A mare with fur as white as snow, and a mane as red as blood.
A smile soft and sweet as a rose, and the scent of sandalwood.
A mocking laugh echoes behind, shadows where once she stood.
In a forest twisted by age and by time, a small cottage stood alone against the endless creeping tide of nature. The branches lengthened, the leaves bloomed and fell, and spring and autumn came and went like hands ticking round on a clock. The forest changed and grew, as forests are wont to do. But the little cottage stayed the same. A shingled roof topping a stone-faced little house, squat as a friendly old frog. Moss crept up its walls, and in the summer flowers bloomed in the window-boxes. In the winter, the windows glowed with the gentle flickering of flames.
The old mare who dwelt in that cottage had lived there for as long as anypony from the nearby village cared to remember. She was a striking old woman; any zebra living in pony lands was bound to turn heads, but her mohawked mane and golden jewellery were especially striking.
But the villagers were used to her, and they were as fond of her as distant neighbours distracted by their own cares could be. For as long as living memory lasted, old Zecora had healed their broken bones and offered potions to ease their foals’ coughing fits.
No, everypony was used to Zecora.
What nopony was used to were her daughters.
They were twins, and as alike as two fillies could be without being identical. One had green eyes and a green mane, and the other had yellow eyes to match her yellow mane. Their names matched — Lily and Daisy — and when their cutie marks came, even those matched. Three white flowers for each filly, with only slight differentiation in the petal shapes.
The village was thrown into uproar the first time Zecora appeared at the market with her daughters. Zecora was far too old to have borne children, and these were toddlers, not babies. And they were not even zebras. The old shaman had turned up with two pony children, and nopony knew what to make of it.
But seasons passed, and the villagers grew more accustomed to the twins, if not quite comfortable with them. The forest changed and grew, and in the unchanging cottage the fillies grew too. They sprouted up like flowers, like saplings, unfurling their petals one at a time into the waiting sun. Both were beautiful, both were kind. They healed the sick just as their mother did, and their laughter was like the chiming of bells. More than one village mother worried that she would lose her son to the wiles of the forest.
But the two sisters seemed to hold themselves slightly above and away from the village, just as their mother did, and eventually they came to be thought of just as Zecora was; ageless, separate. The three healers in the forest.
“I’m going out, Mama!” Lily shrugged her cloak on, its red folds draping over her flanks to brush the floor. She glanced over her shoulder at her sister. “Are you sure you don’t want to come, Daisy?”
Daisy glanced up, her eyes flickering to the two other cloaks, identical in cut, hanging on the pegs by the door. Red for Lily, white for Daisy, and black for their mother.
“No, I’ll be fine,” she demurred at last. “I have a lot to do here, and dinner still needs to be cooked.”
Lily pouted. “It’d be nicer if you came with, though. And some fresh air would do you good. You’re always holed up in here.”
“Is it so wrong to prefer being at home?” countered Daisy. “Things need looking after here, and with you out so often and Mama holed up in her brew-room nothing would ever get done if I didn’t do it.”
“I guess not.” Lily sighed and stooped to pick up her gathering basket with her teeth.
A shadow fell across her, and she turned her head to see Zecora standing at the top of the stairs.
Lily pricked up her ears. “Are you going to join me, Mama?”
“No,” replied Zecora shortly. “I wish only to remind you of what I said; stray not from the path, and watch where you tread. Heed my warning well, little Lily-Red.”
Despite the solemn tone, Lily rolled her eyes. “You don’t need to use the prophecy voice on me, Mama. And when will you get over using those silly old nicknames?”
Zecora smiled and shrugged, descending the rest of the steps. “Lily and Daisy are much harder to rhyme than Lily-Red and Daisy-White,” she said, in a very different tone of voice than before.
“I like the nicknames,” said Daisy loyally, pausing in the rolling of her sunflower-seed dough.
“And I am going out,” replied Lily. “I’ll get the asphodel you wanted, Mama, and be home before dark.”
Daisy pointed a hoof at the larder. “Can you keep an eye out for wild garlic? I just ran out.”
Lily saluted. “Will do!”
As her yellow-maned daughter turned to leave, Zecora stepped forward again. “Remember what I said,” she repeated, a touch of the same ominous intonation as before entering her voice. “Don’t stray from the path.”
Another roll of the eyes was all she got, and the door swung shut as Lily trotted away. Zecora went to the window and watched her daughter swallowed up by the shadow of the trees.
In the forest, deep within, blood-red petals open wide.
Three stalks, three flowers, one with something left inside.
It emerges, it is wrong, blood-slick and green-eyed.
Lily followed the well-worn path that led from the cottage garden into the forest. The clearing in which the cottage stood came to a gradual end; first saplings and shrubs rising from the smooth grass, then smaller trees. And then suddenly there was green canopying the entire sky overhead, filtering the sunlight down in little golden chunks to dapple the ground and turn Lily’s red cloak yellow.
Before too long, the path forked. In one direction lay the village, safe and comfortable in the same way that home was. That was the only path Daisy ever followed, when she strayed beyond the familiar confines of their clearing.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Lily took the other path.
The second path led deeper into the forest, where magical beasts lurked and Zecora gathered the strange plants she needed for her potions. The second path led to mystery, and freedom, and those were the things that Lily craved more than anything else.
Slowly, the trees inched closer together and the golden triangles of sunlight grew thin and distant. Huge, primordial ferns unfurled their spiny leaves, hanging low over the track and damping Lily’s cloak with dew. The track got narrower and narrower, and twisted to and fro in such a way that it would make even the most seasoned explorer lose their bearings. There was only the path, and it went on forever, leading both forward and back.
When Lily came to a break in the ferns that showed a strange avenue of dark, spiky trees that she had never seen before, she hardly hesitated.
She stepped off the path and trotted eagerly into the unknown.
“Why did you warn her about paths, Mama?” Daisy asked in a tone of idle curiosity as she knelt to stoke the oven-fire.
“Because I saw…something in the cauldron last night, my love,” Zecora replied.
That got Daisy’s attention; she spun to face her mother, eyes wide. “What did you see?”
Zecora only shook her head. “I don’t know. Nothing good.”
“Why didn’t you tell her not to go?” Daisy hurried to the window and peered out, as though she could will her sister back into the house just by looking. “Why didn’t you stop her?”
“It wouldn’t have helped,” answered Zecora with a shake of her head. “Lily-Red is the most wilful pony I have ever known.”
Daisy bit her lip. “I know. But surely we should have tried.”
A creature stalks the maiden’s steps, safe just out of sight.
Death spreads in its wake, a black and dreadful blight.
A smile plays on its lips; will she put up a fight?
Lily looked up at the strange new species of tree; jagged black branches, leafless even in the height of summer. Thorns as sharp as knives and half as long as her foreleg jutted out in every direction.
She trotted to the nearest one, and rapped a hoof against it. Boom. Boom. It echoed hollowly, and Lily’s ears flattened for a moment as the blows reverberated down beneath her feet.
“Huh,” she said after moment, speaking aloud just to fill the silence and dispel her words. “Weird.”
She turned away from the tree and — not without a backward glance at the path to reassure herself that it was still there — padded deeper into the shadows, following this strange tree-lined avenue. It was almost like a road, though it was nothing more than a stretch of dry earth, devoid of all plant life and strangely blackened. Like something had sucked all the moisture out of it.
She followed the trees, each as black and blasted as if it had been struck by lightning, and when she came to a dell within the trees, she trotted eagerly out to see what was there.
And then Lily found herself in a forest of gargantuan flowers, each one taller than the cottage and each one utterly dead.
One after another, all alike, they were arrayed in strange patterns, just too close together to be random, but none quite close enough to touch each other. The routes between them were narrow and winding, and the blackened, decaying leaves of the flowers seemed to point inwards, to the dell’s centre.
Walking slowly, Lily followed the winding avenues inwards, feeling more and more like she was wandering through a dream. She stared up at the mouldering petals arching overhead, and when her hoof bumped against something smooth and white half-buried in the soil, she didn’t look down at the skull she had dislodged.
As she went further in, the flowers grew more ancient and more decrepit, their stalks bent and withered, their petals crumbling. But still all identical, all strange, vast roses swollen beyond all recognition.
Until finally, at the centre of the clearing, was something different. A cluster of three huge flowers, growing close enough that their leaves and exposed roots entwined. Just as dead and dusty as the others — but two of those flowers were not roses. They were long past the point of rot, dried-out husks of what they must have been, but Lily knew that those were not roses. Traces of white still clung to some of the fallen petals; some round, and some pointed.
A lily, a daisy, and a rose, amidst a forest of roses.
Lily swallowed hard. This — this was all too strange. It was creepy here; in this graveyard of almost comically overgrown flowers. On balance, she thought Mama had probably been right. Better to have stayed on the path.
She began to back away, and just as she was turning to leave, something happened.
The soil heaved, and then vines erupted from it, thorny stems with barbs as long and wicked as swords. Lily yelped as she was thrown to the ground, and as she scrambled back to her feet the vines began to flow toward her.
“Oh Celestia,” Lily whimpered, and then she turned tail and ran.
And behind her, finally, the thorns twisted into a shape.
Sister, sister, come at last.
Come to find the one offcast.
Come to feast, the grand repast.
“Daisy.”
The whisper was too soft to wake her the first time. Daisy was dreaming; of carrot-cake and hayseed loaves, of her sister’s eager smile as she bit into a new culinary delight.
“Daisy.”
The grass-green head lifted blearily from the pillow, and Daisy looked sleepily around herself. “Lily?”
“Daisy.” It was louder now, almost normal speaking volume, but her sister was nowhere in sight.
“Lily, where are you?” Daisy pushed the covers back and climbed to her hooves. The cares of the day before were coming back to her now, and her eyes grew round with worry. Lily had not been back before dark, as she had promised. Daisy had eaten a miserable dinner with Mama, neither of them able to work up much of an appetite without the family’s third member.
It wasn’t like Lily to miss a meal. It wasn’t like her to break their word.
And it certainly wasn’t like her to whisper from hidden corners in darkened rooms.
“I’m outside, Daisy. Come outside.”
The whispers seemed to come from every direction at once, and Daisy’s ears went flat to her skull. “Why can’t you come here?”
“I have to show you something.” The whispers were growing louder now, excited. “You have to meet ME.”
“Meet you?”
“Meet her. You have to meet her. I have to show you. Come outside, Daisy.”
Uneasily, Daisy put on her slippers and shuffled to the bedroom door. She could find a candle, but it would take a while, and Lily sounded…strange. Perhaps it was urgent. Hastening down the stairs, she paused to put on her white cloak, and then unbolted the door.
She hesitated before she opened it. “Lily? Are you…are you there?”
The answer was immediate. “I’m here, sister. Come outside. I want you to see.”
Daisy opened the door and stepped outside.
The moon was waning, and only a thin silver sliver showed in the sky. The clearing around the cottage was always dark at night, not like the cities Daisy had read about, where the lights burned so brightly that it was always like daytime, even at midnight. Here there were no houses for miles around, just endless forest, dark and foreboding. That was why Daisy liked it inside. It was safe there. Home. With no nuance or shadow to it. Just simple home.
She stood beneath the small porch, eyes wide and white in the darkness, shivering in her silvery cloak. “L-Lily?”
“Sister, come this way,” Lily’s voice called from the garden. “Sister, come see.”
“Lily, you’re scaring me,” Daisy said, a note of pleading entering her voice, but she stepped away from the cottage and toward the vegetable patch.
“Sister, sister,” came the call again, now from in front of her, now from behind, and Daisy twisted and turned on the spot, trying to find her twin.
“Lily, stop it!”
“Sister, sister!” The cries grew loud, exultant.
And then something stepped forward, into the dim light of the fading moon, and when she saw it, Daisy’s courage failed her.
Acting purely on instinct, she whirled in place and burst into a gallop. The urge to flee was irresistible, it was hard-wired in. For a few moments she thought she had made it, that it was working — but then something erupted from the ground and twined itself round her ankle, sharp points biting into her flesh — and she knew that she had been wrong.
“Silly Daisy,” said Lily in a sing-song voice, but now a second voice had joined hers, and two sets of hoof-steps were approaching. “Silly little lazy Daisy, trying to run away from us.”
Daisy flattened herself to the ground, her breaths coming too rapid and too shallow, trying to pretend that this wasn’t happening. It’s okay, I’m okay, I’m safe at home and I never left the kitchen. I’m baking bread and it’s all okay and soon Lily and Mama will be home to have dinner with me and it will all be like it used to be —
Two muzzles lowered themselves to either side of her and two scorching-hot breaths hissed into her ears, speaking in perfect unison. “You should never run away from your sisters, Daisy."
With slow, sorrowful steps, Zecora descended the stairs from her potions room. There would be no soup bubbling over the fire, no bright smile from Daisy to greet her. The room would be as dark and miserable as it had been for the past two weeks, grown dim and dusty without Daisy’s loving care and Lily’s infectious laugh.
She had searched high and low for her daughters, but they were not in the village, or anywhere in the forest that she knew. First Lily, and then a week later, Daisy vanished too. Lily she could almost believe would run away from home, if she found an opportunity that excited her or a stallion she thought she could love. But Daisy? Daisy would never. And even Lily would have left a note.
No, something else had happened. Something had taken them. And Zecora had seen too many horrible warped reflection of something in her cauldron not to know that the two events must be related. That thing with the writhing roots and the fang-sharp thorns had taken her daughters, somehow. If the visions were only clearer. If she could only see where they were.
She took the last step and turned the corner into the living room and stopped dead.
A candle was burning on the kitchen table, giving out a scant circle of illumination, and two ponies were bathed in its flickering glow.
“L-lily?” Zecora stuttered, stunned. “Daisy?”
Neither one replied, and Zecora stumbled closer to them, her forelegs already extending for a hug. But her children didn’t move, and Zecora halted before she reached them, eyes flicking anxiously from one to the other.
“Say something,” she said at last.
“Hello, Mama,” they said, finally, and Zecora flinched. Twins they might be, but they had never spoken in unison before. Something was very wrong.
Zecora tried to summon a smile. It was a weak and watery effort. “I am glad to see you both home safe and sound, my daughters.”
Her children watched her, eyes flat and blank. A few rags of white still hung from Daisy’s shoulders. A lump rose in Zecora’s throat as she remembered how the two of them had laboured over those cloaks together, mother and daughter working as one. A team. How widely Lily had smiled when they handed hers over.
And…and here they were, home at last. Safe in body at least, despite the evils her visions had predicted. They were acting strange, but…she would find the right brew to heal them. She was a healer. It was what she was good at.
Then a third shape appeared, detaching itself from the shadow in which it hid. It quavered and wobbled for a moment, tendrils writhing just out of sight, before it coalesced and stepped forward into the pool of candlelight.
A mare, with a pale cream coat and blood-red mane woven thick with roses, though roses were not in season — should not have bloomed in winter at all. A mare, Zecora realised with a sinking heart, who was shockingly similar in appearance to her daughters.
“Hello, Mama,” the stranger hissed, in a voice so terrifyingly inequine that Zecora’s breath caught in her throat.
“Do I — do I know you?” Instinctively, she cast about for a rhyme. It was the tradition when speaking with a stranger, and some small part of Zecora longed to hide behind the ceremony of it all, to cover her nerves somehow. But no rhyme came to her tongue, and for the first time in a long time, she left her couplet unfinished.
“Perhaps,” the stranger said, with a smile that began as playful and widened until it was horrifying. “Don’t I look familiar?”
She rested a hoof on Lily’s shoulder, and to Zecora’s horror, her daughter was smiling the same smile. Too wide and too full of teeth, long and sharp and wicked.
“Tell her how you found us, Mama,” said Lily, but the stranger’s mouth was moving at the same time.
Zecora looked from her children to the stranger with growing fear. “Who — who are you?”
The mare pouted. “Don’t you know? I thought you might have Seen me, in one of your little prophecies.”
“Tell her how you found us, Mama,” said Lily again, her voice flat and emotionless.
Zecora felt the floorboards beneath her hooves and tried to draw strength from the familiar surroundings of home. “Lily, what has she done to you? Daisy, has it happened to you too?”
“You can call me Roseluck, if a name will help you,” the stranger said lightly.
Lily spoke again, and this time it was more insistent. “Tell her how you found us, Mama.”
“It — it was in a clearing, deep in the trees,” Zecora stuttered, looking from Lily to the stranger and back. Why did they look so similar? Why were this mare’s eyes the same shade of green as Daisy’s? “Beneath the giant flowers, were two tiny fillies.”
“Giant flowers,” said Roseluck, with Lily’s voice making a subtle undertone.
Her breath coming too fast, Zecora tried to think of a herb, a potion, anything that could undo this. Her daughters — stolen, somehow. Their will subsumed. But what could have done this to them? No mere pony could wield this sort of power.
Roseluck took a step forward. “Three flowers, there were. Three. Only two had bloomed. The third was late.”
“It — was it?” Zecora tried to remember. All she could recall clearly about that day was the shock of finding two such tiny foals, utterly forsaken in the wilderness. Abandoned without a parent in sight. The giant flowers had been striking, striking enough to draw her away from the path and into the clearing — but once she had seen the foals all other thoughts had left her head.
“It was,” said Roseluck grimly. “You took them. And you left me behind.”
The words hit Zecora like a blow to the chest. Three foals? Triplets? Surely not. She had — she had looked everywhere for any trace of anypony that might have been responsible for the little fillies. She would have spotted a third child, if there had been one there.
But — but how else to explain it? This uncanny similarity between the stranger and her daughters? The horrible possessiveness in the way Roseluck looked at the others?
“I promise you that I did not know,” said Zecora, her fear forgotten for a moment in the face of her regret. “If I had seen you, I would not have done so.”
Roseluck scoffed. “Why should they get to grow up here, warm and loved? While I was out there—” she jabbed a hoof at the window, at the forest, black and forbidding, “—hungry and so lonely without my sisters.” She advanced another step, and her skin rippled with tiny spikes for a moment, like thorns were about to burst out through the fur. “They weren’t yours to take, old woman.”
“Not yours to take,” Lily echoed, her voice low and hungry.
“They are my children,” said Zecora, summoning the stoic face of the shaman. Don’t show your fear. “I love them still. I loved them then and always will.”
Roseluck snarled then, an animal sound, ripping out of her throat like a curse. “Your children? They are my family, not yours.”
“I found them as babes in the wood,” Zecora answered simply. “I took them in, as anyone should.”
“But not me,” spat Roseluck. “I was left to wander on my own, to eat and bloom and wither, over and over, all by myself!” Her voice climbed higher and higher.
Zecora shook her head slowly and dropped the rhymes. “I am sorry. I did not know you were there. I would have taken you with me. Even if you had come to us later, I would have taken you in.”
Roseluck watched her, that strange predatory gleam back in her eyes. “Would you, I wonder? By the time I found you, I was already out of my budding stage and into full bloom. I would have horrified you, so I stayed back in the shadows and waited for my sisters’ petals to open.” Her teeth ground together audibly. “I waited and waited, but they didn’t bloom.”
Zecora shrugged, her mind racing as she tried to assimilate this new information about the nature of the curse; for surely it must be a curse. “I would have tried to heal you, be that as it may. For my two, love and care kept the beast within at bay.”
“Kept them trapped,” countered Roseluck. “But Lily Valley remembered me. You didn’t tame her quite as thoroughly. And she found me, all by herself.” She shot the amber-eyed mare beside her a prideful, almost possessive glance. “And I freed her.”
“Freed her?” Zecora looked at her daughter, always so wild and so wilful, now reduced to mirroring the facial expressions of this stranger like a puppet.
“Freed her!” hissed Roseluck, and Lily repeated it, like a parrot. Like a broken toy. “Freed her.”
Roseluck took another step forward, and Lily followed close behind. “Now we have come to finish the cycle. It’s time for us to bloom again. And why not finish what you started, Mama? Why not help us grow?”
Zecora backed up again, and found herself pressed against the wall. There was nowhere left to go. She looked at her daughters, the fillies she had raised and shared her life with for the past two decades, and a tear slid over her wrinkled cheek. Lily was pressed up close beside Roseluck, and Daisy still sat at the table, in her usual seat, the one where she had sat so many times to bake and clean and sew for them. All the quiet little touches of domesticity she had found such joy in.
And then Daisy looked up, and met Zecora’s eyes for the first time since she had walked into the room, and Zecora thought that maybe, maybe one of her daughters was not beyond saving.
“It’s funny,” said Daisy, and she sounded so much like her old quiet self that tears sprang into Zecora’s eyes. “I was always so happy. I thought I was a pony. I believed all of it.”
“Daisy-White,” Zecora whispered, seeking and failing to find comfort in the familiar nickname. “You are a pony. You are my daughter. Don’t give up on yourself and give in to the slaughter.”
Roseluck’s hoof slammed down on the floorboards. Her face was twisted in an ugly snarl. “Daisy Flower Wishes, you will listen to me.” Something rippled out from her hoof, some warping of the wood, and Daisy sat bolt upright in her chair.
“I…” Whatever Daisy had been about to say tailed off, and slowly, her flat expression contorted into that same snarl.
“You are a pony,” Zecora repeated, desperately, knowing as she did so that it was already too late. That Daisy was already gone.
“We are not ponies,” said Roseluck, and the two mares on either side of her echoed the words just a fraction of a second too slow. “Ponies, ponies.”
“Don’t,” pleaded Zecora. “Let me help them. Let me help you.”
“We are the children of the Everfree,” whispered Roseluck, through three mouths instead of one. “We are the flower ponies, and it’s time for us to bloom.”
And then all three of those mouths broke into smiles, as delighted as foals beneath eyes that were flat and dead. And those smiles widened and widened until they were nothing but gashes full of teeth, and then their skulls split and their skin peeled back and roots and vines and thorns and teeth sharp as knives rushed out, and all Zecora could do was scream and scream and scream.
And when the last scream was finally silenced, the three things that had once worn the skins of ponies were smiling still, and their roots stretched deep into the blood-soaked ground, growing fat and rich on all that beautiful, delicious, coppery red.
And deep within the forest, where nopony dares to go,
Adventurers will find a home, a little cottage with garden below.
And through the broken roof, three great pink flowers grow.