Applejack woke up. Mentally, at least, as much as anyone can mentally wake up within a dream, and still in that feverish kind of imperfect consciousness that is of both dreams and sickness and that came from both in her situation. The world around her, the purely mental world around her she found herself in, was blurry, undefined, like a sketch or a painting smudged by water. Like moved by a current, shapes and colours flowed and shifted around her, never settling on anything more than vague concepts and hints of something that could be real.
Yet the surface she walked over was solid. She did not feel herself floating, or sliding forward, moving without a body. She felt herself walking. Steps from hooves she didn't see over a pavement that wasn't there, but the cadence was the same, the feeling was the same. She wondered if that too was part of the dream, and what might have caused it. She knew she was in a dream, she had some knowledge and awareness of it at least. For once, oddly, it made sense.
The cold was still there. Permeating her. It didn't hurt as much though. It was more of a general, pervasive lack of feeling. Like how legs go numb if you dip them in cold water too long, only they weren't getting any warmer. At least she wasn't shivering. She was probably shivering somewhat in the real world. The physical world. Her mental world was real too, though that was maybe a matter of semantics. At least her thoughts weren't as sluggish as they'd been before. Or maybe they were, but she didn't notice, trapped inside them with nothing to compare their flow to. She supposed if that was the case then it was a meaningless difference.
She felt mentally cold, too. The emotionless kind of metaphorical coldness. She could tell she was like that, but she couldn't really do anything about it. She didn't really feel. She acknowledged events in her memory, but nothing more. She could remember how she was supposed to feel at them, but all she got were meaningless concepts, hollow terms with nothing to fill herself with. She could maybe fake those feelings, but she didn't want to. And she knew it would have been wrong. That didn't give her a strong opposition to it, or any other feeling, but she still thought it was right to do what she reasoned was right.
She was walking. There was something there for her to see. Maybe. Maybe there wasn't. But standing still, mentally still at least, wasn't something she was interested in doing. If she'd been given a dream, feverish as the one she was having was, she intended to explore it in full. Maybe to understand what exactly was happening to her, maybe simply to spend her time doing something other than nothing. She would have felt bad about not being awake, helping her friends, but again, she couldn't really feel anything, and she didn't wish to fake sadness. Especially not when alone with herself. So she just walked.