//------------------------------//
// Elongation 
// Story: Her Eyes Reflect The Stars 
// by Lynwood 
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The day after Buttercup's nightmare, we began sending scouts out. I was still pretty sure it had just been a dream, and that the worst that would come of it would be some ponies who were very unhappy with the routes I chose for them. I had ponies go up into the mountains around the town and look around for any machines or Children, and I had a few travel down to the mouth of the valley to look for tracks or anything that might get interested in the wall.

See, we'd dealt with Ashen Children before. Every so often, a herd of them finds the wall and decides to try and get over it, and we've had to go and fend them off pikes and spears. Usually, we put them down and drag them far enough away, but they've gotten over the wall once or twice. Those were scary days, but with a little thought and some coordination, a few Children aren't impossible to take down. The worst we've ever had to deal with after those days was wearing around metal shoes for a while while we made sure there weren't any stray crystal shards hiding, waiting to be stepped on.

We also upped the guard on the wall during the night, when the Children are most active. I also ordered some extra pikes and caltrops from Hammerhoof, because you can never be too careful. For the next few days, everypony felt extra safe. Willow and Furrow even invited me over for dinner as a thank-you.

Of course, New Leaf went missing the next day, during his afternoon scouting patrol.

As soon as he didn't come back, I organized a search party. I got together a dozen guardsponies and lead them out. It'd just snowed the last night, so it was easy to follow his tracks. They were regular and bored all the way out to the furthest point in his route, and then they intersected with a mess of kicked-up snow and slush.

I almost wish the trail hadn't been so easy to follow. We heard his shouts not long after we started, and we rushed as fast as we could, following them into a grove of pine. When we found him...

He was being held down in a clearing by something that used to be a griffin, I think. It had a long, lithe body, like a snake's, but feathered like a bird, and a spearlike beak. It had wrapped around his legs so he couldn't move, but his head was free and he was trying to scream it off. The other one was definitely a pony. It was barely managing to balance on eight stretching, nonsensical legs, standing with its too-long torso curved around the griffon-thing and New Leaf almost in a whole circle. Just as we got there it reached up to its neck, where a cluster of the crystals had burst out of its skin, snapped one off with a howl of pain, and shoved it roughly down New Leaf's throat.

That was when my pike rammed into its side. I didn't see what the others did but I had my full weight behind that charge and I am not a small pony. Not even a Child can survive a blade through the spine.

It was too late. New Leaf's neck had already begun to snap and lengthen even before they untangled him from the griffon's gray, flaky corpse.