There was a terrible rumbling from somewhere near my sleeping spot.
I sat upwards in alarm and cocked my head to the nearest wall of the cavern. The cave system fell silent in the wake of the roar, but the beat soon made its presence known once more. Sighing, I fell backwards and placed a hoof on my grullo stomach. My friend rumbled again, and all I could do was give him a consoling pat.
“S’alright buddy, we’ll get you some grub.”
I groaned as I heaved myself upwards. My sore hoof cried out in pain under the pressure, so I let up on it and limped my way out of the cave. It was easy for me to find my way out as I had only settled around the first turn in the tunnel, leaving me with line of sight of the noon sunlight.
The first thing I noted when I stepped out into the sunlight was that something had come through my area. I thought it curious at first, as I believed the hoofprints to have belonged to a deer I knew that wandered by the cave every few days, but they were much smaller and pressed far too daintily into the ground to be a deer. Another thing that struck me peculiar was the fact that there were yellow feathers strewn about the place.
Now, I wasn’t an expert on birds, but I was aware of two facts about the local avians: they were not as large as the feathers suggested, and they definitely weren’t the yellow kind either. My black mane bobbed in front of my vision for a moment as I crouched down to inspect one of the bright feathers.
“Agh!”
My ears perked upwards and I carefully brought my head up. Another cry of pain, more muffled than the first, pointed me in the direction of the hoofprints. In fact, I realized that the prints started in the middle of the clearing, which signified that whoever was in pain was an yellow pegasus.
“Stay—” I clamped my mouth shut. Paranoia flooded me as I asked myself the question; what if the pony was hostile? The last ponies I’d seen were the reason I was hiding in the forest to begin with...
So instead of speaking up, I forced my sore hoof back down on the ground and began trotting with delicate, yet urgent steps.
Sure enough, there was the yellow pegasus. She was in a bit of a bad spot, that was for sure; rose thorns sprinkled her side under a wing, a result of the rose bush she had evidently stumbled into. I wasn’t sure how painful it was to pluck those out with her mouth, but if the small drops of crimson dotting her lips meant anything, then it definitely didn’t feel good.
Before I could say or do anything, she spotted me. At first, she looked relieved, but it quickly turned worrisome.
“The hay are you doing out here, kid?”
I blinked; I hadn’t been ready to answer questions. “...stuff.” My hoof met my face mentally.
She opened her mouth to say something, but she winced in pain; in her shift in focus, she had accidentally shut her wing right on top of the thorns. She grit her teeth and fluffed out the wing again. “You can tell me in a second what’s going on… just… help me out, will ya?”
“You don’t need to tell me twice,” I agreed grimly. My hooves carried me swiftly over, and in a few seconds, I had my green magic lit and wrapped itself around each of the thorns.
The mare’s eyes widened in shock. “W-Wait—!”
I didn’t give her a chance to finish, instead opting to yank the pricks free. On closer inspection, her body didn’t seem to be too injured. I threw the thorns as far away from us as possible and stepped back to give her room to breath.
“Celestia kid…” she wheezed. “I… I can’t say it doesn’t feel better, but you could’ve given me a little warning.”
I shrugged. “It was quick and easy.”
She smiled weakly at that, still breathing heavily. “I can agree with that logic.” The pegasus turned to face me and stuck a hoof out. “I’m Spitfire, and you are…?”
“...Crisper,” I relented after a moment. “Crisper Oak.”
With an eyebrow raised, she lifted a hoof up and wiped a bit of the blood from her mouth. “And what brings you out here, Oak?”
“Um…” I began to sweat a little under her hardening glare. “T-The nature! Right!”