//------------------------------//
// Enter Sand 
// Story: Six Shooter 
// by Equimorto 
//------------------------------//

"It was a nice house. He really couldn't believe he'd gotten it for such a cheap price. The previous owner had seemed eager to get rid of it, even, and he couldn't conceive why anypony would have wanted to go away from a place like that.
Just outside the city, the nearby river providing a reliable source of water, it was the perfect place to set up a farm. Sure, the ground would need some work after it hadn't been used for what looked like years, but with just a little effort it would become the ideal place for him to grow his crops. And on top of that, the house itself wasn't half bad. For something that had probably been built at least a century before the structure appeared surprisingly well kept, and while he'd only given it a cursory look there didn't seem to be any major work needed.
He left his things in the hall and went in his room. He still couldn't believe he'd paid the thing so little. The place had to have been built as the private residence of some noble, judging by all the stuff there was. And it all looked original, too. He was pretty sure the tapestry alone should have costed him more than what he'd paid for the whole house. Looking at the headboard he noticed an intricate hourglass-like symbol etched in the wood, likely the coat of arms of the family that had originally owned the place. He found it weird that he'd never heard of them, but decided to keep his investigations for the day after.
The citizens he met when he visited the town the next day all appeared rather weird to him. As soon as he mentioned being the new owner of the mansion they all looked at him weird, and none of them seemed to want to talk to him. His search for information on the house's previous owners went equally as bad, as nobody seemed to know anything about them, and even the town's library had nothing about them. The most he got was out of a very old pony he met while going back to his house, who muttered something about a curse before shutting up and refusing to say anything else.
He decided to spend the rest of the day looking around the house's interior. Much to his surprise, it appeared to be even more well kept than he'd thought, meaning he wouldn't need to do any work to the house itself. He was distractedly planning what he would do the day after when he stumbled upon a small metal hoop protruding from the ground. Curious, he pulled it up, and underneath a panel of the floor he found a chest buried in sand, locked. He decided he would try to open it the day after and went to bed.
The next morning he woke up at dawn and began to work on the fields. He got rid of all the weeds, delimited the perimeters of the various sections and dug a small canal from the nearby river. When the sunset arrived he retuned to his house, tired after the day of hard work, and after dinner he immediately went to bed, forgetting about the chest.
The morning after that was spent setting up the irrigation system, but once he was finished with that he decided to wait until two days after, when the Moon would be in a favourable position, before sowing. Seeing as he had nothing else to do he paid another visit to the city. The ponies this time seemed worried for him, but he still couldn't get them to talk about what the problem was. That night, when going to bed, he remembered the chest and decided he would spend the day after trying to open it.
Once he woke up, he first activated the irrigation to test it, and after checking to make sure that each patch of land received the right amount of water he went inside to open the chest. It proved to be a far harder task than he'd anticipated, but eventually he managed to pry the lock open. Much to his disappointment though, instead of the treasures he'd expected to find inside there was only a book. Still, he thought there might have been something worth reading there, so he went out to turn off the irrigation. It came as a shock to him that the land seemed to be as dry and even drier than it had been in the morning, something he decided he would investigate upon the next day.
He didn't sleep that night. Awake in his bed, by the light of a candle, he spent all his time reading the book he'd found. It was a diary of some kind, or a report of things that had happened there, likely written by the first owner. Apparently, the land had once not been particularly fertile, and during a drought the unicorn had tried to use a time-manipulation spell to increase the productivity of his fields. It hadn't worked. He read terrible things, of ponies drowned in sand, of a curse upon those who lived in that house, of a land that sucked all life away. He couldn't believe it. He didn't want to.
The next morning he got out of bed before the dawn, having finished the book, and began to plow the fields. It couldn't be true. They were just old tales, legends to scare ponies. The inhabitants of the village were just superstitious, there was nothing supernatural about the place. He should have been thankful for the legend, even, as it had allowed him to buy the place for such a low price.
But once he stood over a small hill, looking over his fields as the Sun finally shone over the land, he felt his heart sink. Beneath the surface, his work had revealed that there was nothing but sand, and here and there the white texture of bones shone through, poking out from their prison.
The pony ran away, terrified, and he never came back again."
"You're one to talk, Apple Bloom," Rainbow said while looking down, "it's not like your sister is any better than Rarity at this."
"Hey!" Applejack called. "What was wrong with my story?"
"Well it was boring, you botched the timing, you spent too much time on uninteresting details and too little on the scary stuff and-Oh, yeah-" Rainbow got down from the tree and stared at Applejack "-sand isn't scary."
"You try growing something on sand," Applejack replied between her teeth.
"Cacti," Rainbow replied with a smile.
Applejack gritted her teeth. "Well, sorry if I didn't want to scare the fillies here! But why don't you tell a story, since you seem to know so much about it?"
Rainbow smirked. "Well, you asked for it."