Lily opened her eyes and met a green blur. She focused.
Everything below her knees was tight with pressure. Grimly, she raised a leg and heard the gloopy slosh of water full of too much gunk. Beneath her, a scummy green reflection looked back as though pleading for a less algae-infested place to reflect her in.
Strangely, although there was definite pressure on her scalp and ears, no helmet met her dripping hoof when she raised it up to check.
No noises cut through the tangles of green overhead. Occasional stems the width of her own legs rose up or ran along the water’s surface, but several yards ahead and – she glanced back to check – behind gave way to pure blackness. She looked up. There was no sky: merely more blackness above the tangles.
“OK…” she said. Sans any echo, the voice was flat and slapped onto the world like a belly flop. “Now what?”
Daisy was nowhere.
Too many minutes of eerie silence passed before she began walking.
“So…” she said, hoping if she talked to herself she wouldn’t try bolting out of the world altogether, “you dream of swamps, Daisy? Daisy, can you hear me? Daisy?”
The water barely rippled around her. As she went further… further… well, she supposed “further in”, though she couldn’t tell what was “in”, what was “out”, and for that matter what anything was even “about”… As she went further, she noticed the branching of the stems. Little round things topped most of the branches, like transparent leaves. They had a toothy look.
Getting out seemed a really great idea.
Except she didn’t know how.
Hadn’t Doc covered it? They’d spoken about it as though getting Daisy out would be as easy as dragging her through a door, but now she was in the actual dream – if this was Daisy’s, at least – she had no idea what such a door would even look like.
Two crisscrossing stems barred her path. She sloshed her way around them and went on.
Nah, perhaps she was being too hasty. After all, everyone woke up sooner or later. If Daisy was stuck, Lily was going to help her out…
…somehow…
…and then they’d just wake up. They would just wake up, right?
She clung to those words – “stuck”, “help her out”, “dragging her through a door” – because they made sense. So she forced herself to ignore the little warning voice in the back of her head insisting that this was a dream, and dreams had the same relationship with sense as Lily had with epic adventures or her own grandma in the care home.
The further she went, the more the world around her changed. Stems which had competed like trees for space now gave way to a stretch of darkness, during which she sloshed her way as though she knew where she was going. Her legs seemed to have a mind of their own, and when the first of the new plants loomed out of the blackness – it was like a solid mist – they stopped her for a moment.
A crowding mass of stems rose out of a central point. Looking down from high, high above, somewhere in the gathering of green, were purple flowers. To her feverish imagination, their yellow interiors were glowing eyes.
She swore as she passed that the flowers shuffled. She looked up. The glowing eyes looked back. They kept watching her back even as they disappeared into the blackness behind her.
More of the masses of stems surged out and past. In between them, Lily was an ant among shrubs.
Still no sign of Daisy.
Where was the girl?
Where was she, come to that?
Unbidden, the thoughts crept up her spine and tiptoed around her brain and whispered, ready to flee should they not be welcomed. What, after all, was she going to do even if she brought Daisy back? They’d wake up – presumably – and get up, and Daisy may or may not say “thank you”, and then…
Well, and then what? Daisy goes back to sleeping more and more often, starting the whole thing again? Lily shook her head to dislodge the biting thought, but it merely buzzed aside to let another one bite.
Or Daisy stops talking to her at all? It wasn’t as if she, Lily, had been invited.
Or Daisy miraculously gets better and then they live happily ever after. The thought swatted vigorously at the others, but she could smell the fetid desperation. Else that was just the swamp. She was sure this was a swamp.
Nonetheless, she walked on. At least the watching purple flowers with the glowing eyes were a dash of colour here, and they didn’t do anything. They were plants. Byblis gigantea, if she wasn’t mistaken. Pretty exotic. All the way from Didgeridoo, she fancied. Not bad: Daisy dreamt interestingly, at least.
Lily sighed. Nothing else for it. She simply had to come into the dream. Had to. Not going in – leaving Daisy on the bed like some abandoned child – was not an option.
Those biting thoughts pointed out: neither was getting stuck in someone else’s dream. But she batted them aside.
Eventually, even these plants were gone. She’d left them far behind. Darkness dominated over the scummy water.
A fresh waft of honey greeted her nose.
Now this was more like it! Lily breathed deeply, letting the sweet scent ooze through her head. For as long as it lasted, she felt the sun’s heat on her flanks, saw the dazzling brightness and the swaying of the meadow, heard Daisy’s excited talking and Roseluck’s giddy laughter from a summer long ago –
New plants loomed up before her.
She stopped.
Teeth grinned back.
They were a field of red and green streaks. Bulbous little sacks sitting on top of the water, they were each topped by a rim of spiky white and red shaded beneath a hairy leaf. The effect was of a psychopathic clam.
All of them looked like fangs glad to see her.
Water sloshed under her; she backed off –
No, no, wait a moment… I know those… they’re much too big, but… Cephalotus follicularis?
Another Didgeridoo species. What is this? Daisy’s giving herself a mental holiday?
Knowing the plant, and suspecting she’d hit the right direction if she went on long enough, she braced herself and waded in. Bristly hairs caught on her coat, and the honey smell did little to alleviate the bumping of hard buckets of green and red on either side. They were as willing to shift as bamboo baskets nailed to the floor.
“Daisy!” she called.
No echo. No answer. Not that she’d really expected one.
Well, it could have been worse, she supposed. At least she knew plants, though not when she was apparently the size of a daisy by comparison. At least plants didn’t make comments about her hypersensitivity. At least they wouldn’t leave her, if only because they had no legs and not even a brain to think about leaving. At least they were still there when she came back.
Which was funny, she reflected, during her attempts not to get beaten back by a particularly stubborn bucket of green-and-red; she didn’t really believe Ponyville was going to drop her and her friends like a used hanky. They’d still have a job. They’d still be needed for special days, provided they didn’t go bankrupt first. It wasn’t as if they’d really starve to death.
It didn’t give her much comfort.
There were other kinds of death, she thought, and had always thought. One day, she’d wake up and she’d find she – she – was dead to other ponies.
Because she’d say the wrong thing.
Because she’d panic one time too many.
Because she’d let them down if she didn’t keep an eye on trouble.
Because – perhaps most likely because – she’d simply prove what a shallow, selfish, irredeemable little attention-seeker she was, deep down, and had been the whole time, and would be, because as soon as she thought she’d mastered bravery, another monster attack or another round of trampled flowers would knock her back to her foalhood, and she’d be there. Lily. Fainting at fuchsias again.
“Daisy!” she called.
Finally, the field of buckets gave way to green waters again. At least waters didn’t rasp at her coat, though the chill came pretty close.
Green waters had it all to themselves for a moment.
Then even bigger buckets loomed over her.
Amid a tangled mass of stems and branches, these buckets were the size of houses. Velvet red lapels rimmed the gaping mouth. Every single monstrous bulb held up a leaf like a vegetable rooftop. Now the honey stench was her nose drowning under all the sugar. Her head tingled against each breath.
She shivered. Roseluck’s, aha, “favourite”. Nepenthes. Just Nepenthes. She didn’t inspect them any more finely than that. Even she got the creeps just knowing they were there, and she kept her head down.
“Daisy!” she called out. “Daisy! Daisy, where are you!?”
More walls of speckled green surged past on either side, a village of Nepenthes half-concealed within the boggy jungle.
“Daisy!” Her voice cracked. “I want to go home! Where are you!?”
Her walk turned into a canter. Violent splashes yelled angrily at her, but the old panic insisted this was top priority. Stumbling, she forced herself to keep going straight ahead, to look around, to snatch some lifeline clue out of the tangle.
“Daisy! Quit HIDING from me! DAISY!”
“Lily?”
She skidded to a halt. Ears rose on her head.
“Daisy, is that you?” Her gaze darted from bucket to bucket. She didn’t dare spin around, lest she lose her sense of direction. “Daisy! DAISY!”
“What are you doing here?”
Her ears triangulated, swivelling like alert sniffer dogs. Sounded like it came from over there…
In her rising panic, she went from a standing start to a gallop in a single breath. “DAISY! I’m coming for you! Hold on! Hold on!”
“What? You’re not part of the dream?”
“No! I’m real! Come on, I want to get out of here!”
“Then go. Now.”
“Hold on! I’m coming to help you!”
“No! I want to be left alone. Go back. Can’t you take a hint?”
Under her cloak of fear, a dagger of fury glinted. “A hint? Do you know how long it’s been –” She yelped, hitting the surface with her chin and belly, before scampering back to a gallop. “Do you know how long you’ve been gone?”
“N… No…?”
Finally, the Nepenthes and the stems fell behind. Darkness and swamp led her to an emerging hump of an island. Panting and wheezing, she leaped onto the bank and all the energy went out of her and she flopped, dribbling green and feeling the rustle of grass under her heaving chest.
“Thank… goodness,” she murmured in between breaths.
She looked up and met Daisy’s glower coming the other way.