//------------------------------// // Mistakes were made // Story: House of the Rising Sunflower // by kudzuhaiku //------------------------------// A great and terrible sunburn covered Sundance from hoof to ear. At least, that is what it felt like. His skin was too tight, tender, and movement of any sort was painful enough to be annoying. Deep within his wingsockets there was a dreadful ache, and what he wanted right now was to be dunked in some cool water. Black soot covered most of his body and as he flew, he left a trail of gritty filth flowing behind him.  His passengers fared no better.  “I panicked, I’m so sorry! I got scared and I—”  “Paradox”—Hennessy’s mechanical voice was grating—“it’s fine. Everything is fine. Right now, I need for you to focus. You have to pull yourself together. There’s a fire to put out and we still have some spiders to deal with. Can you do this?”  “I don’t know,” Paradox whined in response. “Right now, I’m still panicked. And scared. And I can’t think clearly. What if I mess up again? What if I blow us to smithereens?”  “Then we’re blown to smithereens. We have to finish the job. The fire is spreading.”  Without being told, Sundance banked and did a sharp turn to bring them around. Incoming wads of webbing made things difficult however, and he had to swerve to avoid them. Trees were scattered everywhere, his eyes watered from the smoke even inside his flight goggles, and he was fearful of what the flames might do if they weren’t extinguished. Somehow, he flew in between the gooey globs of webbing and maintained a steady straight-on course.  Paradox did not disappoint. As they went whooshing past, another fireball was dropped. This one was far more controlled however, and they weren’t almost blasted right out of the sky. It did cause a spider to explode though, and several smaller spider survivors ignited. Legs flailing and kicking, they ran about in an engulfed panic. A second blast obliterated them and the resulting explosion actually put some of the flames out.  Most of the copse of trees were gone now, just so much splinters and charcoal. Some of the trees on the outer edges survived, or would survive if the fires were extinguished. Smaller spiders fled, running, scurrying for any crack or crevice that might offer shelter. As for the larger spiders, they were exposed now, and made for easy targets. Without thinking, Sundance banked and prepared to come around once more.  The spider menace ended today; it wasn’t the mission they’d set out to do, but it was the mission they’d complete.  Teeth bared, gritted, his black, sooty lips pulled back into a ferocious snarl, Sundance once more flew between the dangerous clumps of hurled webbing. The black sooty trails that flowed from his wings looked a lot like smoke. He was in a place beyond fear, beyond terror, an emotional plateau of grim resolve. No unnecessary thoughts cluttered his mind, he had no distractions. This time as they passed, a truly enormous spider—a matriarch if not a queen—met its end in the fiery conflagration. The massive hairy abomination ignited, and as it burned it sizzled and spat like oil in too-hot a pan.  They’d come for River Raider, one of his own, and now, he’d come for them.  As he circled around once more, Sundance understood a great many things about himself that he didn’t know just five minutes ago. He was a creature of terrible truths and absolutes, one of which was vengeance. River Raider had almost died and she was still in recovery. The spiders had almost taken something precious to him—so now they would burn for their trespass. The last thing that they would know would be terror and flame that poured down from the skies—and the skies were his.  Flowers of terrible truth blossomed down below him, wretched roses whose growth was fertilised by death, the consumption of flesh, of life. Red-orange petals opened, spreading wide, exquisite creations of tragic beauty. More trees fell, regrettable but acceptable losses. Hennessy was screaming; no words, just a terrible sound that poured out from his mechanical respirator. Together, the trio had themselves a moment, though Sundance was only aware of his own.  Upon this day a pegasus flew through smoke and fire, and like a phoenix, was reborn.    At long last, nothing moved. No grotesque hairy eight-legged horror stirred. Vast plumes of smoke rose up into the sky from charred patches of scorched earth. The last of the flames were dying now, smothered bit by bit as Paradox suffocated them. An appalling stench violated the nostrils with each breath, but Sundance was beyond caring about such trivialities. Never had he felt more like a baron, a leader.  He was quite pleased with himself.  All victory had cost him was a copse of trees.  “Beyond what remains of the trees,” Hennessy shouted. “Eastward. I see a valley. Sundance, have a better look and tell me what you see.”  After gaining a bit of elevation, Sundance squinted through his soot-encrusted goggles to have himself a better look. Yes, beyond the burned mess was a sort of valley, a sheltered place between the meadow and the foothills. Whatever he was supposed to be looking for, he couldn’t see it. To him, it was just a patch of earth, a shallow valley. Yet Hennessy clearly saw something, so surely something had to be there. But what? What exactly was he supposed to see?  “There’s no green.” Her voice weak and somewhat hoarse, Paradox was difficult to hear over the sound of the roaring wind. “It’s all just dirt from what I can see.”  “Exactly!” Hennessy called out. “The spiders lived here because they had a food source nearby. It would take a lot of rabbits to strip the land of green like that. We should go have a better look over that way once we know for sure that the fires are out.”  Sundance found himself in agreement and said, “We can do that…”  The valley floor was barren dirt for the most part. There were some shrubs, but these were stripped of leaves. Sundance noticed the condition of the topsoil, which was dried out, cracked, and crumbly. While he was no farmer, he had been paying attention and had learned a few things about healthy soil. This gully was long, quite narrow, and may have once had flowing water, but it was long gone.  Along each side of the gully were shelves of rock, outcroppings and overhangs where the land had eroded away beneath. These formed sheltered places, and Sundance suspected that these sheltered places might be infested with rabbits. He saw what might have been some sort of berry thicket, maybe raspberries, but the branches were bare, stripped of anything fruity or green.  “If you could see what I can see right now, you’d drop a load of horseapples,” Hennessy said to his companions. “There are deep burrows beneath these ledges. Massive warrens. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. There’s too much red to count.”  “Not so sure I can blow up tons of rock,” Paradox said.  To which Hennessy replied, “I don’t think you can either. No offense.”  “None taken.”  “We could try collapsing the stone overhangs, but the bunnies would just burrow out.”  Though perhaps not as smart as his passengers, Sundance was well-aware of the futility of this task. The old riverbed had carved a sort of fortress for rabbits and it seemed as though they were here to stay. Dynamite might be of some use, though Sundance doubted its effectiveness. They would need a lot of it because there were many stone outcroppings on both sides of the gully. After his explosive victory over the spiders, this stung a bit.  “It would take the Underwatch Corps of Engineers to rid this place of pests,” Hennessy said as Sundance continued his flyover. “Still, we’re going to see what we can do ourselves. Maybe we can make this a long-term project.”  “So this is the place?” asked Sundance.  “It might be. Might not be the only place.”  After a bit of thought, Sundance found the wisdom in Hennessy’s words.  “Paradox, think you can cause one of those overhangs to collapse?”  “Maybe,” she replied to Hennessy, “but we’ll have to land.”  “I figured as much,” was the earth pony’s patient reply.  “Can’t hit what I need to hit from the air. Would have to cause a big kaboom from below.”  “Put us down, Sundance. We need to get a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”    Choking smoke hung heavy in the air and tickled the lungs. A terrible stench lingered, the foul funk of burnt hair and roasted spider. Sundance stood on dry, powdery soil that poofed up little clouds of dust with every step. His wings ached, his back hurt, and his throat was parched. If only his mother could see him now. Sweat and soot formed a paste of filth that caked his hide and befouled his wings.  “I can’t believe that rabbits would do this,” Paradox said as she passed the water canteen to Sundance. “Just look at… everything.”  “And we might’ve made everything worse.”  Upon hearing these words, Sundance held the canteen in his right wing and gave Hennessy a curious stare.  “The spiders were eating the rabbits,” Hennessy said to explain himself. “Now, with the spiders gone, the rabbits can only prosper and do what rabbits do. There’s nothing to hold them back, and so—”  “We made it worse?” Paradox’s words were almost a shriek. “But the spiders were a real threat to the barony!”  “And the primary threat to the rabbits,” Hennessy said in a smooth voice of reassured calm. “Look around you. Up and down this gully, under these overhangs, there are massively overpopulated warrens. Some of them are hot with disease.” Raising a hoof, he gestured at the mask that he was no longer wearing. “Put it on, if you’d like.” Paradox groaned, kicked the dust, and then began to grumble to herself.  Meanwhile, Sundance had himself a cool drink of water.  “We’re a couple of miles away from the barony,” Hennessy said, his words soft and his demeanour thoughtful. “There’s a ravine where the orchard is, and there’s water there. That won’t slow the rabbits down much. They’ll spread from here in search of food. There’s tens of thousands… maybe hundreds of thousands, I have no way of knowing. There’s been multiple rabbit famines in Equestria when the conditions turn just right for rabbits to swarm.”  “This seemed so much better when all we had to do to fix it was blow stuff up.”  “I know, Paradox. I’m sorry.” Bowing his head, Hennessy slipped into thoughtful silence.  “Not every battle ends in victory.” With the canteen held inches away from his lips, Sundance tried to flick some filth from his tail in an effort to regain his noble composure. “Hennessy, can the Underwatch do something about this?”  “You can go on the waiting list…” As his words trailed off, Hennessy turned away from Sundance.  “Right. No hard feelings. So we find another way. If we put our heads together, we’ll think of something.”  For the first time in his life, Sundance began to understand the danger of what could happen if things went out of balance. It was beyond his understanding. For almost all of his life, he’d lived in the city, a place that he now understood had artificial balance—at the cost of unbalancing everything around it. A whole variety of factors had conspired against the barony; feral weather, geography, biology, the ecosystem, all things that he could barely comprehend.  With a turn of his head, he glanced upwards at the ridge above and watched the pillars of smoke that rose from the obliterated spider colony. The spiders were far too much a danger to let live, and yet the spiders protected them from a different threat that was no less dangerous. There could be no doubt about it; the spiders had to go. For Sundance, he was confident of this. He could deal with the consequences of the rabbit swarm, but he couldn’t deal with the potential consequences of the continued existence of the spiders. Somepony might die, and that, that was unacceptable.  “Can rabbits swim?” asked Paradox.  “Yes,” Hennessy replied without hesitation.  “Well, bother.”  “The slabs of stone here are granite,” Hennessy said. “Beneath them are layers of sedimentary rock and sandstone, from the looks of things. There’s all kinds of cracks, crevices, and crannies. You could try gas, but the porous nature of the rock might work against you.”  “All of this used to be a river, or a creek, or some kind of flowing body of water with a funny name.” Sundance turned himself around, his hooves kicking up clouds of dust with each step. “Where did the water go? I mean, this whole area is supposed to be this great fertile patch of land. There’s a river flowing through the orchard in the next ravine over… so where did this river go?”  “Sundance, are you suggesting that we try to restore the river?” asked Paradox.  “I don’t know,” he replied, uncertain of the right course of action. “Might make things worse in some way. But the river is gone. I was told that the river in the orchard was larger at one time… large and deep enough to float barges full of produce down.” Holding out his wing, he pointed northwards at the jagged peaks of the mountains in the distance. “There’s a lot of water up there. It’s not getting down here. Maybe if we follow the riverbed to the source, we can figure out how and why the water stopped and—”  “Flood this gorge,” Hennessy said whilst he nodded his head.  “A lot of bunnies would drown and die horrible deaths if this place flooded. Their burrows are under the old riverbanks. I mean, you can see where the water once flowed and washed the soft stuff out from beneath the hard stuff. That’s why we have these stone shelves.” With a sad shake of her head, Paradox surveyed her surroundings, clucked her tongue, and then said, “It’s them or us.”  “Might make the land a bit more fertile too. That’s good for the barony long-term.”  “I agree, Hennessy,” Sundance said to his friend. “So… how about we have a bite to eat, and then we go north to find us a water source?”  “That sounds like a plan,” the earth pony replied. “Certainly better than doing nothing.”  “I don’t care what we do, just so long as we have lunch right now. I’m ravenous.”  “Me too, Paradox,” Sundance said to the starving unicorn that had just made it rain fire. “We’ll have some lunch and then go north. No telling what we might find.”  Again, Hennessy said, “That sounds like a plan.”