//------------------------------//
// 05 - Intruders in the Grove 
// Story: The GATE 
// by scifipony 
//------------------------------//

I gasped.  Pain awakened me.  In my confusion, I noticed my knees, my chest, and my jaw ached, like somepony had opened a door in my face.  I smelled the cold dry-air smell of frost and shook my mane out and heard wet bits patter beside me.  My bed felt like its lumps had turned to rocks.  Purple and blue phosphenes flashed behind my eyelids as I opened my eyes, wondering what had happened.

"AJ!" I shouted before it all came back.

Not in bed.  I saw a tree.

An old apple tree.

I'd teleported.

I lay astride gnarled roots that had grown out of the soil to become a tripping hazard, my legs folded and my muzzle ploughed deep enough into moist ground such that the impact must have knocked me out.  Today just had to be the day I had to test the limits of unicorn magic, didn't it?

And now I'd shouted my location to the bipeds from somewhere in Sweet Apple Acres.  As the phosphenes retreated and I levered myself up, I recognized the old grove I lay in.  

Obviously, when Big Mac had said "northeast orchard" that had stuck in my head.  It was the location of a special pair of trees that had grown intertwined.  As I stood swaying and a bit dizzy, I recognized the wedding grove, and the pear and apple tree that had grown together such that the upper trucks roughly formed a large heart.  The original wood pots—abandoned at the altar where AJ's parents had married in secret long ago—had long ago returned to the soil.  The memory had similarly been mislaid, and the grove had lain forgotten until Grand Pear and Granny Smith could reconcile, yet something essential in the long ago union had created a strong palpable magic.  

I sensed the harmony in it.  Maybe it was a reason AJ grew up to become the element of honesty.  The Tree of Harmony had roots throughout this part of Equestria, after all.

But that wasn't everything I felt.

I didn't forget my shout and backed into the surrounding trees.  I felt my ears swivel, listening for any non-arboreal sounds.  I sniffed the air as I waved my horn, trying to sense any disturbance in the magic pulse.

What I sensed smelled faintly of ozone, that weird scent after an electrical storm.  After half a minute, I heard a faint zap and a crackle...   I shivered.

Its source lay beyond the intertwined tree.  My horn didn't sense magic like from a developing or continuously reciprocating spell, but there was a flow, more of a stream than a brook.  

I remembered visiting a gem mine once.  A mine was rarely just a single hole, but many.  Since warm air rose, air naturally ventilated such arrangements, being sucked from the lower entrances to rise like chimney smoke out the upper entrances.

This was that, but with magic.

I heard a roar, one I readily recognized as an engine.  It approached rapidly, and I pushed myself further into some concealing shrubbery.  I heard laughter then glimpsed a pair of bipeds on a motorbike, one much more rugged than the one that Sunset Shimmer drove.  It came bumping up a path that I would have very soon noticed on my own.  Truck tires had mercilessly shred the soil that lead just east and parallel to the length of the grove.

I heard the laughter again and watched the light seesawing between the trees before the noisy machine jumped into the grove, having hopped a root, then buzzed on by.

Nopony was seeing me.

I jumped from hiding into the air, flapping hard to see above the intertwined tree.  I followed the sound with my eyes just in time to see the phenomena I'd just sensed a minute ago.





The motorbike shot into it—and was silenced immediately.  In the moonlight, I might have missed the apparition until within pony-lengths.  A wan bluish light, not unlike moonlight, lit it.  Something the other Twilight had called a fluorescent light.  The clue was the motorbike.  A red running light glowed on its tail end, and the red light diffracted jaggedly, passing through what had to be some sort of magic mirror, then slowed into what looked like a small cavern, except it couldn't be.  I saw apple trees beyond the inter-dimensional membrane, but the location of the bike appeared to be the same place when looking through the membrane.

A sudden crackle of electricity solved the issue of me seeing this thing I had no good context to understand.  The discharge outlined a depressed sphere—it resembled a water droplet on oil, about the size of a small house, embedded slightly in the ground.

The motorbike riders opened a door—to a barn I immediately presumed—and bright sunlight streamed into the space on the other side.  Daylight.  The pair immediately passed through on foot and the barn door closed behind them.

I heard a shout from behind.  An inquiry, surely, because another biped farther away made a querulous sound.

Right.  Pony flying.  Glints off my hooves, maybe?

I acted on reflex.