'Where were you, when the Behemoth came to Canterlot?'
"How did it start?"
It had been months before. "Months ago." When the Behemoth came to Canterlot, and she gazed into its shadow. "I was out in the fields."
"How did it start?"
The room was cold. Metaphorically cold, perhaps the right word was sterile. Whether it was physically cold too, Applejack could no longer tell.
She was sitting over one of those padded bed-like tables she'd come to associate with doctors' offices, she'd never learned the proper name for it. Not an operating table, or at least she was pretty sure it didn't count as one. No operation would be conducted there either way. The light streamed in from a window, in the kind of way that highlighted the rays of sunlight themselves through the motes of fine dust suspended in the air. The room wasn't literally sterile, even if it felt like it. The window itself was closed.
Then the light bounced back off the crystal pavement and crystal walls. Not in painful ways, not in ways that directed rays of it into anyone's eyes. The whole scene looked to her less warm than it should have. She knew that because she'd been in the castle before, in similar weather conditions, and she remembered what that had looked like. What she was seeing then looked different. Evidently whatever she had did not affect her memories, but it was stopping her from properly reliving some of them.
"Applejack." Twilight's voice was firm, worried, caring, demanding, all at once. It had a depth to it, a breadth, a set of intertwined layers. It reminded Applejack of Celestia's voice, and she looked at Twilight. And the alicorn asked once again, "How did it start?"
Applejack still saw it, in her mind. "When the Behemoth came to Canterlot," she said. Then, she continued, "I looked at it. I think I looked beyond it. I don't know what I saw. All I know is that I felt cold. Real cold. Starting from inside of me." She swallowed.
Twilight looked at Applejack. There was a strange, profound compassion in her eyes. She looked taller than she was, and not just because she was standing and Applejack was sitting. "How strong was it?" Twilight asked, writing something down, holding back a dozen other questions. Maybe there would be time for them, maybe not. Her friend was still more important to her than the knowledge she could get out of her.
Applejack tried to recall. "Not much, at first. Not after the first moments. I think my head just ignored it for a while. Then it got stronger, for a while. I got sick. Pretended it was nothing, told no one about it. It died down for a while. Thought I could just live with it, and I'd only have to bring it up if it flared up again." She looked Twilight in the eyes. "Why did Nightmare Moon make it come back so strong?"
Twilight Sparkle looked downwards at Applejack. "The thing we faced, what that Nightmare Moon became... We saw the arrival of another Behemoth, or something equivalent to it."