"Alrighty then, Sweetie Belle," Twilight started. "I've got my saddle bags with some food, water, quills, notebooks, and ink. Everything to jot down whatever we find in the castle."
"Why don't we just teleport there?" Sweetie Belle asked.
"Because the Everfree distorts magic so we would probably end up in a rock or tree," Twilight chuckled nervously. "I've yet to figure out why, but I'll discover it eventually." Twilight straightened herself up and narrowed her eyes in determination. "It's only a matter of time."
Sweetie Belle and Princess Twilight Sparkle stood in front of the Everfree forest, fully prepared to reach the abandoned castle hidden within its depths. While Sweetie Belle still trembled and, on more than occasion, tried to hide behind Twilight within this massive amalgamation of plants and darkness, Twilight was used to the body of trees. The sounds of growls and chirps only emphasized the foul reputation of this place for the 'outsider'.
"It's okay, Sweetie," Twilight reassured. "It's just a forest."
"But, Twilight--"
"I've been in there several times, and even more times with your sister," she recalled. "You don't need to worry. There are SOME monsters in there, sure," Twilight shrugged. "but it's not something that we can't deal with anymore. Stay with me and you'll be fine."
Twilight's glowing smile reassured Sweetie who felt a little bit of her fear draining away. The filly gulped loudly and stayed extremely close to Twilight's hind legs, occasionally jumping in fright at the sounds of branches snapping and large creatures slithering through the trees. Said creatures didn't help the filly when they would stop and stare at the two ponies from the darkness of the trees, their glowing white eyes emphasizing their size. Sweetie audibly winced at them, attracting Twilight's attention. The alicorn shoo'd the creature away and Sweetie Belle felt better for it.
"See? There's nothing to be afraid of," Twilight said. "You aren't afraid of the dark, but what's inside, and there's nothing dangerous aside from a few long hanging branches. Why, I discovered plenty of plants growing in this forest that were great at making magical potions."
"They're..." Sweetie Belle looked up. "magical conductors?"
"Yes! One of them is a mushroom that looks like a thin pyramid and is quite colorful." She giggled to herself. "If you're not careful while picking them, they'll blow spores onto your face and you'll look like a paintbrush sneezed on a tapestry."
"Does it do anything else?" Sweetie pondered aloud.
"No. Pinkie did it several times to herself in a row because she found it funny and spread the rainbow spores across her mane to imitate Rainbow Dash."
The filly chuckled and followed her mentor quietly. The longer she walked with Twilight, the less creepy the forest became. Naturally, barely any sunlight came through the trees, but it was still there.
"Keep an eye out for anything that might seem out-of-place here. It could be an interesting ingredient Applejack and I missed during our first few runs through here."
"Alrighty!" Sweetie responded cheerfully.
The search didn't leave much for the explorer's heart, although a bit of moss that Sweetie thought she had newly discovered made her laugh as the white flowers looked like butts, but Twilight didn't find it funny simply because she thought such a thing was so absurdly stupid. It took about fifteen minutes of searching for Sweetie to spot a large stick jutting out of a mound of decaying wood and leaning towards the side lightly. It broke off into two pieces from its center, making it look like the letter 'y'. Its surface was riddle with black scales of dried wood and shined a bronze sheen despite the lack of any significant light sources. Sweetie was certain it was a magical object, and Twilight would be very happy if she saw it.
"Twilight, I found something!" the filly eagerly announced.
She hopped to the stick and grabbed it with her two tiny hooves to get a firm grip and pull it out. The only thing pulled out were grunts as the stick refused to budge. She decided to go with using telekinesis as she had gotten better with the control, and trying to pull the stick would be great training to even further improve herself.
"Come on," she strained. "Get...out...bah!"
Sweetie Belle let go and rolled into a tree behind her. She groaned in pain and rubbed the back of her head.
"Twilight, I can't get it out. Can you help me?" she asked. There was no response and Sweetie Belle insisted. "Twilight? Can you help?" She opened her eyes to see where Twilight had gone. "T-Twilight? Where'd you go?" she asked. "Twilight? Where are you?" she shouted.
Suddenly, the forest started to seem that much scarier, but Sweetie steeled herself. "No, Sweetie Belle. The princess showed you that this place isn't that scary. You can find her if you remain calm and collected." She cleared her throat. "You're a Cutie Mark Crusader after all."
She started walking through the forest all while calling out for Twilight, but the lavender alicorn would not answer. The young filly kept peering over her shoulder to see if anything was following her or if Twilight was behind her far away, having somehow heard the calls, but there was no such luck.
"Well, I might as well try and get out of the Everfree forest. Twilight told me to stay with her, and since she's gone and I don't know the way to the castle, I think this is the best thing to do," Sweetie Belle decided.
She started her return trip and found the path difficult, simply because, with being so small, her stubby little legs were extremely inefficient with vaulting over rocks, hills, and fallen clumps of rotting wood. Sweetie Belle started to notice some changes happening to the forest the further she went in, however. The air gradually became damp despite the lack of mist, and the air became colder and colder. Worse still, the chirps and sounds of hunting beasts had stopped completely. That wasn't normal at all, Sweetie thought, but she did her best to remain strong regardless of the creeping fright she was feeling. As for illumination, yellow lights coming through the leaves disappeared to make way for a dark, blue light that gave a gloomy look to all of these trees.
"If a forest could be abandoned," Sweetie spoke softly under her breath. "Then this is certainly what it would look like." She gulped loudly and her breathing became heavier. "I want to go home," she cried. "Where am I?"
Sweetie Belle heard a branch creaking and her head jolted to the left. There was nothing moving, so she took in a deep breath and reminded herself that it could just be the decay of the trees. The trees, however, didn't look normal anymore and twisted even further with the distance the filly made. Their leaves started to thin in numbers and those that clung to their host had turned dry and gray. The bark became dark and ash-colored, and the trunks and branches twisted and bent sharply in many directions. Some seemed to bend directly towards the pony and followed her as she moved forward. Sweetie Belle looked to the right, and in the corner of her eyes, she saw the bark extending outwards towards her, but when she looked at the trees, there was nothing. Sweetie Belle looked to the left, and the same thing happened with the trees on the left. Her heart was racing so fast she was certain it had been replaced by Rainbow Dash.
The little filly galloped as fast as she could through the forest but tripped on an outstretched tree root and landed against a tree. She curled up into a ball and hid herself from the scary things around her. For fifteen minutes, one would've mistaken what was at the base of the tree to be a sentient, white puff ball. She looked up to see that nothing was around her nor were there any sounds. Perhaps, Sweetie pondered, that the silence was worse than there being any?
"Wh-where is T-T-Twilight?" she stuttered. "I want to go home. Rarity!" she whisper-yelled.
She couldn't bring herself to speak up more than a few murmurs and spastic stutters. She stopped all actions when she heard something stretching out to her right. It sounded like old wooden planks straining under extreme weight, but what she saw...A large, malformed cylinder with a rounded top was stretching out of the wood and moved towards the filly inch-by-inch. The surface started moving and bubbling like a living creature in a sack. A hoof stretched out and touched the ground while the rounded dome twisted and bent, letting a right ear poke out and a bitter-sweet smile to grow along the bark and curl at the edges. The 'head' turned to face Sweetie Belle, showing a hollow part of the wood that was supposed to be an eye socket while a wood knot was in the place of the other one. More cracking occurred, and the 'ear' of a helmet started growing out of the right side of the entity. There was no movement from the figure, the wood forming its body straining against the tree itself as if it were trying to escape its confines.
It exhaled loudly into Sweetie's face and was the only source of heat she felt for quite some time. "Ponyyyy..." it strained. Its voice was hoarse and spoke with whispers decorated by the sounds of old wood cracking from rot and force.
Sweetie Belle screamed at the top of her lungs and scampered to her hooves to get away from the creature that watched her before being reabsorbed by the twisted tree.
"What was that?!" Sweetie shouted. "What in Equestria was that?!"
A tree next to her started expanding in the same manner, but this time, an outstretched branch tipped with a gray leaf was on the surface of the growing shape. It ended up being an unfortunate hindrance coming from the chest and going diagonally through the entity's neck and out its right eye socket. A bony wing stretched out with multiple pops before the tip broke off and fell onto the forest floor. The shadows of the forest emphasized the figure's sickly, thin form as it stretched out of its 'home', its movements slow and tired like an ancient equine.
"Ponyyyyyyy...Sun touuuuuched."
Sweetie Belle's legs wouldn't obey her and only permitted her to slide back until she hit another form with the same facial expression as the very first one she saw looking down at her from above. The left side of its mouth was a large hole while several twisted branches came from its body. A tiny one tipped with a dried leaf jutted just above the right eyebrow and swayed with every little movement the entity made. Their expressions of the beings would not change and their mouths would not move when they looked at the young filly during and after their emergence. These were faces she would not soon forget regardless of age, and the horrid sounds. They felt worse to her. Their bodies cracked, chipped, and snapped with every movement they did, liberating a little bit of their bodies, but they would freeze in place just as quickly as the bark comprising their bodies crawled into the 'empty holes' formed by any kind of activity.
"Ponnnnnnnny..." it crackled. "White like suuuuunnnnnnn..."
Sweetie Belle got to her feet but tumbled down a slight slope and along some bizarrely dry leaves despite the intense humidity and light mist floating in the air like flying serpents. The other trees were undergoing the same effect, with creatures of wood climbing out. One of the entity's torso was fully out of the the tree but its body was even stranger, if that were even possible. While it only had a wooden knot on its ribs and an inverted wood deformity on the lower left area of its chest, its right leg looked like bones with a shredded boot on its hoof. Just a small portion of the left jaw was exposed as though depicting a skull as well.
"Ponnnnyyyyyyyyyyy..." many of them hissed.
"What do you want?!" Sweetie Belle blurted out.
One of the entities, only an 'eye' and a left foreleg from a tree branch, picked up a root and threw it at the little filly. She screeched and jumped away when it hit the ground just mere millimeters from her leg. The object was a pilum. The entity threw a pilum at her, and she could do naught but stare at the weapon in disbelief.
"Ponnnyyyyyyyy..." they all hissed in unison.
Sweetie Belle took this as a cue to get the Abyss out of there, and do so she did. She as far away from them as possible, and the further she went, the less of those creatures remained; Not because they were far behind the filly, but because the trees swallowed the creatures back into them.
"I want to go home!" Tears streamed from Sweetie's eyes. "I want to go home! I want to go home! I want to go home! RARITYYYYYYYY!"
Another few pilum landed in front of the filly, just narrowly missing her. The culprits were the same creatures standing high above the ground on a large rock. One of the entity's head was tilted to the side and bobbing left to right as it tried to right its 'broken neck'. Its left ear broke off and fell to the ground, as did its left leg.
"Leave me alone!" The filly shouted. She ran to the right of the rock in panic, ignoring the creatures on there and hoped the exit was nearby. "I didn't do anything to you!"
Sweetie narrowly missed a hoof that tried to stomp on her and slid along the dry leaves. Luckily, she was in control this time and managed to slow herself down to a halt with her hooves. She was breathing heavily, but it wasn't just from exhaustion; She was starting to hyperventilate.
"White...like sun..." a creature whispered.
"White like the sun," many others growled.
"Touched...by sun..."
A tree growing over the ground in an arc let loose a wooden creature onto Sweetie Belle, and scream and thrash did she to get the creature off of her. It was surprisingly light, but she realized why: It had no lower torso. She bolted off, but it wasn't as easy as she thought, as attested by the most recent encounters. She dove to the ground when a short sword swung at her and the filly managed to slide away from the threat. The 'sword' was made from broken wood and decayed beyond any proper recognition. Had it not been used, no pony would have ever discerned what it was for.
"Touched...by sun..." a creature crackled.
"Return...her..."
"Give...purpose..."
"Give back..."
Sweetie Belle couldn't understand what they wanted nor what they were trying to say. If it weren't for the creatures' sluggish movements, Sweetie might have died as one of them swiped at the back of her neck with its sword. She stopped from terror and clenched her teeth at the realization of imminent death, then saw a large chunk of her mane fly in front of her eyes and gently float down on the dry ground. She tapped her neck as the entities watched her, and tears began welling up in her eyes. A young filly shouldn't be living through this nightmare.
'Wait, that's it!' she thought. 'This was all a nightmare!'
Insane chuckling followed this 'realization', born more from desperation than an actual conclusion.
"Luna!" she cried as she bolted through the forest. "Princess Luna! I don't want to dream this anymore! Help me! Let me wake uuuuuup!" she howled.
A pilum grazed her right hind leg, cutting her across the fur, but it wasn't enough to stop the adrenaline coursing through the little white filly. Looking up and hoping to maybe see something that would help her identify where she was, she realized that the sky was dark as night and the moon looked like it had spiraled inwards into some sort of whirlpool. At least, that's what she thought she saw through the thick layer of gray smog hanging just below the tree lines.
"Return...her...to us..." the voices crackled in the air.
"Return...meaning..."
"Give...forever..."
"White...like sun..."
Sweetie belle was cut on her left foreleg rather gravely, but she continued on regardless.
"Betrayed...her..."
"Left...to rot..."
"Light eternal...Night afar..."
"Kill the sun..." one of them started.
"Kill the sun..." another repeated.
"Kill the sun..."
"Kill the sun..."
A loud exhale of cracking wood filled Sweetie's ears."Kill the sun..."
Sweetie kept going, but alas, there seemed to be no exit from this twisted trees. 'Is it possible?' the small filly thought as hope welled up inside her. 'Freedom at last?'
"I'm free!" she cheered through her tears.
Something was thrown at her legs, causing Sweetie Belle to burst out of the trees, fly a short distance, then skid along the ground, kicking up dust and dirt. She attempted to get up, but failed, and turned her head to look at the source of the problem. Her rear legs had been locked in place temporarily by some rope and a broken beam of wood. Sweetie could hear the cracking and reforming of the entities' bodies getting louder and did her best to get the object off of her hind legs. She only saw it briefly, but the object was a heavily rusted shield with only a 'fin' of its borders remaining. There was still some blue paint remaining in the middle, but it was mostly hidden by the holes in the metal.
The filly looked around and realized that she was more than wrong. She was only at a cliff leading to a destroyed castle covered in white vines with very few gray leaves growing from them. Looking behind her, Sweetie Belle could see that the creatures were still there and not leaving her alone, and in the light of the dead moon, several crescent moons marks, barely a hair in size, glowed a searing white on various portions of the bodies of each individual, with one spot not being identical in location to that of the next creature. Unfortunately, the feeling of safety removed some adrenaline in Sweetie and caused the filly to feel the wound on her foreleg and collapse from the pain. She did her best to get to the rickety bridge that led to the castle and cross it. It was a foolish idea, but it was the only place she knew was safe, and despite the weird sky and moon and its decrepit state, she was certain that she would be safe somewhere so fortified.
In front of the bridge were a few swords and large, circular shields -larger than the previous one tossed at Sweetie's legs- abandoned by their owners and who had seen the unfortunate decay and rust of time. The shields were barely anything but thin slices of swiss rust, and the wood of the spears had long since broken off and left the metal tips stuck in the cliff wall and shields. The further Sweetie Belle went, the more numerous the items became. In fact, one of them was still intact enough that, despite having a huge chunk of it rusted off, displayed just the surface of a circle and three waving arms allowed her to understand that that was the sun. She didn't have time to think on that, though, as the creatures were slowly moving in. The filly was thankful for the lack of trees here, although it seemed so barren. Why?
The closer she got to the castle, the bigger it became. There even seemed to be a bright, white light emanating from behind it, giving the area an extra terrifying look. The wooden doors of the entrance, both easily the height of a barn, were left slightly ajar, so Sweetie Belle took the opportunity to scoot through the gap. She didn't pay attention to the helmet pierced by a pilum and resting on a shield and kicked it with her leg, moving it but also disturbing what was beneath it that responded by blasting gray and blue powder in Sweetie Belle's face. The pony coughed and spat the gross powder and squeezed through the gap and collapsed on the stone ground, just atop the ripped welcoming rug. The castle's entrance stretched to a destroyed throne of stone far behind where pillars and chunks of ceiling lined the pathway towards the seat of royalty.
She shuddered from the cold and her fear. Her face had been completely matted with tears that continued to flow, and she started to fall unconscious, but then a loud bang filled her ears and woke her up. Sweetie's head bolted in every direction to what she thought was the origin of the noise, but she knew where it was really coming from and slowly craned her neck towards the doors she squeezed through earlier. The horrible creatures were there, their legs trying to get through the door.
"Ponnnnyyyyyy..."
"White...like sun..."
"Return her..."
"Betrayed her..."
Sweetie Belle stared at the creatures then noticed their legs moving away. There was now silence for a few seconds, but Sweetie felt like she had died several times in that interval. Through the silence, steps sounded. A head with a wooden knot in place of the left eye walked in front of the gap and disappeared before returning to the gap to look at Sweetie Belle with its empty socket. There was a long moment of silence during the staredown, but Sweetie Belle was the only one to break as the creature's 'empty' eye socket was slowly filled by a bright green light that hummed louder and louder to the point of nearly bursting the glass windows in the walls.
"Kill the sun..." it crackled.
Sweetie Belle shrunk to the ground and covered her eyes as the loud humming became louder and louder just as hoofsteps did, and the young filly broke down into tears. She could feel something in front of her with malicious intent ready to strike her down, and there was nothing she could do.
"Sweetie Belle?!" a familiar voice cried out.
The terrorized filly poked an eye above her foreleg and looked up to see that she was in the castle, but it was different and full of color rather than blue and gray of a dark night. The lavender alicorn rushed to her and picked her up, sizing her physique. She was horrified at what she was seeing.
"What happened to you?! You're incredibly hurt! And your mane...You were right next to me, then I heard you saying you found something. Next thing I know, you're gone! Poof!" Twilight gestured with her right foreleg. "I searched EVERYWHERE for you and even asked the others to help. Where did you go?"
Sweetie Belle burst into tears and hugged Twilight in a vice. She was vibrating so much that Twilight thought her head was going to come off.
"Why are you hurt like this? You look like you went through a battlefield!?" The alicorn looked worried. "Wh...Did you hurt yourself with something sharp?! Was it a monster in the forest?"
"N-n-n-n-not a m-m-m-monst-t-t-t-terrrr," Sweetie hiccuped through her tears. "T-t-t...T-t-t"
"T-t-t? What is it, Sweetie? You can tell me."
"T-t-t-treeeeees!" She exploded in tears and hugged Twilight tightly, confusing the alicorn.
"Well, I guess this expedition is over," the alicorn sighed and scratched her neck. "Let's go back home. We need to get you checked before I can see whatever it was that did this to you." Twilight looked around to see the best and quickest way to take Sweetie to the hospital. "I can get us through the Everfree fo--"
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" Sweetie bellowed. "N-n-n-ot agaiiiin! P-pl-please, Twilight! Take me back to Rarity!" Sweetie hiccuped.
Twilight sighed and looked at Sweetie Belle's shaking form with concern.. "Well, I can always try flying us above it." She hugged Sweetie Belle close to her chest and smiled. "It's okay. We're going home," the alicorn cooed.
Sweetie Belle hung onto Twilight's chest for dear life and took only a minute to glance down at the forest from their altitude. The entirety of the forest looked nothing like what she had just traveled through. It was lush and full of colors and life. The filly sneezed, and some rainbow powder shot out of her nose, startling Twilight briefly.
"Ohhh!" she chuckled, tryng to lighten the mood. "I see you stumbled upon one of those weird mushrooms. They're funny, aren't they? It's a shame the powder doesn't do much, though," Twilight sighed. "Perhaps we'll discover it another day, okay Sweetie?"