Zest closed her eyes and brought ten orbs to her side. She gave each one of them a simple command. Go forward and come back, scraping along the ground. This was about the most complex task an orb could handle but that still gave them a surprising amount of utility.
Today, they’d effectively automated one of Zest’s chores. As they returned, they gathered up a ball of pine needles. If Zest commanded their grip to be weak enough, they wouldn’t pick up anything heavier than that. Zest could just sit back until they returned to the mulch heap and tell them to drop their load. Then she’d send them off in a new direction and that was that!
It was all too easy now! Zest got to spend the two hours playing fetch with Sparky instead.
She felt as if she was a pro-ghost already! She’d effectively become an orb master and gotten even a wraith under her command. Sparky jumped onto her affectionately every time he returned with the stick. All his anger issues were gone, thanks to Zest’s aura mastery.
Doing it the lazy way, her pile grew impressively large. On her first day, Zest had a pile a tenth this size after two hours of hard work. Now she had ten-fold the results with what amounted to zero effort.
“Heh!” Zest flicked her muzzle and smirked. “From now on, it’s easy street for me!”
Sugarcoat floated in soon after to find Zest had finished early. Zest leaned forward, curious. Another ability she’d developed was to passively sense Sugarcoat’s feelings.
Typically her mentor’s emotions could be described as ‘meh’ and today was no exception. Sugarcoat simply wasn’t an overly emotional pony.
Yet Zest got the occasional hit from Sugarcoat like bones thrown to a dog. So she knew deep down Sugarcoat took pride in her improvement. The rarity of it all made it a big deal when she did get her fix.
“Good,” Sugarcoat looked at the pile with no enthusiasm. “We have enough mulch for the garden next year. You’ll be starting a new chore now.”
“Guh!” Zest flung herself at Sugarcoat. “But I just got good at this!”
“Congratulations. Now you can get good at something else.”
To be fair, that was how training worked.
“Well, I guess I have gotten pretty good at telekinesis and aura control, huh?” Zest smiled and nodded with her eyes closed. “I’m basically a pro-ghost, eh?”
“Not exactly.” Sugarcoat shook her head. “You’ve gone from hopelessly weak to moderately below average.”
“That’s still an improvement, right?” Zest opened her eyes back up.
“Technically, yes. You’re recovering at a decent rate.”
High praise!
“I believe you’ve regained enough strength to move on to a more intense activity.” Sugarcoat created a ball of ice between her forehooves. “Your chores will be focused around ice magic from now on.”
Ice magic, she knew, was a power every ghost had. Even these miserable orbs sucked the heat out of the environment. That was why the inside of Shadowbolt Academy was always a balmy five below (not that Zest could feel cold anymore). It was also why you couldn’t work them into a free-energy device as Zest had once suggested.
Technically, she’d been using it herself this whole time without even thinking. Whenever she breathed or ate– that was ice magic. But if she could use it with thinking it could do so much more.
She’d seen Sugarcoat perform all manner of impressive feat with her ice. She could make seemingly any tool out of the stuff. Sugarcoat could make screwdrivers, knives, axes, hammers, and even scissors all from hardened ice.
She could make entire walls or small structures of ice. Then there was her ability to encase a solid object in ice and simply shatter the whole thing with her mind.
“After your aura, this is the second most important skill for you to practice,” Sugarcoat explained. “For one, it will give you more control over how much heat you take from a source. You can avoid snuffing out fires or killing ponies if you accidentally start feeding off one.”
Zest blushed a little. Admittedly, she did retain her habit of putting out fires. They were just so tasty and she couldn’t stop herself!
Sugarcoat levitated a second lump of ice that’d been there all along to her side. She held this up with her newly created one to compare.
Zest didn’t know where she’d gotten that second lump of ice but knew it was naturally formed. She could feel it in her aura and see it plainly enough. The enchanted ice shone a brilliant blue, practically an enchanted gemstone, while the ordinary ice remained coarse and clear.
“Second, it’s another way to protect yourself from ghosts. And we do have incorporeal enemies, sadly. If you recall, the ice we conjure is enchanted.”
To prove her point, Sugarcoat chucked the coarse ice at Zest as hard as she could. It went straight through and shattered on the wall behind her. No physical attack could harm Zest.
Next, she tossed the enchanted ice underhoof. It moved much slower in its arc, but actually hit Zest on her shoulder when it got there.
“Third, it’s a necessary skill for certain chores.” Sugarcoat turned to a nearby tree. “Your next task will be cutting wood and making charcoal. You’re going to fail to do it today so try not to feel bad when that happens.”
Sugarcoat held out her foreleg. Ice encased it and formed into a broad axe. She pulled her leg back, then slammed the axe into the tree, putting a sizeable cut into it. She only needed a few more blows to fell the whole thing.
Zest panicked briefly as the tree came down, only to remember that such things couldn’t touch her. The tree landed harmlessly.
“And of course, you can make more tools than just an axe.” Sugarcoat tossed her blade aside.
“Well I can already kind of make ice.” Zest looked between her hooves. “I just don’t know how to shape it.”
“I can assure you there’s far more than that you don’t know,” said Sugarcoat. “But go ahead and try to create ice for now.”
Zest put her forehooves together and focused her magic. A large chunk of ice formed easily enough, only hers was a shapeless ball. Previously, Sugarcoat would have stopped her from ‘overexerting’ herself at this point. To be fair, Zest used to get tired trying to make much smaller pieces of ice. Her first attempt, about a month ago, at making a chunk of ice the size of a golf ball left her feeling hamstrung.
To make a ball of it the size of her head! Zest really was getting stronger if she could do this without exhausting herself!
Sugarcoat shook her head and floated over to Zest. She stayed behind Zest as Zest formed the next one. The senior ghost helped her guide and shape it, acting as training wheels.
It took hours, but Zest needed less and less help with each attempt. Just after midnight, she’d finally formed her first, crude axe around her foreleg without assistance.
Zest gasped with delight as she looked over her shining axe. She held up the malformed weapon to let its dull blade shine in the moonlight. She felt like she’d just forged a legendary weapon!
Zest turned to her mentor, bobbing up and down. There it was, that tiny sliver of pride!
“Not good,” said Sugarcoat. “But it exists.”
And from her, that was a huge compliment!
“Whelp!” Zest turned to the tree with a sharp smile. “When you got an axe every problem’s a tree!”
Zest swung her ice blade at the tree as hard as she could. Her weapon took more damage than its target, shattering completely on impact. There ended the tale of the axe of legends.
“Huh?!” Zest looked down at her broken axe, then back to Sugarcoat. “Why did mine break?”
“It wasn’t cold enough nor did you put much magic into it. Ice becomes stronger the colder it gets. Compared to my axe, yours was burning hot.”
“Right.”
Zest took a deep breath. She formed another ice blade, but this time sucked as much heat out as possible. She knew this one was far colder than the first.
On the flip side, this made the ice more difficult to shape. Zest desperately tried to mold the ultra-hard ice. She only got a hunk that few would mistake for any sort of blade. Maybe a generous pony would call it a wedge.
Zest frowned at the ‘axe’.
“As you can see, you’ve arrived at the hard part,” said Sugarcoat. “Your new task is to make one hundred of these blades every day until you can cut down that tree. I’d suggest starting on the warm end, pushing the limits of how cold you can make a blade at least sharp enough to cut a blade of grass.”
Zest nodded with determination before turning back to that tree– her new mortal enemy. As Sugarcoat went back home, Zest forged a new axe and broke it against the tree.
She spent the rest of the day like that. She’d create a blade, test it against some grass, and if it could cut that she’d slam it against the tree.
And she didn’t go slinking back home until she’d shattered a hundred blades against that tree. A hundred and one, if you counted her first. By then, she felt exhausted and was glad the sun rose to signal bedtime.
Sugarcoat hadn’t been kidding when she said this training would be far more intense. For the next week, Zest had to take every other day off to rest. The first night left her so tired she literally slept through the entire next day.
That’d be more worrying as a predead, but ghosts were known for their heavy sleeping. Zest could just sleep as much as she wanted now. No worries about getting sore or needing to stretch these days.
Two weeks into the training, Zest finally began noticing some progress. Zest increased the number of blades she made each day to one hundred and fifty and felt only minor exhaustion the next day. She could at least read, whereas she’d been too tired for even that much prior.
Still, her decreasing fatigue from her daily routine was her only marker. Admittedly, Zest got frustrated enough at the tree a few times that Sparky would rush in clawing at the thing. That little guy did way more damage in ten seconds than she had in ten days!
Tempting as it was to let him slay her opponent for her, she had to send him off somewhere.
By the third week, she no longer needed rest days.
Finally, in the last week of June, she scored her first point against the forest.
Zest pulled back and slammed her latest axe against the tree, fully expecting the blade to chip with minimal damage the same as the last thousand or so. But this time it was the tree that chipped.
Her axe dug past the bark and into the actual wood, lodging itself inside.
Zest stayed perfectly still a moment, staring at the axe, still in the tree, barely able to accept that this had actually happened.
With her eyes wide, she pulled it out and held it up to the sky. That blue light that came from behind the stars cause it to shine brilliantly in the night. The corners of Zest’s mouth crept higher and higher as she accepted that this really happened.
Forget that pathetic pretender from before, this was the axe of legends!
Zest did a little flip in the air.
“Dun dununun dun dun dunun nu nuuuuu!”
Her little victory songs always drew in a crowd – typically about ten orbs and Sparky, who began circling her.
Zest laughed as she hacked away at the tree. Zest should have been a lumberjack! She had no idea cutting down a tree was this fun!
Though maybe ‘cutting down’ was a bit generous. Her manic rush left a sizeable gash, but it’d still take all day to fell this thing at her present rate.
Eventually, the axe did break before the tree. The darn thing snapped right in half just as Sugarcoat came floating out.
Zest looked down at the fallen axe of legends II, then up at her mentor. She frowned and tried to move between herself and it.
“I swear it was doing good a second ago!” Zest promised.
Sugarcoat inspected the sizeable cut made in the tree.
“When I felt how happy you were, I thought you’d actually cut it down.” Sugarcoat put her hoof on the bridge of her glasses. “But I suppose this is just good enough.”
“Hey, I’ll take ‘good enough’ any day of the week, boss!” Zest pointed both hooves at her, then slowly lowered them, remembering an important question. “But, uh, good enough for what again? I can’t cut down trees yet.”
“I suppose I need to explain something else first.” Sugarcoat gestured for them to head back inside. “If you’re going to do this next mission, you’ll need to learn to read ghost runes. It should only take a few days to memorize enough.”
“Ghost runes?” Zest followed her back to the school.
They phased through the wall and entered the gym. Already there was an orb here waiting with a fountain pen. The specter briefly stuck this in her mouth, then pressed it against the wall. She drew three circles, each one smaller and contained within the last.
What drew Zest’s attention was the color of this rune. It looked as though that pen etched a deep hole into the wall and light came pouring out from green flames far away on the other side. It was that same ‘phantom green’ she’d seen on the moon every day, one of those colors she doubted she could have described properly to her living self.
But there was one other place Zest had seen this color before. In fact, she’d seen this very symbol some time ago. It’d been such a strange sight to her she couldn’t forget it.
“Wait! I think I’ve seen this one before.” Zest put her hoof over the three circles. “This was written on the Maple Hill sign. Were you the one who wrote that? And the ‘don’t go south’ warning?”
“That was most likely one of mine, yes.”
“You could have been more specific, you know.”
“I made hundreds of those. It’s not going to be an essay.”
“I guess,” Zest sighed. “So what? Do three circles mean south? And the others mean dangerous.”
Zest couldn’t remember what the other symbols were.
“That’d be redundant. This is the symbol for July.” Sugarcoat drew two upside-down triangles underneath it. “And this means one. Together it means the first of July.”
“Okay.” Zest tilted her head. So it meant something happened on the first of July. That was only a few days from now. “I think there was at least one more?”
“There was.”
Sugarcoat drew a half circle and the memory of the complete sign returned to Zest. That was exactly what she’d seen back then!
“Ghosts have always been shy about meeting one another, recently more than ever. Specters leave these out at meeting points. If another ghost wishes to join a group, they’ll complete this sunrise symbol as such.” Sugarcoat drew a line under the half-circle, then three lines radiating out so that it made a crude sunrise. “And they’ll write the date they want to meet up. The date I’ve written is the time I intend to check the meeting points next.”
“Hm!” Zest nodded, feeling as though she belonged to some secret club now. One mystery down, anyway. “I got it! So we’re going to go check all the places you wrote this down on the first of July? To see if anypony wants to join the Shadowbolts?”
“Close. I’ll be checking most of them. You’ll be assigned a small number to check by yourself. Also, we’re not called the Shadowbolts.”
“Huh?” The orbs around Zest floated off. “I’m going off on my own? But what about you-know-who? Won’t she get me?”
Zest hadn’t once left the safety of Sugarcoat’s aura since she’d been on her own that first day.
Without a word, Sugarcoat pushed her aura out towards Zest, trying to force her to feel afraid. Zest drew her aura tight around herself reflexively. She was still shy about sharing her emotions like this.
A ghost could draw their aura in defensively or push it out wide. Zest knew for a fact that Sugarcoat could have effortlessly broken through this meager defense– her aura was six kilometers in diameter. But Zest’s aura cloak was enough to block this tiny push.
“As I said.” Sugarcoat gave up her ‘attack’ if you could call it that. “Just good enough. You’re thousands of kilometers away from her. Keep your aura up and she won’t be able to touch you here.”
Zest looked down at her hooves as she loosened her aura once more.
“And what about the other ghosts under her control?” Zest asked.
“Unlikely we’ll find any this far north just yet. They aren’t going further north than Manehatten for now.”
To be fair, Zest never considered how strong that effect really had been. Maybe drawing her aura up really was enough to protect her. If so, freedom was at last within reach! As were all the new friends she’d make on her mission!
“Heck yeah! Then I really am a pro-ghost now! I’m finally strong enough to go out on my own!” Zest snatched up a second fountain pen an orb brought. “This is gonna be great! So I just need to–”
Zest put the pen against the wall and tried to draw. Nothing happened. She looked down at the pen, finding its well empty. It didn’t look like an enchanted pen, either.
“What about ink?” Zest took the pen.
“We write with ectoplasm,” Sugarcoat said. “It’s an ideal ink to use. Any ghost can see it easily but predeads normally can’t. Plus, we can produce ectoplasm so we don’t need to carry a supply with us.”
Produce ectoplasm? She remembered that stuff came from her mouth.
“So wait. Wait. We write with spit?” Zest pointed at her mouth.
“It’s perfect for this. Only dippers with especially high psychic perception can see–”
“But it’s spit.”
“Rain won’t wash it off. It lasts for thirty years and you can tell how old the message is by how bright–”
“So I just spit all over stuff? That’s how we write? That’s the bedrock of ghost culture? Spitting all over the place?! We’re a civilization of spit?! A salivization?!”
“I suppose.”
Zest sat stunned, mouth agape and hooves upturned. Sugarcoat didn’t even miss a beat! She was completely immune!
“You put it in your mouth like this.” Sugarcoat stuck the pen back in her mouth. “Presh your tongue againsht it. Takesh a minute.”
Defeated, Zest sighed and capitulated to the spit-tocracy. She took out the second fountain pen and pressed it against her tongue. She was able to write the rune for ‘July’ after that.
“There are a few more runes you’ll need to know,” said Sugarcoat. “We use these for more than just meeting up.”
Sugarcoat wrote out the symbol for each month and how the ghost number system worked. Annoyingly, the number of symbols never matched up to the numerical value, as though the whole system was a half-assed attempt to fool somepony. Then she showed Zest the symbols for the four cardinal directions, one for up, and one for down.
She showed her the symbol for danger – the bottom half of a square with the top connected by an ‘m’ shape’. This one looked like a slice of bread to her. One that reminded her of a knife pointing down meant safety. One of the previous directions could be drawn in the empty spaces of those two symbols to show which direction to go or avoid.
So Zest made the moniker ‘Bread is dead. Knife is life,’ and nodded to herself.
Finally was a circle with arrows pointing up, down, left, and right from the edges. That meant immediate and immense danger and to leave that place as soon as possible.
With her study guide written on the wall, Zest had little choice but to hit the books. Or wall to be more specific.
Memorizing the handful of important runes Zest needed hardly took two days. There were plenty more she’d yet to learn, as the meeting spots were often used to give information about an area. You’d draw more S’s to show increasing amounts of predead activity, or an oval to show ghosts who had no problem freezing ponies lived nearby. These were the ones she could do without on the first mission, however.
Sugarcoat gave her two ghosts to take with her. The first was Sparky, for an extra bit of protection. Secondly, she was given an orb, whom Zest just now learned were like pack animals. Carrying things was more cumbersome for ghosts than predeads. You couldn’t just hitch a wagon or put on saddlebags. No, you’d have to carry stuff with your telekinesis the entire way.
Thankfully, orbs could carry objects for you. They could be told to follow easily enough as well. This one orb would be enough to hold a compass, a map, and a small fountain pen for writing ghost runes. It had one final item for her side mission. Sugarcoat gave Zest the bracelet they’d taken from the wight with instructions to throw it in a river she’d pass.
“Remember,” Sugarcoat gave Zest one last rundown before sending her off. “If you get lost or run into anything, just hide underground until I come find you. Oh, and if you do meet another high ghost please refrain from any ghost puns. I assure you they won’t appreciate it.”
So Zest set out with her companions in tow!
Out on her own again!
It’d been three months since Zest left Sugarcoat’s aura. She hardly remembered what that pull toward the south felt like, other than how she thought of it as a black wind blowing her along. Now she remembered why she’d labeled it as such.
The moment Zest left Sugarcoat’s protection, it returned. Strangely, it was at once both clearer and weaker. She could make out its suggestion as clearly as she could words and yet it held no sway over than any other whisper might. With a clearer head than before, she could feel something slightly sinister and off about its urging.
She felt herself a child who just learned smiles could be fake.
Or perhaps it still held more sway than she thought. Even now, having been told it was a trap, Zest felt the slightest of urges to follow it to Crater Cemetery. A sudden curiosity took her, to see this horrible monster and the chained ghosts herself.
Zest put up her own aura as Sugarcoat had shown her. The wind and the longing ended completely. Zest could no longer feel it through her thicker aura.
She’d grown strong enough to protect herself from this much. She was safe for now. Yet this was from thousands of kilometers away from their enemy and in no way aimed at Zest. She shuddered to imagine what it’d be like to be directly targeted at close range.
“It’s far too lonely out here,” said Zest. “I hope we meet some friends soon.”
With that, she flew off into the dark woods.
It felt like she’d crawled to Shadowbolt Academy in retrospect. She could fly so fast and free now, by comparison. Her first trip was from a town twenty kilometers north and it took her almost an entire day to get here.
But now? She’d already gotten five kilometers to the first meeting point in maybe a half-hour. Like Sugarcoat said, floating didn’t tire her out as much as galloping used to. The twenty-something kilometer marathon set up for her no longer sounded so daunting.
She circled the area, keeping low to the ground until she found the jack pine near a patch of rocks. A ghost could see that light ‘phantom green’ she now knew it as, from a good distance away.
She crouched down low, half underground, and watched the spot for a few minutes with Sparky by her side. Zest found no signs of other ghosts.
“It looks like the ghost is clear,” she whispered to Sparky.
Then she flew up to the spot and checked the writing.
Three progressively smaller circles each within the last? July. Two upside-down triangles? The first. Half circle? The invitation to meet.
Zest got a thrill at being able to read something that’d once been so mysterious to her. Yet sadly there was no sunset.
She erased the symbol for July first and replaced it with one for September first. That was the next expedition date.
The ‘meeting spots’ were universal, she was told, so other ghosts would know where to look. A jack pine by a cliff. The largest rock around an unused pond. Underneath an unpopular dock. Inside the crypt farthest from the gate of a cemetery. There were a few more lonely places like that to meet a ghost.
Zest flew off once more, wondering what the odds of finding a new friend were? Sugarcoat was checking a much larger area, so she was the more likely to find somepony.
Zest went from meeting point to meeting point with little luck.
The crypts in Farburrow and South Glenbrook?
No sunset.
Underneath a dock by the river border to Sugarloaf?
No sunset.
Though Zest did stop here to throw that bracelet into the river. That would bring it east and eventually out to sea, far away from Shadowbolt Academy.
A mist began settling in by now. Zest found her world much foggier in general. Not because of actual fog like this, but because minor light sources appeared as such. So she thought little of the mist.
Zest crossed the river into what was technically the province of Sugarloaf. You got trees other than pines down there, though not just yet. The only difference is that the trees were much taller now and she needed to be warry of the more populated towns.
Jackpine by a cliff to the west of that?
A sunset! Zest put her hooves on her headphones and bobbed her head back and forth.
A prospective friend had visited this spot and wanted to meet up!
“Dun dun dununun nu!” Zest put her hooves on her headphones and bobbed back and forth, singing her little victory tune, Sparky and her orb circling her once.
She looked to the date. Three circles, each inside another meant July. Four vertical lines meant six and a sideways S-like thing meant 2. They’d be here from the second to the sixth.
So they wanted to meet right away from the looks of things.
But Zest could only be too happy because they wrote an additional message underneath all of that. She remembered one of her monikers. ‘Bread is dead, knife is life’. This one had bread with an X inside it.
Danger to the west.
Picking up on her fear, Sparky came closer to her. The two lowered halfway underground as Zest looked off into the woods and stroked Sparky’s back.
The stranger hadn’t given the worst possible warning– the one to leave immediately. Still, something dangerous lurked somewhere out there. Zest wondered if her ice blades would be enough to fight this mysterious threat.
With any luck, they’d soon be friends with whoever wrote this warning. Then she’d at least know what she was up against.
“I think this is as far west as we should go,” she said to Sparky. “What do you think?”
Of course, he agreed with her with a small hiss. He couldn’t do anything else.
Zest underscored the two, promising to be back tomorrow, and turned tail to head back home before the danger could get her. By now the mist had grown considerably thicker, obscuring the path back home.
She rose up and over the trees, looking down to see that the mist flowing between the pines below, not reaching the treetops. Then she thought better of the plan. She didn’t want to be seen right now, not when potential danger lurked behind her.
Instead, she got down low, submerging herself entirely in the fog and halfway underground as she started back east.
The animals, she soon realized, knew something wasn’t right in this area. Creatures that shouldn’t be this active so late at night we're waking up and moving to the north or south. Maybe Zest would take the hint and follow them were her home not to the east.
Then she heard the cawing of a crow and saw the offending blackbird fly overhead.
Bad luck! That tiny one-in-a-million chance any given crow was a witch in disguise was enough to make them the bad omens.
“Ah, geeze!” Zest kept her head down as she passed the bird. “I sure hope my good luck cancels out the bad luck!”
She picked up the pace, flying forward as fast as she could.
Increasingly, she got the sense that something was following her. Every little noise she heard drew her attention. Yet the fog grew thicker and confirming it was nothing grew ever more difficult.
Her bad case of nerves was bleeding into Sparky. The wraith snapped and snarled at every living thing they passed, frightening away them away. Having a guard dog around sure helped but Zest wished Sugarcoat were here.
The bad luck eventually won out. Zest reached the river she’d crossed earlier, but the abandoned run-down dock was nowhere in sight. For all she knew, she could be miles upstream or downstream. If she couldn’t find that dock again, she’d be lost.
Floating up did nothing, as mist covered the entire river now, making it impossible to see anything at a distance. She could smell the warmth of towns in any given direction. Yet she would find no refuge in any of them. To the living, Zest was the monster. Shadowbolt Academy was her only safe haven in the whole world.
As she came back down, Zest noticed something troubling about the river. Despite being summer, small chunks of ice began forming in the water. Great Pines was cold, but not that cold, not in July.
How cold was it? Zest couldn’t smell anything below room temperature and couldn’t feel heat at all, so there was no way for her to tell when things got truly cold.
These days, Zest associated any sudden coldness with her own kind.
What if it was a ghost following her?
Zest gulped what she assumed to be ectoplasm.
She had two options when it came to her aura. She could suck it in and wear it like a cloak, making it harder to push emotions on her and giving her stealth against other ghosts. Alternatively, she could pulse it outward. That was sure to find any other ghosts nearby but also meant alerting all of them to her location.
“If somepony really is following me, I’m pretty sure they already know I’m here,” Zest whispered to her pet, stroking Sparky’s back. “Get ready.”
Sparky bristled and his icicles grew longer as he snarled, ready for a fight.
Zest pulsed her aura outward. She felt a ghost, alright. It stood much further away from Zest than she expected but she could feel its presence all the same.
It felt enormous, but not in the same way a specter did. It was more like a balloon. Like a huge volume with low density, rather than being truly massive. Which type of ghost was huge again?
“A revenant?” Zest wondered. She’d read as much in that book, though had never seen one herself.
Whatever it was, the thing was hungry. Its desperate starvation consumed itself to the point it simply felt nothing else. All it wanted was to eat and freeze.
She looked at Sparky, recalling one other time she’d felt such single-minded emotions. Maybe it was a lesser ghost instead?
It appeared to be wandering aimlessly. Then, as if only now realizing Zest was here, it turned its single-minded hunger towards her and began moving in her direction.
“No! I’m not tasty at all!” Zest backed up and put her hooves up. Not that it’d do any good, given how far away it was. “I don’t have any heat at all!”
Zest pulled her aura back up as tightly as she could and look around desperately. Hiding underground wouldn’t work against another ghost. She needed to get out of here before that thing showed up!
Figuring it was at least in the right direction, Zest zipped out across the lake and rushed back in a general eastwardly direction.
Though it made her feel better in the short term, Zest soon realized rushing into the woods to escape was a mistake. Now she found herself surrounded by pines in every direction. The mist was thicker than ever and no landmarks were to be seen.
Zest nervously tapped her hooves together. She still had her compass, which she now carried herself, so she could tell which way was east.
Zest shook her head and rushed forward in the same direction, hoping to escape the mist before poking her head up again. Something that big couldn’t be too fast, right?
Zest took out the map, glancing at it, then back over her shoulder. She hoped to bump into something marked on the map, but low visibility made that nearly impossible.
“I can’t find any of these places!” Zest crumpled it up. “I think we're lost, Sparky! I don’t know if I’m passing the right towns or–!”
Zest stopped dead cold as something interrupted her little tantrum.
A pool of blackness formed on the ground just on the edge of Zest’s vision, blocking her path. From it, a pony began to emerge. Zest knew just looking at her that this really was another ghost for light went through her and she and no scent.
Her spikey, blue hair came up first. After that, it was her eyes alone that drew Zest’s attention. They were a brilliant yellow color, but monotone without an iris, and sunken in a way Zest didn’t know eyes could get. It was as if large pools of blackness were carved out into her skull so that only those glowing, yellow disks remained.
As the newcomer emerged, shadows and darkness seemed to drip off of her like water.
Was the ghost that was chasing her? It’d caught up if that were the case.
Then Zest felt it! A flood of aura from the new ghost to her! She tightened up her aura, knowing this had to be an auric attack, but for real this time!