“Bellows!” Wild called. “You’re back?”
The charcoal-coated figure shifted from one side of the doorframe to the other. “I’m struggling to think of a sane reason you would be chatting with a colt at three AM in my workshop,” he said, scratching the bristles of his carefully trimmed goatee. He let the following silence turn the statement into a question.
“Bellows, listen, you’re not going to believe this,” Wild began.
“I already don’t believe it.”
Wild shook her head. “This ‘colt’ is First Fruits, and”—she stood, disturbing Cinnamon enough to cut her purring short—“he’s a Caretaker! The dark times are over at last!”
Cinnamon burst from the hay and dashed into the labyrinth that the wooden feet of the racks and display cabinets made above the shop floor.
“A Caretaker with a kitty cat,” Bellows mused, descending the hoof-sawn steps that led from the house. “Where did you find him, Primrose, lurking around the graveyard using his pet to catch the barrow rats?” His heavy hooves drummed his advance.
First rose as the towering blacksmith stopped just a bit too close, his uncertain gaze at a level with the stallion’s chest. Bellows smirked down at him, daring a reply.
“It’s true, sir,” he said, “been at work in the garden long as I can remember.”
“Bellows,” Wild cut in before the conversation could take a wrong turn, “number one, I’ve already told him my real name, so you can stop calling me Primrose. Number two, I’m serious. I saw him cut down the werebeast with my own eyes. Him and his ‘kitty cat’. And he did the Salute, before and after, just as the Chronicles tell of the Lunated warriors of the High Sanctuary! You know, like in chapter twenty-seven, page forty … no, forty-one of—”
It was then that Bellows noticed the scars that crisscrossed First’s forelegs, and the deep, ragged crater in his shoulder. He lifted a hoof to silence Wild.
The smirk faded from his face. “If that’s true,” he said to First, “you didn’t do it with your bare hooves. Show me what you used.”
First gestured to where his shears lay, haphazard in loops of still-knotted twine.
Bellows blinked and turned quickly to the window, which framed the luminous night sky. “Ah stars, things change …” he sighed. His words faltered. The distant lights he’d invoked flickered back at him from the depths of their black sea. “Sometimes for the better. Thank you, Selene. Thank you for taking this burden from us.”
He cleared his throat and turned back to First. “My sister has suffered a long time because of that monster. I won’t forget this.”
A pair of whiskers and a probing snout slipped through a break in the shadowy furniture undergrowth. Cinnamon emerged, not missing the opportunity to scratch her spine along the bottom of a stand of saw blades. She hopped to her spot on First’s back. “It only seems fair to me, sir,” First replied to Bellows. “Ms. Carnation has shown me kindness and nothin’ else. Besides, it’s what I was born and raised to do.”
A smile broke on Bellow’s muzzle like a crack in granite. “Be that as it may, you must be tired after your battle, not to mention being up all night and most of the morning. I myself have been traveling the night through. Had to settle a debt with my carpenter. Why don’t we all get to sleep and tell the rest of the story over breakfast tomorrow?”
“Sounds good to me,” said First.
Wild yawned. “Seconded,” she agreed.
“Great. Problem is, I only have one guest room. Don’t get too many guests, for some reason. You mind spending the night out here, First?”
“No, sir.”
“Good enough. Follow your nose to the kitchen when you get up. I’ll leave the door to the house unlocked. Wild, as for you, you remember where the guest room is?”
“Yuppers,” said Wild. She launched into an exaggerated yawn and headed up the steps out of sight.
Bellows watched her go. Turning once again to First, he placed a hoof on his shoulder. “I meant what I said, by the way. I won’t forget what you did for her. You’re welcome in this house while I’m its owner, and if you ever need supplies, come to me. You won’t pay a thin bit.”
It was First’s turn to smile. “Yes sir, I appreciate that.”
“OK then. Wash room is the door at the end of the hallway on the right. See you in the morning.”
First knelt down into the soft bed of hay and curled up. “Good night,” he called.
The door clicked shut. A few moments later it opened again to reveal Bellows’ stern face. “One more thing,” he said.
First lifted his head back up out of the sweet-smelling hay with effort. “What’s that?”
A thick white bath towel landed next to him.
“Don’t use up my shop towels.”
***
The first ray of sunlight that crept over the windowsill spilled onto the nape of First’s neck, adding to Cinnamon’s warmth. The scent of cooling bread and fried eggs mingled with that of wood and charcoal that hung in the forge. He shook his mane, his signal to Cinnamon that it was time to get up. When she’d lazily complied, he stretched, found his journal, and opened to a fresh page.
Day two
Put down a new kind of Rose. It’s called a warebeast, or some such. Wild Carnation told me. That’s Primrose’s real name. Not sure why she had a fake one.
Didn’t know manes could smell like fruit.
He looked outside the window above the hay pile, quill in mouth. Ponies were shuffling out of their doorways and down the streets into the gray morning. Some pulled fruit and vegetable carts, to be set up in the marketplace for the noon hour rush. Others, wearing suits, dresses, hats or shawls, trudged to their shops and offices to repeat the daily routine of their livelihoods. First watched them a while, then put his quill away and headed into the house.
Once he’d finished in the washroom, he remembered Bellows’ instructions to follow his nose. It wasn’t difficult. Sharp cheese and oranges had mingled with the ambrosial scents already tugging at his stomach. The hallway that led deeper into the warren of alcoves and crystal doorknobs was lined with ornate credenzas, each one bearing its own enigmatic iron sculpture. The dark wallpaper displayed a faint tartan design, broken here and there by the frames of frowning portraits.
The muffled voices of a mare and stallion filtered through the finery. Wild Carnation and Bellows were arguing. Worried that he was the subject of their ire, First hurried onward until he rounded a corner and found himself in the kitchen.
“Yeah, you can stay here and hammer out my next order,” Bellows grumbled. He was leaning forward over a table set for three, glowering at a cross-legged Wild. “Shouldn’t be too bad, just thirty-five broad-axes for the lumberjacks up on Warped Heights. By the way, they conscripted the last blacksmith that didn’t deliver. For three years.”
Wild waved his ill-concealed warning away with a hoof. “So get your apprentice to help. Oh wait, you don’t have one because you’re a prickly … oh, hi, First!”
“Good morning, ma’am,” First replied, lingering at the edge of the room. “Should I come back later?”
“No, no, please! Sit down. Eat. My dear brother and I were just having a small disagreement.”
Bellows snorted. “Yeah, we disagree as to whether I should spend the next thirty-six moons chopping trees down with nothing but my hooves and willpower.”
Wild tossed her mane, trying to make it look like she was straightening it. The scent of peaches wafted briefly. “I’m trying to convince my dear, wise, oh-so-dedicated sibling here that there are more important things in life than wood and metal. Unfortunately, his head is made of one or both of those.”
“At least mine isn’t full of random trivia from the post-Fall darkness!” Bellows retorted. He took an angry bite of orange, rind and all.
“And now you’re forgetting your manners!” Wild shouted, before replacing her snarl with a smile. “First, please join us. The esteemed stallion of the house is going to lead us in what I’m sure will be an elegant devotion before we break our fast.”
First slunk into the chair that had been saved for him, exercising every caution to avoid jostling the table that had been laden with a pyramid of whole oranges, wheels of aged cheese, steaming loaves of bread and fried eggs. Three glasses of orange juice rippled as he sat. Bellows huffed and extended his hooves to him and Wild.
First glanced at the work-worn hoof. When he saw Wild touch hers to her brother’s, he followed suit. Bellows cleared his throat and spoke:
The deer all have walked free,
The spiders, they did weave their homes,
The wolves to their dens have returned,
And the owls from their branches cease to roam.
The night now is done; we await the next one:
Thank you for giving it to us, o Selene.
Wild smiled at her brother before turning to First. “Do you say anything similar? Just, you know, professional curiosity.”
First shrugged. “Yeah, Da and I always say, ‘Thank you Night Princess for letting us live another day’,” he rattled off with perfunctory speed.
Wild thought for a moment. “I guess that makes sense,” she said. “Caretakers never know when they’re going to be called to be stars in Selene’s dark veil.” Her smile turned wistful.
“S’ppose that’s true,” First agreed. He nibbled at a slice of cheese, wincing at the potent, though pleasant tang. “Speakin’ a’that, never seen a Rose like the one last night. Usually they’re folks we buried. What was it?”
Wild and Bellows shared a quick glance. “We’re not exactly sure,” Wild began, “but we have some theories.”
“Go ahead, tell him,” urged Bellows.
Wild bit off half of a buttery chunk of bread and ground at it, gathering her thoughts. “So … there’s more to the story I started telling you last night,” she said after she washed it down with a gulp of orange juice. She leaned in as if to prevent anyone within earshot from hearing what she was about to say. “I think I’m being tracked.”
“Tracked?” First asked.
“Yes. I believe it’s because I’m doing some tracking myself. You see, there was nothing I hated more than that abomination. I knew I wasn’t strong enough to kill it, if that word even applies, so I considered the next best thing: find whatever magic created it and destroy that.” She took a bite of her eggs and chewed, gazing into the past. The silence stretched just a bit too long before she resumed. “I started with the Greywater. My cache of Lore records—every Lorekeeper has their own store of ancient scrolls and writ to study and safeguard—had plenty to say about the Cultivation, and I was dead sure the well dated back to that cursed time. This kind of research is a lot like a puzzle, you know? The genealogy we covered yesterday is part of it; piece this fact with that one, make sure the dates line up, watch for contradictory versions of the events and weed out the false leads.”
“Nintey-nine percent of them are false leads,” Bellows muttered.
Wild ignored him. “The more I researched, the more one name stood out among the traitors. And in the end, only one lie at the center of the tangled lines of history and reasoning like a spider surrounded by dead flies: Baal-Kaas.”
Bellows shivered. Feeling a primal loathing at the sound of the name himself, and fear corkscrewing upward like cold liquid metal from his very bones, First marveled at the sight of the powerful stallion trembling. As it left Wild’s lips, it dredged at his memories, lifting foreign whispers like filth from a swollen river bed.
“Who … who were they?” he managed to ask.
Wild steadied herself before continuing. “It has to do with the Mystery of the Nine Stars. So much goes back to that. Even the Cultivation, I’m sure of it. Haven’t been able to prove it though. Sorry, I’m throwing words around.” She took a sip of orange juice as if she were a tired scholar at the end of a day-long lecture. “He tended the waters of the Garden: the measurement of the arcs, the gradients of the streams; the height of the waterfalls and their orientation to catch the rays of the sun and moon to make splendorous rainbows; which of the reflecting pools had fish and which didn’t; these were his duties, and he oversaw them to perfection. He took direction from Joyous Grove himself, as did all of the most gifted groundskeepers, to ensure that the vision of Selene was realized.”
“Until she was shunned by her own people, and her vision failed,” Bellows interjected. He nudged First. “Listen to her go, bud. She’s in full-on Lorekeeper mode.”
Wild nodded, her face serious and downcast. “Until her Fall. Until the great dream became a nightmare and all was lost. Many of the laborers, in their impervious loyalty, followed Selene on her Tartaran path. They remained laborers—oh yes—but came to see the whole world as their garden, in the same way that Nightmare Moon saw Equestria as her rightful dominion. A thousand tears for the telling of the tale! It is said that at the very moment of her Fall, all the flowers were poisoned: where their petals once shone with life-giving moonlight that inspired both genius in mind and love in heart, they withered in endless decay, bearing fell magic to bind the dead and raise them. The charmed apples—delightful to taste—that could sustain the mightiest stallion all day with a single bite, would now turn good ponies to mere horses, mindless and mad. The beasts that gave gentle companionship became monsters, and the sweet waters that could heal any wound became the surest path to the grave.”
It was all First Fruits could do to continue eating, so rapt he was by the images Wild’s words painted. He felt, more than saw them, as if they were the fabric of the dream that underlay the waking world. Even Bellows had gone silent next to him, his big lanky presence warm and tense.
Wild wasn’t finished. “Tell me, First, are there any strange flowers to be found in your father’s Sanctuary?”
First bowed his head, searching memories that after only a day’s journey seemed indistinct from his imaginings. “Now that you ask, yeah, over the way into the garden there’s a trellis of white roses that I never thought looked right. And they don’t die in winter!”
“That’s right. That’s because they aren’t alive. At least, not like you and me.”
“You mean that …”
“Yes, First. The smallest flower, the merest drop of water is all it takes. That was the Cultivation. That was their plan: disperse the tainted seeds of the Garden to saturate the whole world: to turn the very earth against the living. The Greywater, I’ve come to be convinced, was one of the ‘gifts’ of Baal-Kaas. The local histories say that ponies or animals that drink from it don’t die. They suffer. They rot alive until all they can do is scream.”
“W-why?” First whispered. “Why would any pony want that?”
Wild shook her head. “Baal-Kaas is just a title. Took me a while to figure that one out. It means “root of agony” in old Ponish, or something like that. His real name was forgotten centuries ago. The point is, I think he’s still out there. I think he’s still alive, like your white roses.” She waited for her words to sink in. “Somehow, he’s responsible for the werebeast, which tells me he’s become more active in recent years. And somehow he knows I’ve been looking for him, and has been looking for me in turn. Now that you’ve slain his creation, he’ll be trying all the harder to find me.”
“So what do we do?”
“The Wayfinder I mentioned to you last night. We need her. All I know is that her name is Sundew, and that she lives in Frogmire. There’s a small community that keeps mostly to themselves in the swamp and surrounding peat bogs there. Few travel in or out. I’ve spent almost the whole morning trying to convince ‘sunshine’ here to come with us.” She pointed at Bellows, who rolled his eyes in reply.
“Could we just go and try to find Baal-Kaas ourselves?” asked First.
“I would, but I have no idea where to start. Also, I have to confess, I have an ulterior motive. The last time a Caretaker, a Lorekeeper and a Wayfinder have been together in the same room was several thousand moons ago. We’d be making history.”
Bellows drained his orange juice and slammed the glass down in resignation. “Sounds like there’s only one thing for it, then,” he growled. “We need to talk to Sundew.”