the rotting cloth behind her, then at the filly. She carefully lifted her hoof and waved it in Foxglove’s face. No reaction, though her little ears danced in response to the eddies in the air. “I’m sorry. Were you her daughter?”
Foxglove shook her head again. “I was her apprentice.” She sniffed again. “And now I’m the witch of the marsh. So, uh, beware! Beware my curses, intruder!”
She waved her hoof in Dash’s general direction. When nothing more happened, she crept back under the bench.
“Right.” Dash frowned. “Hey, look, I just need a place to stay the night, okay? In the morning I’ll leave and you can go back to, you know, whatever it is you’re doing out here. That alright?”
Foxglove bit her lip. Her ears danced around, and her legs started to shake again. Finally, though, she found her voice. “I, uh… Madam Foxglove will allow this! Because she is merciful!”
“Right.” Dash let out a long breath. For a moment she allowed herself to ignore the filly and survey the cottage. Beside the stove was a meager pile of firewood, more twigs than logs. About the size a filly Foxglove’s size could haul, Rainbow figured. A few tiny crabapples sat in a basket on the counter. Broken crabshells littered the floor around the sink. On the windowsill, the cropped remains of a basil plant poked above the dirt. They’d been nipped off at the stem.
“How did you do that?” she asked, absently. “Earlier, I mean. How did you get me to walk in here?”
Foxglove jerked at Rainbow’s voice. After a moment, though, she raised her hoof, and the rotting linen rags lifted into the air. The rattle danced and jerked and rose with them, and for a second all the light seemed to flow out of the room, like water sinking into a drain, and in the darkness the towering, hunched, hungry form of Madam Hazel hovered before her. The scent of wildflowers flooded Dash’s muzzle, and in the distance she heard the faint buzz of thousands of flies.
Just as fast it was gone. Light returned, and the rags dropped to the floor. The wood rattle zipped across the room to Foxglove, who snatched it against her breast, the way a normal filly might hold a doll. She frowned at Dash with all the severity only foals could manage.
“I am a witch!” she declared. After a pause, “Almost. I learned a lot! You should beware me!”
“Uh huh.” Dash frowned at the filly. She was tiny enough that Dash could have lifted her with one leg. Dash could count her ribs beneath her coat. “Hey, kid, I was thinking. You don’t have a master anymore, right? I know some mares back home who are like witches. Kind of. One’s really good with black magic. I’m sure she’d be happy to take you as an apprentice.”
Foxglove frowned harder, if such a thing were possible. “Does she consort with dark powers?”
Starlight? Rainbow pondered. “Probably, yeah.”
Foxglove swallowed. A long silence ensued. Her cloudy, blind eyes danced around the room, never fixing on anything Dash could see. Were all witches like that? She’d never met one before. Perhaps they saw things of their own.
Finally, Foxglove decided. Her head gave a jerky little nod. The rattle chattered in sympathy. “Very well. Madam Foxglove will accompany you. Because she is kind! And merciful!”
“Right.” Dash stretched out before the stove. It wasn’t cold in the cottage, but the light was a soothing shield against the darkness outside. After a few seconds, Foxglove crept out from beneath the bench and settled a few paces away. She smelled like she hadn’t bathed in weeks.
Well, they could fix that tomorrow. “You’re going to like Ponyville, kid,” Dash said. “I think you’ll fit right in.”
Hehe, a bit surprising, but an enjoyable short.
Yikes! That was spooky!
But I'd sure like to see where it goes!
that's adorable
I liked it!
Definitely good stuff. You did a good job with pony spooky, and of course, the reveal was lovely and sympathetic.
Plus this:
Made me chuckle.
Never gonna live that down, Starlight.
Nice. :)
Foxglove frowned harder, if such a thing were possible. “Does she consort with dark powers?”
Starlight? Rainbow pondered. “Probably, yeah.”
On one hand I want to defend Starlight, on the other, she has a point.
Aw! I'm a sucker for this stuff.
This feels like it needs more. Good little short though!
Madame Foxglove approves of this story! Because she is merciful!
(and needs a bath)
IDK how Rainbow Dash landed in Missouri and found your OC in Baba Yaga's hut, but she's a helluvah flier
Ohhh! Fun read! Thanks for this.
Is there any way to fav a blog post? Love to reread this in the future.
Spooky and adorable!
This was pretty good. Loved the descriptions and cuteness at the end.
For a moment I thought the flies and her broken wing meant that rainbow dash was a zombie
5139378
I had the same thought.
Foxglove is going to really fit in well.
Funnily enough, Trixie, Rarity and Twilight all consorted with dark powers at some point in either the show or comics, but Starlight didn't.