//------------------------------//
// ... With a Metaphor 
// Story: First Fruits 
// by the dobermans 
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A procession of words intended to comfort Wild, or to distract her from the silent, bleeding pile that lay at their hooves on the dirt floor, sounded in First’s mind without reaching a resolution. All did little but remind him that he was an unprepared colt in an ever more dangerous world; a colt with a farmer’s reckoning who had no clue what a grieving mare needed to hear to ease her sorrow. He shuffled his hooves and gave Sundew a sheepish look.

The hermit rose on weary, mud-streaked legs. Rooting for a moment in a collapsed frame of wood that had once been a corner shelf, she withdrew a roll of parchment, an ink bottle, and a quill. As she was digging the items free of the wreckage, a cadre of haggard ponies filed into the hut. Taking a look at the heap of bodies, most placed a hoof over their hearts. Others hung their heads and mumbled blessings in a dialect dotted with unfamiliar words.

Sundew unfurled the parchment a respectful distance from where Wild sat and began to write. The ponies who had joined them fanned out, giving room for a trio of white-maned elders to enter. The scratch of Sundew’s quill on paper mingled with Wild’s stifled cries, and the sibilant slumping of the inert bog bodies as the marsh folk dragged them from atop Bellows onto the floor.

First winced as the taut faces tore away from the stallion’s coat to reveal horseshoe semicircles of bite marks, patterning the muscles and joints a bright, inflamed red. Some came away toothless, leaving brown stalks of broken incisors around gouges in the flesh like fungal growths on carrion. First noticed clumps of hair in the matter stuck to his shears with an accidental glance, and shuddered at how like the bunched skin around Bellows’ injuries they were.

Sundew finished writing. She waved First forward, taking a place beside Wild as she set the scroll down for her to read. She wrapped a foreleg around her, and with a tip of her muzzle, invited First to do the same. He eased down and complied with her unspoken request, careful to keep the sharp edge of his blade well away from either mare. He felt Sundew’s hoof begin to soothe Wild’s back in slow circles as he read over her shoulder:

Do not krye. Ðe doktors shall wyrk upon hym. He shall be well yn tiȝme, but hys skars shall be deep, and remaȝn wyþ hym.

Whether out of relief, or of being reminded of her brother’s valor, Wild wept harder, and burrowed her muzzle against Sundew’s chest. The older mare completed the hug. Finding no contradiction to the strict rules of his upbringing, First did the same. Within the gentle frame of their support, Wild’s pained lurches and hiccups subsided by degrees into calm, even breathing. First caught Sundew’s eye above Wild’s bowed head. They had fulfilled another one of the Missions’ laws, and he could tell Sundew had learned the same ones he had been raised to uphold, either from her own parents or by virtue of whatever mystical ways were open to Wayfinders. He heard his father’s voice repeat it in his mind.

The downtrodden are to be comforted.

The elders, who had been inspecting Bellows’ wounds and eyes and teeth, signaled to the younger stallions. Four of them left and returned with a stretcher cobbled together from saplings and strips of bark. They each grabbed one of Bellows’ legs and heaved his heavy frame onto the sackcloth strips that had been stretched between the poles.

Wild raised her head to watch them take positions at the four corners and lift. Those who were not occupied with her brother’s evacuation were busy clearing the twisted bodies from the scattered bric-a-brac. A group that had been yanking at the glaive tumbled into a heap as it came free of the knotted mass of roots that formed the far wall.

“We’ll see him again, right?” she asked, her voice still thick with sorrow.

Sundew nodded. First backed away to create enough space to speak to Wild face-to-face. “I’m just guessin’, but your brother is strong as a bull. He got nipped a bit, no question, but I seen Da get worse from Roses and come back fightin’ stronger than before.”

“Really?” Wild said, rising to her hooves for the first time since she entered the hut.

First gave her an exploratory smile. “Sure as sugar.”

“The boy says sooth,” one of the elders affirmed. His silvery mane was strung with acorns and wintergreen leaves, and melded into his wild white beard like a winter waterfall raining on a river’s ice floes. He trod up to them on trembling hooves.

“This mighty stallion shall live indeed, as Lady Sundew has perceived. The waters of the bog are ever clean, even as the magic that disturbed the nether-folk was not. I say: the waters abide no disease, and so no plague abides in them.” He wiped at Wild’s wet cheek with a lock of his mane. “His salt ocean is drained, which is a greater danger to his life. We shall tend him the span of three moons, or two if Lady Sundew’s prayers to the Night Princess are heard and indulged.”

Sundew withdrew from Wild’s side and began to restore order to her scattered belongings. She flipped a table formed from a scarred slab of tree trunk back onto its feet, her hooves crunching clay fragments of broken dishware. Sniffling hard, Wild joined her, sweeping the starred pieces to the side where they couldn’t pierce their tender frogs. 

First poked at a vase of water lilies that had spilled onto the brim of a sun hat woven from the reeds of the marsh. Now that noxious odor of fish had receded with the removal of the bog bodies, other scents—deeper infused in the tangled root wall and packed straw of the thatched roof—emerged like animals of the forest rustling again after the passing of a wolf: wood smoke, earth, mane hair, and something like bread.

A delicate bottle rolled out from the fallen wall shelves and bumped against his hoof. Inside, a single piece of jewelry tinkled against the glass: a silver chain strung with bangles shaped like each phase of the moon. Feeling the weight of someone’s gaze, he looked up, and saw Sundew almost smiling at him.

The weight grew a thousand fold. First blushed and made an about-face to survey the battlefield. It would be a tactical oversight not to search the area for stray Roses, he considered. There could be severed forelegs that had been missed in the dark vegetation, inch-worming their way to spots that would be shadowed during the day, waiting to trip them up and crack their skulls, or worse, lie dormant until nightfall to force their way down their throats and choke every pony while they slept. He trotted outside to hunt, away from the more subtle dangers of the hut.

The swamp folk had set torches in a rough perimeter, each guarded by a pair of lean warriors. They had focused their watch on the misty world outside the reach of the flames’ glow, unmoving, unflinching, with spears at the ready. The water’s edge received their greatest attention; no fewer than fifteen stood in a breathless formation with their weapons’ tips pointed at the treacherous pool.

First took note that the stallions were not much greater in stature than he was. The muscles of their legs and chests were hardier, to be sure, but in height they might have been mistaken for colts his age. It was simply the nature of their clan, he mused, or a lack of food available in the swamp. His grandmama had grown up in hard times, after all, and had been only half the size of his mama. Beginning to feel an ache in his own stomach, he dipped his head to the ground and sniffed. 

A foreign scent caused him to recoil. Even in the midnight gloom he could see that the grass of the shoreline meadow had died, its vibrant greens turned a pale, sickly brown in the weak light of the torches where the fluids of the creatures had spilled from their wounds. Beyond the disappointment of another small victory for the enemy, the sight of the blighted earth nagged at First’s mind for a reason he couldn’t place. 

It was then that he heard the distant sound of a cat crying.

“Cinnamon!” he called, cantering in a circle. He stopped at each point of the compass to listen. The wails grew louder further from the pond. There was only one place that made sense for his missing partner to be.

“Ms. Carnation, Ms. Sundew! I’m going to the Garden!” he yelled at the hut’s door as he galloped into the outskirts of the pine forest.

The moon-dappled boughs sped past in streaks of gray and brown. The bog bodies had been busy even here, he discovered. The reek of rotten fish returned, and he began to find them, their maws cracked open wide where they had erupted in sprays of black slime onto the tree trunks. In some places they had stripped the bark away, as if to bare the trees’ hearts in order to drench them in their poisonous filth.

As he approached the Garden, he could hear Cinnamon’s cries above him somewhere. She must have climbed up and away from danger when the creatures attacked, he reasoned. She was tough, but knew when she was outclassed.

When he broke from the trees into the enclosed circle of the Garden, the first thing he saw was Cinnamon hunkered low on a lofty branch on the far side. She was shivering in a patch of moonlight, her tail pressed flat against the upper stem of the great pine’s crown. 

Cinnamon had been with First her entire life, and by now he could tell from the timbre of her cries when she was afraid and when she was not. So he knew there was no pair of jaws waiting to snap her up on the ground below her. She was angry, and more than a little sad. 

He looked around and understood why. The Garden was in ruins. The hind ends of bog bodies poked into their air like obscene flowers where they had torn ragged holes in the perfect greenery and buried their skeletal heads. Their viscous bile had soaked into the ground around them, and turned all of the surrounding moss and flowers the same shade of gray-brown. 

The statue too had been defiled. The mouth had been broken, leaving a hole full of sharp points of stone like misshapen fangs. The poison that the creatures had vomited into the earth had seeped into the subterranean pool that fed the fountain as well, so that the once-silver tears that fell from the eyes of the Night Princess now were blackened streaks of corruption oozing down her face to kill everything it touched.

There was a tremor in the ground. Two sets of hooves slowed to a halt beside him. Unable to look away from the horror of the desecrated remnant of paradise, he heard a long, loud hiss like a stifled scream. Sundew dropped to the earth and buried her head under her hooves.