//------------------------------// // In the Halls, I // Story: Equestria's End // by Aquillo //------------------------------// Once upon a time, long before the foundation of Equestria or even the loose union of the three tribes, there was a great king of the earth ponies. Yes, the earth ponies once had kings. As too did the pegasi and the unicorns, though only the latter fondly remember theirs. The pegasi chose to forget after they betrayed their king, though some tell the tale differently. But that is a story for another time and another place, where its meaning will hold more relevance. Now, this king was great and his kingdom was wide, stretching from mountain to coast across the vast southern plains, far past the central spire of the Canterlot mountain. He ruled it as justly and fairly as only an earth pony could, treating all of his citizens as his equals. I say citizens because, although easily in the majority, he did not rule over earth ponies alone, and neither were all his citizens ponies. That king was King Orchard, and he was the first to ever lie. Applejack shivered once and flicked another shard of wood onto the campfire. The deserts were cold at night. That'd been the first thing Applejack had learnt about them as a filly all those long years ago. So, when she had finally made it over the arching ribs of the Macintosh hills and out onto the great central plain, she'd made certain that she'd be carrying enough dry-wood with her to form a fire, even if it did weigh the same as a wagon filled with apples. It had also left her with precious little space to pack the other essentials she had needed. Clothing and bedding had been kept to a minimum, meaning she slept on the ground with no blanket or barrier between her and the world. It didn’t really bother her. She was used to brushing the dirt off of herself by now. There were enough partially dried up riverbeds around the place that drinking-water, whilst being hard to get ahold of, wasn’t something she needed to lug about with her everywhere. She’d been lucky in that regard. As for food, well... Applejack knew exactly what to carry with her. The apple she was eating was hard to the hoof but soft on the teeth, the flesh of it being beautifully easily to bite into. Applejack swallowed another chunk of it, small flecks of its green skin pasting round her lips. Her tongue flicked out and swiped them off; a small, silver watch held by a chain around her neck danced under the motion. She swallowed. The apple tasted good. She wondered if it was one of her own, bucked from the Sweet Apple Acres' orchards by her or Big Mac months and months ago. In another life. Last week, Applejack corrected herself, before taking another bite. Just ‘cause I’m still getting older don’t mean that the rest of Equestria is too. We’re the one who’re outta place here. We shouldn’t go round marking things by our standards when we should still be using theirs. She swallowed, and then tried to go for another bite. Her teeth hit the apple’s core, hard and bitter. She tossed it into the campfire next to her without a second thought. The sparks disturbed by the landing flew straight up; the air about her was unnaturally still, leaving the glowing dot's vertical pathways straight and unbroken. The end of the world always seemed to manifest itself as a local thing. What’d be fire and brimstone in one corner of the globe would be ice and hoarfrost in another. Out here, near the Badlands and sand-sea of the San Palomino desert, it was quiet and unnaturally calm. It’d used to unnerve her. Still, there were always some similarities. Some common themes that didn’t quite hold to a certain place. Little marks to remind you that, no matter how personal it seemed, the apocalypse was horrifyingly indifferent. Applejack rummaged around in the saddlebags next to her, her hoof clunking and shifting its way through everything she’d packed. She felt the familiar round, lumpy smoothness settling into her hoof soon enough. She took out another apple and bit into it. It tasted good. Sated, Applejack tilted her head back—hat shuffling about with it—to stare at the reason she was still awake this many hours past dusk. There was a fiery line stretching from north to south across the sky: a great, bleeding scar carved like a gash into the heavens, separating the pitch-blackness of night from the cheery blue of day. It looked as if somepony had just laid their hoof on the horizon’s edge and pushed, shoving it out to a third of the distance between the rim of the earth and the centre of the sky. Applejack was camped inside the larger, darker sector: the part of the world still firmly entrenched in night. The stars above her head twinkled out as if nothing at all was wrong. Applejack could remember learning in school that night and day were really part of the same thing. That if you ran fast enough with your eyes pointed up, and somehow managed not to fall over, you could see one melting into the other. That there were only slow shades of difference between them: that the two were really one. Apparently, that wasn't always the case. Sometimes, she wondered if this was just an end of the world thing, or if this is what it’d always looked like. One hemisphere dark, one hemisphere light. Night and day as distinct opposites. She took another bite out of her apple. She swallowed. Her eyes never left the sky. It was a type of vigil, in a way. A method of reminding herself to look at what was there rather than what she wished was there, of reminding herself that everything was not alright. It was all too easy to just lapse into a certain complacency. To tell yourself the lie that one cycle was exactly the same as the last, and that there was no point in doing anything ‘cause there was nothing you could do. No way to stop it. This here was a problem. There was a reason they were being given second chance after second chance: Applejack was sure of it. They had to be the ones to fix whatever had gone wrong, and they had to do it together. She tore another bite out of the fruit, teeth chewing and chomping on its flesh as she carried on staring skywards, challenging the abomination in the atmosphere to blink. It had never indulged her, not in all of her wanderings across Equestria after one flighty pegasus. And, in turn, she had never indulged it. She would keep on staring until the end. Well, almost till the end. The last few minutes had to be dedicated towards making sure she was ready to cope with crossing between cycles. The turn between moments could be frighteningly sudden, and it was best to make sure she was prepared for it. You had to be vigilant: a slip could easily cost you something precious. Like the time a colt had ran, screaming, into her, and knocked her hat clean off her head a second before the cycle had ended. She’d gotten a replacement hat, of course, but it simply wasn’t the same. It didn’t crinkle right, and it smelled kinda funny. She’d wasted one cycle trying to see if she could catch the old one in the brief moment between it leaving her head and the world ending—the instant in which it'd exist as a visible, touchable thing inside that cycle—but she’d fumbled the catch the first time around, and she couldn’t afford wasting a second cycle on it. Finding Fluttershy was more important. She could only hope that the description of her getting the Manehatten Express was correct. Not that she’d know if it wasn’t, of course. The cycle ending would soon clean any and all evidence away. She just had to catch the same train as it passed through Appleloosa on an early Wednesday morning, and hope that the guess was right. The watch round her neck started ringing suddenly and loudly, breaking the quiet of the night in an overly dramatic fashion. Applejack quickly gulped down the rest of the apple, disposing of the core whilst her mouth was still full, and levered the watch open, gently. A delicate flick of the hoof switched the alarm off as her eyes flickered over its ticking face. She ignored the watch’s inner inscription. Two minutes left. More than enough time. She threw another wary glance back up at the horizon cutting across the sky, but—aside from a faint, red glow to either side of the divide—nothing had really changed. Looking back down, she reached up and pulled the hat up and off her head. She flicked it down onto the ground next to her, disturbing the sand that made up the floor in the process. Two scarfs were quickly retrieved from out the disorganised jumble of her saddlebags, the gap they left behind being quickly replaced by a scrunched up ball of hat. She wrapped the first scarf around the top of her head, and then carried on down, covering off the rest of her neck and securing her mane in place. The second was wrapped around the lower half of her face, masking her mouth and nose from the air. A joint knot fastened the two of them firmly together, only giving her a little space in which to move her head. She threw another glance up at the sky. The red stain around the horizon was thicker now, and spreading. Parts of it had bled down into the dark crack that the Macintosh hills made inside the sky. She had less than a minute. She gave her saddlebags a final, confirmatory shove. She wasn’t going to risk them going the same way as her hat, even if the only possibility of somepony else having touched them was probably imaginary. Probably. Still, she was too far out into the Equestrian wilds to be complacent. A lost saddlebag could wind up being the end of her. None of them quite knew what would happened if one of them died. Consensus had been that it was a thing best avoided anyway. Finished and content with her levels of preparation, Applejack sat back and waited for the world to end. And waited. And kept on waiting. After a few seconds of this, she gave her watch another quick glance. The end of the world was one and a half minutes late. “What in tarnat—” Sand Suddenly, in the millisecond trapped inside a blink, there was sand everywhere, clouding up her vision and slapping into her sides like condensed chunks of the air. For the first few seconds, it actually staggered her, forcing her down into an unsteady crouch and almost succeeding in tipping her over. Its attempt was counteracted before it could really begin. Firm muscles built from a lifetime spent at work hardened, raising her back up. Her hooves ground into the floor, anchoring her to the unmoving base beneath the shifting upper layers. She tried to open her eyes, but the sand and flecks of dirt bit them into closing. The switch between cycles must have happened. She may have missed the actual moment, but the change itself was clear: the eerily calm night of one cycle had been replaced by the harsh, vibrantly powerful sandstorm of another. The wind itself felt like a living thing, screaming and howling its displeasure as it flowed around her, tugging desperately at the scarfs wrapped around her head as if anxious to rip them from her. The campfire had been put out in seconds; the flames themselves had been left behind in the transferal, but the wood and ring of stones around them were present and currently being scattered around by the storm. The stupid thing was that Applejack had been expecting it. The last town she’d called in to had made mention of a sandstorm round these parts. What she hadn’t been expecting was just how fierce it would be. The scarfs worked well at protecting the majority of her face, but the sand stung against her eyelids badly, even after she'd scrunched them up as tight as she could get them. A hopeful foreleg raised in front of her head helped in only a vague sense of the meaning. She wished she’d had the good sense to buy that pair of goggles the salespony had offered. She felt foolish for thinking she could do without. She’d been complacent, and now she was paying for it. Complacent... The saddlebags! Applejack’s winced as the wind hit her face, her front leg having snapped down as she spun to where she’d left her saddlebags. She was fortunate in that the turn placed the wind behind her, leaving her face guarded against the worst of it. She winced her eyelids open into a thin crack of light and glanced quickly around. Small particles of sand were leaping like living things around and away from her, their bouncing arcs unnaturally high and long. The world around her had dimmed to a murky, brownish haze that faded into black less than a couple of metres away. Her sides were already caked in a clinging layer of sand and dust, as if the wind was determined to make her into a true 'earth' pony. The saddlebags were nowhere to be seen. Thoughts and various scenarios, most bleak, flashed through her mind as she stood there. The world around her felt small, distant: like the memory of a dream. The wind felt like a current of boiling water swarming around her. Her breaths felt hot and stagnant against the cloth that clung around her mouth. She gulped, swallowing down a hard ball of spit. The saddlebags couldn’t have gotten that far, could they? The cycle’d only been going for a few minutes now—perhaps less. They shouldn’t be that far away... She took a step forwards, hoof sinking into the swarming, bubbling sandbed. It was like walking inside a thicker, browner water: one that was determined in its efforts to drag her underground. The skin around her hoof itched as the sand forced its way past the hairs of her coat. Enduring the feeling, she took another step away from what remained of her camp, and then another. A third followed after it as Applejack ploughed her way forwards, out-stubborning the storm just as she had friends, work and end of the world before it. Her eyes darted towards any dark shape as she moved, only to dash her hopes against every black rock they turned out to be. After a few minutes that felt like hours, part of her began to worry that she wasn’t even heading in the right direction. The world around her turned darker, like a thick mist that had been painted brown by a demented artist. The constant rippling of the ground and murky nature of the air robbed her of her sense of place. Applejack had never felt more lost in all her life. Well. Not quite. She carried on, driving her way through the sandstorm. The wind almost succeeded in unfastening one of the scarfs, tugging half of it off and flapping it round like a child desperate for attention. One of her hooves reached up and tucked it firmly back in; the wind took advantage of her unsteady position with a renewed attempt to topple her over. Hoof back down, she paused for a moment, catching her breath. The sudden hilarity of what she was doing gripped her. The saddlebags would be long gone by now; she'd come to terms with that half an hour ago. She was wading through a sandstorm in a direction that only vague hope told her was correct, after an object she knew she wasn't going to find. Why in the hay was she still walking? What was the point? Stubborn old mule. Heh. Guess I am nothing more than a silly pony after all. She almost laughed, but the scarf was in the way. She felt a sudden urge to rip it off, to just let the wind have what it’d been battling her for every step of the way. What was the point in keeping it? She was utterly lost. Her only map had been inside those saddlebags. She might have outlived the end of the world more times than she could rightly keep track of, but nopony could survive hunger and thirst in the depths of the desert. The magic that took them from one cycle to the other didn’t protect them against harm or hunger. Twi had made sure of that during their first few weeks, back when figuring out what the heck was going on seemed just as important as trying to stop it. Twi. The others. With difficulty, AJ suppressed her thoughts, blocking off the direction they were trying to tug her down. The feelings and urges she’d felt earlier retreated, leaving her uncertain and confused. Stubbornness reasserted itself, overthrowing black-comedy’s brief reign inside Applejack’s mind. If she wasn’t going to give up just yet, then she might as well keep walking. Applejack pressed on. She’d lost track of time hours ago. Or, at least, it felt like hours. Could’ve been minutes. She didn’t know. The wind’s temperaments were a more important thing to keep track of, anyway. She knew it like the shape of her cutie mark, now. Knew when it’d tug at the watch dangling round her neck. Knew when it’d try and rip off her scarfs. Knew when it’d rub against her back with a surprising tenderness, like her hoof stroking along Winona’s back. Winona. Her lips were so dry. She tried licking them, but found that the inside of her mouth was just as bad. She carried on. There was a dark outline before her, tall and black and worryingly thin. The wind had died down a while back. She’d only just noticed. She should have been paying attention. The shadow unnerved her. It didn’t feel right inside the storm. It was out of place, like a clown inside an opera house. Like Pinkie in an opera house. Same thing, really. Heh. She moved away from the shape, cutting a path into the wind's flow. Taking swift advantage of her foolishness, the wind finally succeeded in snatching one of the scarfs from her. The exposure of her face to the outside was like a slap, hard and almost concussive in its ferocity. She reached up to quickly try and catch the scarf, but paused. There was something lurking in amongst the dirty, sandy wind: a hint of something familiar in the boiling air. She sniffed and smelled apples. Her saddlebags had the only apples for miles around. She turned back towards the shadow, eyes seeing it in a new light. Hunger and thirst spurred her first stumbling steps towards it. Then hope retook the saddle, and she leapt forwards, hooves stumbling over the slipping sand, the wind now almost desperate in its attempts to trip her. Something weak throbbed inside her chest—some small certainty of place that’d been birthed following a rainbow's memory halfway across Equestria, from the foggy streets of Manehatten to the cooling shades of Sweet Apple Acres. It felt as if she knew, utterly knew, that the bag was going to be there. It wasn’t, of course, but something else was: something that was most certainly not another barren rock. The shadow's source was a black, hoof-thick and cylindrical column of wood that stretched up into the sky like an arm pointed in accusation. Another gust of wind shoved into her side, barging her into the thing. The wood speared into her, causing a painful exhalation, and shook a dose of clarity into her head. Still slumped in a heap against it, her eyes ran up at its length, and then, with some disbelief, back down to the point where it sunk into the earth. It'd hardly moved at all. The thing wasn't even shaking. Forgetting about her saddlebags for the moment, Applejack pulled herself back up onto her hooves, eyes blinking stupidly at the thing as her mind processed what'd just happened. Applejack prided herself as an apple-bucker. She knew she was good; maybe not the best, but good. Damn good, even. Part of that came with knowing exactly how much force went into an action, even one she hadn't originated. If she was part of the action, part of the motion, then she knew. Or at the very least, she could make a better estimate of it than most. There'd been enough force put into that shove to rock even the mightiest and firm-rooted of trees, and this thing had barely shuddered. Unnerved was right. Apples or not, she felt an uneasy rumbling in her chest over her proximity to it. The wood scratched across her as she tried to move away from it, and yet no splinters dug into her coat. It had a sort of paradoxically rough smoothness to it. A second burst of clarity gripped her. She was being silly again. She’d lived through an apocalypse, and yet it was something like this that spooked her? She didn't have either time of effort enough to waste on this, not when she still had shelter to find. Had that been what she was looking for? Shelter? Yes. Probably. It would make sense in this kinda weather. She pushed herself sleepily away from the wooden pillar, staggering like a colt fresh from his first lick of salt as she paced back and forth, eyes combing the ground in wild, erratic sweeps. Her ears pricked up as she heard something off in the distance. It was a sharp, tearing sound—one that was louder than the wind to her, louder than anything she’d ever heard in her life. It ripped through the clouds of tiredness and thirst that permeated her head; she could no more ignore it than she could the midnight screeching of an unhappy foal. If anything, the two sounds were eerily similar, both drawing upon some ancient, primal urge to protect. It was the sound of a splintering tree branch. She took to her hooves at once, unthinking. The sheer ridiculousness of her reaction did not cross her mind, and neither did thoughts as to what a tree was doing in the depths of the desert. All she knew was that there was a tree—she knew that sound instinctively; she had no doubts the tree existed—and that it needed her. Figuring out why could wait. Applejack could be a very silly pony when she wasn't thinking straight. The wind died down around her, broadening the dirty sphere that was the extent of her vision. Slumped piles of sand, dirt and pebbles were spread across the ground in frozen waves. Leaves and broken branches carpeted the ground too, scurrying about the place each time the wind blew like foals playing some childish game. For a pony who was on the verges of giving up, who had trekked through a sandstorm for enough hours that the lowest parts of the horizon were beginning to lighten, Applejack ran fast. Her stubbornness, it seemed, was partnered and supported by a healthy reserve of stamina, and although she panted heavily, not once did she slow down or stop. Dark walls rose up from the gloom and broke aperiodically into her miniature world. They appeared on either side, indicating that she was probably in some sort of gully or deep crack into the landscape. It would explain the now-hushed voice of the wind, at any rate. The smell of apples was stronger now, as were the bitter traces of smoke. Underneath the hubbub of the foaming air outside was the call of voices: pony voices. Hope bit into her heels, spurring her run into a full on sprint. She burst out of the gully's confines and into the shadowy hints of a wide field filled with tall, swaying silhouettes: trees waving back and forth like the mane of the earth rippling in the breeze. Dark, pony-shaped figures flickered and jumped about the scene, carting round writhing bundles of rope that they threw over the tree tops, binding them into rigidity. Every so often, a thunderous crack of wood splitting marked the loss of one more to the wind's antics. Frantic cries and urgent calls for help greeted each one. And Applejack responded to them, racing out into the ongoing calamity without any clear reason in her head as just why she should. The moments that followed her entrance were a timeless, insubstantial thing. Her attention faded in and out of focus rapidly, leaving her memories of what had happened previously vague and only tangentially related. One moment found her sprinting with a partner towards a creaking and dangerously swaying tree, their hooves pounding in a joint union of beats into the shifting earth. There had been the tug of a net trailing along the ground behind her, bouncing and jolting and yanking at the rope clenched hard between her teeth. Her partner had called out to her, and she'd nodded her head in recognition. The briefest flash of a green, dirty pony had danced into her peripherals; his gaze had been focused on the bundle she was dragging along. She'd halted just before passing under the tree's outer branches, spinning in place and heaving the net round and into the air. It'd unfurled mid-flight, solitary ropes falling from the main net like unwanted and discarded threads; they'd found a new use as her partner and two others caught onto them, clamping down and hugging the net tightly around the tree. The red apples had glinted like stunned fish between the woven bars. Odd branches stuck out at random from the now lumpy tree-head, clawing angrily about as the wind ghoulishly animated them. Most of them had been snapped off by the storm barely a moment after moving. She dropped her rope and ran to catch one of the dangling others. All of them had raced quickly round the tree in a circular procession, weaving the ropes into a firm knot around the trunk and tying in the tree's loose branches. The action had thinned the tree's size down into a thin blade of leafy material that cut into, rather than stood against, the wind. Another moment—curiously unconnected—found her chomping down onto a rope of her own with six other souls inside the roaring quiet of the storm. The wind had bellowed as it found them, then laughed as it bashed into the constrained tree and threw the ponies holding it down from side to side. One pony had dropped their rope to yell for help; the tree'd resonated angrily in response, almost ripping the rope out of Applejack's mouth and making a fair attempt at taking most of her teeth with it. The wind had pulled at her mane suddenly, and Applejack realised with alarm that her second scarf had been lost without her noticing. The realisation stole a moment of concentration from her, and when she was next paying attention, the rope was out of her mouth and the tree's trunk was cleaved in two. Her companions in trying to secure it were gone, taking the net with them and leaving what was left of the tree to snap and tear under the wind's brutal caress. She'd joined them moments later, not even giving herself time to grieve. A flurry of leaves had accompanied her in her exit, the wind dangling them around her eyes and waving the pathetic things in her face as if trying to rile her. It'd worked. She'd thrown herself with even more abandon into the fray. A third moment found her shoving a pink-maned stranger out of the way of a falling branch; a fourth and fifth found her having the favour repaid by shadows whose names she'd never know. More scattered moments found her racing through the dying night and oncoming dawn, caked in mud and twigs and broken leaves and chasing after a half-remembered cry for help. Others found her awakening in a heap on the ground, the world ringing and swirling around as the wind still roared and the other ponies still raced against it. Each time, she'd fought off the impulse to cave in, to give up. She'd carried on. She'd out-stubborn this catastrophe, too. Help in trying to avert a crisis that would only repeat a week later. But her thoughts were scattered and tired, and the utter pointlessness of what she was doing did not occur to her. And it was only when the wind had finally given up more than a few hours past dawn that she too surrendered, curling up beneath the branches of some great tree and falling heavily to sleep. “Hey! Hey, Applejack!” She knew that voice. "Hey there, Cuz! What are you doing here?" She knew what it meant, too. Somehow, impossibly, her wanderings had taken her to Appleloosa. “Are you asleep? I don’t think you’re asleep, but if you are asleep, then all you need to do is say so and I’ll leave you be!” Well, perhaps not impossibly. She had been camped within spitting distance of it, after all. “I’m gonna take that as a ‘I am actually awake, but I’m pretending not to be’. ‘Cause it is.” Her half-awake brain eventually added that it’d also explain the whole orchard in the desert thing. “C’mon, Applejack. Aren’t you even gonna say hi?” Last night’s worries suddenly felt very, very silly. “AJ, I know you’re awake. Your nose always starts twitching when you’re trying to ignore someone, and it’s twitching up a storm right about now.” Applejack mumbled sleepily in response, shuffling slowly round to turn her back towards the speaker. The lumpy hardness of a root dug uncomfortably into her side, and the watch's chain gnawed into the rubbed-red ring it had carved around her neck last night. "You really gonna try and sleep there? We've got some of the best beds in Equestria right here in Appleloosa, y'know! Why don't you come and try them?" There was a pause in which the speaker obviously expected an answer. Applejack did not satisfy him; a new avenue for discussion was quickly found. "Where's your hat?" Applejack reached up to try and tug a hat that simply wasn't there down over her ears. She sleepily realised that there was no way to stop him without talking to him, and groaned, loudly. "Braeburn"—Applejack shifted round onto her front—"I'm right fine and dandy exactly where I am, thank you very much. You'd best be just leaving me here. You can sit down over there some—" She waved a hoof off into a vague direction and ended up hitting the tree. "Dangit!" He ignored her. Of course he did. "Did you leave it back in Ponyville?" Braeburn asked. Applejack groaned again, hoping that the sound would be enough of an answer. It wasn't. "Say, did you bring all of your friends with you this time, or did they stay back in Ponyville to watch over the hat?" Applejack's eyes cracked open; she had finally resigned herself to getting up. "How long are you gonna be staying in Appleloosa for this time anyway? Can’t imagine you’d want to spend too long away from your hat." "Don't know, and I lost it," Applejack mumbled, utterly resigned. "What's that, Cuz? I don't think I heard what it was you just said." Applejack sighed out, disturbing a few leaf fragments in front of her face. "I said that I don't know how long I'm here for, Braeburn, and that I lost my hat some time ago." A thought triggered in her head, a warning about the precise meaning of what she'd just said, and all of a sudden, Applejack knew exactly what'd happen next. "You... You lost your... hat?" "I... Yes. Yes, I did." There was a pregnant pause in which the world stood still and Applejack rose further into lucidity. After it had stretched out for too long, she blinked once and lifted her head off the ground. Braeburn was standing like he'd just stared a cockatrice in the eyes, stock still and with a distant look of stunned surprise on his face. His leather jerkin flapped idly about, stirred by the same gusts that were ruffling out his mane and tail. The world was calmer now, the wind having dulled into a soft yet persistently nagging breeze. Fat, fluffy clouds drifted about in isolated clumps inside the wide sky. The sun was pleasantly warm, its light coloured in the rich gold of an autumn's afternoon. She was lucky. It was still Monday. Tuesday would be an utterly different day. "You sure?" It seemed Braeburn had returned to her. Applejack stared him in the eyes, and nodded. "Well, that's a huge problem to be sure... Hey, I know!" He rose suddenly up onto his back hooves and reared excitedly. "I'll go get you my second-best hat! Hold on, cousin Applejack. I'll get you out of this here predicament soon enough!" Another warning flared inside her mind. As annoying as he could be, Applejack had no intention of squandering any of her chances at something for no good reason. And, whilst the exact workings of the cycle's magic had eluded her, Twilight's experiments had made one thing clear: If you talked or nodded at or somehow interacted with somepony and then let them get around twenty-one metres away from you, they wouldn't be so friendly the next time you tried talking to them. Keep on doing it, and even your best friend could turn into your worst enemy. They'd never carried the experiments past seven times. It got dangerous past that. For the most part, though, Applejack didn't take any of that into account. Instead, she reached up, chomped down on Braeburn's tail and yanked him onto his back before he could begin charging off anywhere. "Ah!" He toppled down next to her, missing the tip of her nose by less than an inch. Applejack spat out his tail: "Phtoe... Braeburn, listen..." Applejack paused and licked at her lips, frowning. Her face scrunched up. "Your tail tastes funny." "That'd be my new cologne!" Braeburn was apparently unperturbed with being yanked onto his back. "I put some of it on last night, and I guess it's still got a bit of kick left in it. Do you like it?" "It tastes of stallion." There was a pause. "Cuz, I am a stallion." "I... Look, Braeburn—" "Yes, Cuz?" "—It don't make much sense for you to go all the way to Applelossa—" "It ain't that far. We're only out in the orchard." "—Just to go and get me a hat." There was another pause. Applejack rose up onto her legs, and then began to kick them out one at a time, stretching. Her back rippled as she clicked the bones in her spine back into place. Dust and broken twigs fell off her sides. Braeburn was up with her a few seconds later, a frown on his face. "But... But Applejack. You need a hat! An Apple—" "Braeburn." "—isn't really an Apple if they ain't wearing something: imagine what Big Mac would be like without his yoke or—" "Braeburn." "—Applebloom without her bow! It just ain't right, and you without a hat's—" "Braeburn!" "—the exact same thing. Why, I don’t think—" Applejack gave up, deciding the best policy was just to let Braeburn talk the worry out of him. There was no real stopping her cousin from talking both your hind-legs off and making a decent attempt at your front ones once he’d gotten started. Celestia knew, she had experience. She gave a tired glance round the orchard. By the looks of things, the storm hadn’t done too much damage, but that it’d rolled through there was obvious. Leaves and twigs and broken branches were littered everywhere, and a fair chunk of the grass had been coated with sand and dirt. What wasn't coated had been trampled flat; presumably, some of that was her doing. Earth ponies trailed in and around the orchard, most carrying step ladders and baskets filled with gathered detritus. A few glanced up at the two of them as they strolled past, and frowned. Made sense. Applejack had probably used up one chance with half the town already. Best to try and keep her interactions to a minimum, then. No point using up what might come in useful later on. That, and having an entire town angry with you for no reason’s never something to aim for in life. She wondered if she could get Braeburn to help her pack; he could certainly talk enough for the two of them. All she'd have to do then is keep out of most ponies' way until Wednesday, and then she'd be leaving Appleloosa far behind her. She flicked her attention back to Braeburn, who had finished speaking at some point and was now wrapped up in giving her an expectant look. “Erm... pardon? Didn't catch that last bit, I'm afraid.” Braeburn was not opposed to the idea of more talking. “I said if you ain’t gonna let me bring the hat to you, you should really let me bring you to the hat. After all, more time spent in Appleloosa’s always time well spent.” "Well, I ain’t gonna argue with you, Braeburn, ‘cause that’s what I was trying to say.” "Well then, why didn't you just say so!" His head butted into her, forcibly nudging her along. Applejack was too tired to resist, and slumped forwards into an easy pace away from the tree. "We could have got going ages ago! Fancy spending time out here when you've got Appleloosa sitting all pretty right on your doorstep. You shouldn't go wasting time like that, Applejack." Wasting time. That's what she'd done last night in driving herself to exhaustion over an event that would just reoccur a week later. The utter idiocy of her attempts to save the trees struck her forcibly: she could have injured herself badly or worse, and for what? At that moment, Applejack became ashamed. She'd forgotten her predicament and given in to the moment. That she was tired and muddle-headed didn't matter; she should be better than this. She held herself to a higher standard than that. Her saddlebags had been an unfortunate slip; this was near-unforgivable. If a tree branch had fallen on her, or if she'd never found the orchard at all... She searched for a way to shake the feeling, and found inside her mind a question. "How'd you know I was here, anyway?" Applejack muttered. “Ponies recognised you from the last time you were round these parts, of course! Mentioned that you were out sleeping under Bloomberg.” Applejack glanced back as Braeburn carried on chatting away contentedly. The tree she’d been sleeping under was indeed Bloomberg, and, much to her relief, he looked like he’d gotten through the storm with only a few tousled branches. She blinked at him again, and sleepily twigged that the net around him was missing. Somepony must have removed it whilst she was still asleep, which was surprising seeing as how she was usually a light sleeper. She tuned back in: “—and so then I high-tailed it out here to see if I could find you. And sure as Appleloosian pie’s the finest thing in all Equestria, there you were. Anyway, Cuz, you haven’t told me what time you got into Appleloosa? You can’t have been here too long or else I’d have heard about it before now.” Braeburn frowned. “Though I didn’t know you were sleeping in the orchard until somepony told me. Huh. Guess my ear ain’t as close to the ground as it used to be.” Applejack nodded, having gotten momentarily distracted by the orchard again. There was something off putting about it, something that wasn’t quite how she remembered it. Well, it has just been hit by one doozy of a sandstorm, she thought. But... that don’t feel like it's right reason. Broken branches ain’t what's wrong here. There's something else... But, then again, it wasn't relevant to her mission. She dismissed the feeling. They passed by two ponies who were busy working under the dappled shades of the trees' branches. One of them was a bright-blue, and the other one a dark green. Both were male. The blue one had his front half perched inside a tree, and his back half balanced on the tip of a ladder. The green one was at the other end of it, using his weight to anchor it in place. His head turned towards them as they approached, watching them with a bored look. Applejack stared at him. A few heartbeats later, he started staring back. She didn’t know him, and that was the only thing she knew for certain about him. But he looked familiar, having one of those faces photographers looked for to represent the common pony: dull, unthreatening and featureless. She glanced down at his flank, but his trowel shaped cutie mark wasn’t much help. He was still staring back at her, an uncertain look in his eye. His eyes narrowed, and the frown on his face switched from one of puzzlement to one of recognition. “You,” he muttered, nodding towards her. “You were there this morning. I remember you helping me to secure one of the trees.” His eyes crossed over to her neck. “You’ve lost your scarf.” “Hat too,” Braeburn chipped in. Applejack glanced over to him; that was unusually... short coming from him. The colt seemed to have much the same idea, for his attention turned to Braeburn. To Applejack's further surprise, it soured. “Oh, go walk off the earth, Braeburn.” And with that, he turned his attention back to the ladder with the audible huff and stomp of heel of one who wants their dismissal noticed. Applejack was having none of it. “Hey, who d'you think you—” Braeburn rammed into her, sliding her quickly away from the two colts. “Braeburn!” “Sorry, Cuz, but I couldn’t let you cause a scene back there. Things between me and the... between me and him ain't so peachy right about now, and there ain't no need for you to get caught up in our problems.” He trotted off quickly, their conversation apparently ended. Applejack was still having none of it. “Hey!” She caught up with him quickly, regulating her pace so that they were walking level. The watch thumped loudly off her chest and her back legs twanged under the increased effort of walking at this speed. Braeburn flicked a glance over at her, and increased his pace. “I’m talking to you, Braeburn.” He walked a little faster. “You come back here right now, you hear?!” He didn't stop, but did turn his head to speak. “Look, Cuz, as much as I’d like to tell you it ain’t really something that needs telling.” Braeburn kept walking, making sure that Applejack couldn’t get any closer to his side. Whatever it was that was between them, it was bad enough to make even Braeburn quiet. Applejack almost stopped. She almost turned around and declared that if Braeburn was going to be so stubborn about telling her, then she’d just go ask the colt himself. She wouldn’t have actually gone and done it, of course, but Braeburn would’ve cracked all the same. And then she’d know what sort of little problem it was that’d come between her normally amicable cousin and another Appleloosian. But that was just it: it was only a little problem. Right now, right at this very second, the gears that'd break the world in their teeth were already beginning to whirl and grind, and it was them that she was racing against. Whatever secrets Braeburn was keeping from her weren’t her true concern, because the world was ending and she was one of the six tasked with somehow stopping it. Problems like a potentially divided town became pale and petty before a great big problem like that. Applejack didn’t have time to waste on this. She had to gather supplies and leave; she had to reach Manehatten and hopefully find Fluttershy. She had to stop the end of the world before she made a slip so big that her ability to do so would be gone forever. That was what was important, not trying to fix some problem that’d only undo itself a week later. She couldn't afford another slip this cycle, not even for family. And so she said nothing, and followed Braeburn silently into Appleloosa. 3. i) A physical interaction with an inanimate object by a member of the Altering group [see 1. ii)] shall repeat at precisely the same time and place inside all following cycles [see 1. i)], unless acted upon by a member of the Fixed group [see 1. iii)] before the end of any cycle, whereupon the repetition shall cease. See Exp. 9. B–G for further research and related hypotheses. Excerpt from Twilight Sparkle's Field Notes on the Apocalypse