//------------------------------// // Cicadas // Story: Ghosts of Whitetail Wood // by Biochi //------------------------------// The midsummer sun hung high in the sky; pouring bright, thick ropes of light down onto a sea of green grass. Half hidden by the prairie’s height was a filly with a yellow coat and bright red hair pulled back by a ribbon. The young pony panted as she strained against both the thatch-like thickness of the wild grassland and the hot, humid air. Except for the occasional grunt as Apple Bloom pushed her way forward, the normal sounds of the prairie were absent. The birds were hiding underneath the grass canopy, listlessly panting in the heat instead of singing. The scurrying of mammals was absent too, as they also were hiding in their burrows in an attempt to sleep through the worst of the heat. To Apple Bloom, the hot, humid air seemed to be held in place by the tall, thin stalks surrounding her, weaving a thick blanket out of the stagnant air. Every breath she took was redolent of moist, black soil, rotting vegetation, and her own sweat. Her short stature meant that her eyes did not crest above the level of the grass, bringing her eye to compound eye with countless grasshoppers singing from their grass pulpits. Apple Bloom kept her head down as she walked, carefully assessing her path for hidden divots which threatened the possibility of a broken ankle. Her posture made her mane an attractive landing site for the swarms of leafhoppers she disturbed with her passage and soon she was covered with a crawling menagerie. She wasn’t using her eyes to guide her path, all she could have seen from her vantage was green stalks. Instead, she navigated by trusting her rapidly swiveling ears as they tracked the thrumming of cicadas. She was seeking the swarm that had emerged a few days ago and were now blanketing the trees of the forest she sought, the Whitetail Wood. This swarm was something unique in her experience, as different from the normal cicadas she saw every summer in her family’s orchard as a forest fire differed from a campfire. She could hear the great swarm all the way from the farm, their alien call pulsing and throbbing from miles away. Unlike her usual adventures with the Crusaders she hadn’t invited Sweetie Bell to come along. Apple Bloom felt a flash of guilt at the thought but then she tried to imagine the unicorn filly pushing her way through the bug infested grassland to see a swarm of cicadas and just simply couldn’t. Scootaloo she had invited and was disappointed that the orange pegasus scoffed at her idea. Apple Bloom had tried to explain to her that the great cicada swarm only emerged once every seventeen years and was huge, consisting of millions of cicadas. She had maintained her refusal, however, explaining to Apple Bloom as if she were slow: “Bugs aren’t cool. Therefore, a whole lot of bugs isn’t cool either.” She believed that Scootaloo's logic was flawed in some fundamental way. The scale of the event was what made it different from every summer in her memory and therefore irresistible. While she loved her two best friends dearly she felt that they lacked a proper level of appreciation for natural wonders of this sort. "Maybe its ‘cause they are from Ponyville town instead of from a farm?" she wondered to herself. It was immediately followed by the less charitable thought, "Maybe it's 'cause they aren't Earth Ponies?" Distracted as she was by her own thoughts, the filly stumbled when she broke through the margin of the dense grassland. Stepping into the forest was like falling into a pond. The shade of the trees abruptly cut off the sun’s assault and the suddenly cooler air came as both a shock and a relief. Without the thick wall of grass stems separating her from the swarm, the droning buzz crescendoed, obliterating all other sounds. Her mouth and eyes agape with wonder, she recovered her balance and reverently entered the quickly thickening forest. All around her the trunks and limbs squirmed with life. Black bodies, adorned with flashing red eyes and prismatic wings, pushed and jostled each other for space on the bark of the engulfed trees. The losers of this shoving match rained down around her; drunkenly arcing as they beat their wings in a vain attempt to avoid the ground. At the base of each tree, a puddle of squirming chitin fought with itself in a race to rejoin the bizarre scrum. The swarm's song was so strong at this point that Apple Bloom could feel each and every one of her hairs vibrate in sympathy. The odd sensation made the skin on her back and haunches jump and twitch in response. After several minutes of pure wonder, the filly broke free of the swarm's spell, smiled, and set off deeper into the forest. While the Whitetail Wood was far more tame and open than the dreaded Everfree Forest, the ground was covered with disoriented insects each only slightly smaller than one of her hooves. After the first squelching pop of insect murder to reach her ears, Apple Bloom froze with a grimace on her face. She wiped the remains from her hoof with a degree of fastidiousness that would have made Rarity proud. Restarting, she adopted a shuffling gait that pushed the insects out of the way of her hooves as she continued her journey deeper into the wood. The forest grew darker as she continued onwards and the dim, green light scintillated off of the millions of wings around her. Apple Bloom’s head began to feel light and fuzzy as the buzzing built past the threshold of sound and became a pattern of vibration that caused her entire body to oscillate. She felt the first twinge of fear as the solid surety of the world began to dissolve around her. Trees began to shift position and swim through her vision and her breath began to speed up again. She searched for the sun; for anything that could give her a point to orient with. Instead she only found muted and dappled light playing across the strange living blanket of cicadas. She wanted to bolt but restrained herself, unable to squish so many bugs at one time. Her teeth bared in suppressed panic, she shuffled as fast as she could but knew that she was lost and wandering. In the back of her mind, where rationality still held sway, she knew that the forest was huge. The Running of the Leaves took all day to complete and that was at a running pace along a known path. Shuffling as she was and unable to see any landmarks, the rational part of her mind decided that panic was a totally reasonable response to this situation. The filly began to whimper as she entered the strange mental space of panicking without being able to run. In the depths of her distress, she suddenly caught a glimpse of hope. A flash of white flank disappearing behind one of the larger trunks. "Hay! You there! Hello! Can you help me?" She shouted to the fleeting figure while shuffling towards it as fast as she could. She didn't see anypony for several heart-stopping seconds but then she saw another flash of white, bounding away from her. "No! Please! Come back! I'm lost!" she screamed, tears brimming. "Help," she whispered in defeat when whoever it was didn't turn around or answer her. Forcing her tears to stop, Apple Bloom exhaled once to summon her courage and then turned around in hopes to follow her own tracks out of the forest. "Ahhhhh!" she screamed as she turned and saw a strange, white face only a few centimeters from her own. The creature looked almost like a pony but to the filly’s eyes it seemed subtly wrong in every way. Its face was longer and more narrow than a pony's should be and its ears were long and tall like a donkey's. It had a pair of horns like a goat but they branched like trees reaching into the sky. The most disturbing thing was its eyes. They were solid black and bottomless. She had no idea how anypony could see with eyes like that. The creature turned from her as if it was going to bolt but it didn't run. Instead it paused, as if waiting for her. Apple Bloom's heart gave a flutter of hope and she shuffled towards the white being as quickly as she could while whispering "Thank you," in a shaking voice. Once she got within a meter of it, the creature leaped like a giant rabbit. Unlike a pony, the creature didn’t walk or run but bounded, covering meters with each bounce. It paused again at the limit of Apple Bloom’s vision as the filly took several minutes to awkwardly shuffle across the forest floor. The pair of them kept up this dance for what felt like an age, until eventually golden sunlight peeked out from between closely spaced trunks. Apple Bloom let loose a breath she didn’t know she was holding as the forest’s edge and her salvation came into view. The white creature stopped it’s bouncing pace and took a few normal steps to meet Apple Bloom scant meters within the edge of the forest. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" the filly gushed in relief and gratitude while closing the distance between her and her silent saviour, intending to deliver a rib-cracking hug to the being. As she approached she suddenly noticed something which didn’t make any sense. The strange, bifurcated hooves the creature walked on weren’t crunching or squishing any of the cicadas covering the ground. She stopped dead in her tracks as she watched the being’s hooves pass through the layer of insects without causing any harm. Apple Bloom’s eyes bulged as she looked back up at the creature's body. In the gloom of the deep forest it had appeared as solid and real as anything; but here, in Celestia’s light, she could look through its translucent body and see the grass of the prairie swaying gently in a subtle breeze. The filly’s mouth worked noiselessly as her mind struggled to comprehend what she was seeing. Involuntarily, she blinked and when her eyes reopened the creature was gone as if it had never been there. Apple Bloom screamed as she galloped off into the tall grass. ---------------------------------------- Twilight believed that she might be dreaming. The first reason was that she had wings, again. Ever since she and Luna had started dating, whenever she closed her eyes the feathery appendages would make their unsolicited appearance. It wasn’t that dreaming that one was an alicorn was all that uncommon but, to Twilight, having her subconscious create wings for her every single time she slept without them being part of any nocturnal narrative seemed criminally inefficient. The second reason was that there was a head of cabbage with a blue, ethereal mane looking up at her from her kitchen table. It was quite the feat for something without eyes. She returned the imploring look with a glare. “I told you that I'd write when I was ready to talk.” “It has been over a week. Ms. Rarity assures me that such prolonged silence is a breach of etiquette, therefore I am justified in seeking you out.” The Brassica had spoken with Luna’s voice. "Has she.” Twilight answered in a tone that boded ill for her unicorn friend. “Well, I'm certainly not going to talk to you like...like this,” the purple mare said while gesturing to the table. “You look utterly ridiculous" “I don’t care! You’ve thrown up so many walls around your dreaming I could only get inside by latching onto another symbol. I did not have any other way to get in touch with you.” “Have you heard about this new invention we’ve developed in the last thousand years? Its called the postal service,” Twilight’s verbal sparring with Luna was without humor and dripping with bitter sarcasm. “I’ve already written you a dozen times!” the cabbage’s voice was beginning to rise with anger of her own. “And the fact that I haven’t answered you should have told you that I wasn’t in the mood to talk yet!” Twilight bit the cabbage where the middle of its forehead would have been, opened the oven on her stove, and tossed the offending vegetable inside. She slammed the door shut and, after a moment’s thought, cranked the appliance’s temperature to its highest setting. Twilight smiled in satisfaction and turned away from the stove as soon as smoke began to drift out of the oven. She trotted out the open doorway to the main reading room and, as she passed through the poral, she blinked and found herself standing inside Sugarcube Corner, hock-deep in blueberry jam. All around her, thousands of minuscule Pinkie Pies cavorted, danced, sang and swarm in the fruity condiment. She sighed, remembering the Mirror Pool fiasco, “Well, at least I know where this dream came from," she said to herself. "Is someone frowny-wrouny?"one of the Pinkies asked. “Yes Pinkie, I am frowny-” she cut herself off as she noticed that the miniature horse that spoke to her was midnight blue. She reached out with her aura and lifted a very tiny Luna from the writhing sea of pink hyperactivity. “-wrouny.” “Why won’t you talk to me?” The miniature goddess asked in a wounded voice. “You threw a restaurant at somepony,” Twilight said with anger evident in her voice. “In particular, you chose to pick up and throw the one we were having our dinner in.” "He called you a rude name," the miniature Luna sniffed and managed to look indignant despite her size. "And I paid for both the medical bills and the damages." "I don't care!" Twilight shouted at her. "There are going to be jerks anywhere we go. You can't just chuck twenty tons of masonry at a pony for being an ignorant bigot!" "In the days before my banishment, anyone who spoke to one of my concubines in such a manner would have been gelded." "...Con...cu...bine?" Fire glimmered in the depths of Twilight Sparkle's eyes. "Oh bugger” said the princess of the night as she realized her mistake. Twilight tossed the miniature version of Luna back towards the kitchen, used her magic to tear the gas line from the wall, and then ignited the flammable vapor with a spark from her horn. Fire quickly spread through the bakery, partly due to being spread by the swarm of burning miniature pink ponies running to and fro. She could feel the heat but knew it had no power to harm her so she stepped through the flames and began climbing the stairs that would normally lead to the apartments above the shop. Once Twilight had discovered Luna’s ability to dreamwalk, she had dedicated herself to mastering the art of lucid dreaming. She could not tolerate the thought of somepony else traipsing around inside her subconscious without having any say in the matter. The purple mare bit her tongue and pulled on her training, closing her eyes while focusing on the pain. Opening her eyes, she smiled as she saw the pale and cratered landscape she had ordered her dreaming mind to produce. Twilight looked up into the airless sky and saw her homeworld floating above her, bright and blue. "This is playing dirty, Twilight,." Luna said, sadness clear in her voice. The princess was waiting for her, of course she was, Luna was the Queen of Dreams. Twilight knew that she didn’t have the power or control yet to simply expel Luna from her sleeping mind but she knew how to make the persistent mare pay for violating her privacy. Luna's form stretched and darkened until Nightmare Moon stood before her. "This is who I was when I was last here. Is this who you want to talk to?" Twilight's heart beat faster at the sight of the illusion, despite knowing it for what it was. "Is this the mare who nearly crushed a pony to death for nothing more than words?" Twilight's gaze locked with the dragon-slitted eyes confronting her, until Luna's filled with tears and broke contact. "No, it wasn't. I can't blame her for that." She shrunk as she spoke, resuming her previous form. The alicorn's tears boiled away while falling through the airless void surrounding them, never reaching the lunar dust. "I'm sorry, Twilight. I'm so sorry." Twilight's heart hurt seeing Luna like this and she fought with all of her will not to run to Luna's embrace and tell her it was all better. Shaking with the effort, she maintained her distance and spoke. "I know you are. I also know you don't mean anything by it when you misspeak. Sometimes, I wish you did." Genuinely confused, Luna simply said "What?" "If you had any malice or did these things because you were selfish, or insensitive, or mean, or...anything; I could then just be angry with you and that would be it. Instead, it's mistake after innocent mistake and it makes me want to scream. I'm so sick of forgiving you again and again but you don't do any of it on purpose. If I treated you like you were, then I'd be the bad person." She sighed and frustration colored her words. "There's so much I love about you but you are driving me crazy. That's why I wanted to take this break. I just need to calm down and go a week or two without some sort of horrible disaster upending my life." "Why didn't you just tell me all this? You left me with barely a word and then nothing for a whole week." Luna asked. "Because its stupid. I sound stupid saying it and I hate sounding stupid." Twilight's eyes were watering now. "Its not, but I can't promise not to make any more mistakes. I'm still learning so much." Twilight closed her eyes and bit back a sarcastic "Are you?" but she wasn't sure if that did any good here. "Yet more things to deal with when dating an alicorn." she thought to herself, hoping it actually was to herself. Upon opening her eyes, she saw Luna's stricken face and had her answer about the privacy of her thoughts within dreams. "Luna, I'm sorry. I'm just so frustrated...between our schedules, the paparazzi, the security details...I don't know if I can do this any more." She sighed, "Maybe we should just-" "No!" Luna's use of the Canterlot voice was predictable but effective and Twilight stopped talking. "We still have options we haven't tried yet. I'm begging you to just give us one more chance. In the name of everything we've been through together, I beg of you. Just once more." "How will it be different this time, Luna?" Twilight asked with dread and hope mixed in equal measure within her heart. "For a start," Luna pronounced, "We shall come to you, in Ponyville." "You have the Night Court, meetings with your staff, Celestia, and-." "Let them all hang," Luna declared. Twilight's mouth dropped open. "That is a figure of speech." "Oh...You can't just do that," Twilight recovered. "Who exactly is going to stop me?" she smiled. "Duty." Twilight replied without a pause. "Celesta hasn't been... right since the whole Chrysalis and Grogar thing." Fear creased the unicorn's features as she remembered something unpleasant. "Are you really OK with leaving the kingdom in her hooves, alone?" "She ruled for ten centuries without me, she won't destroy Equestria if I take a long weekend." "A...long weekend?" Twilight asked, hope finally leaking into her voice. "How long?" "I'm thinking I'll fly out Friday, tomorrow morning, and leave Monday night. We can have a nice, quiet weekend in Ponyville. We don't need to do anything special or exciting. Just time for us to be together. No disasters." Twilight's voice shook from the ping-ponging of her emotions, "Th-that would be nice." Luna approached Twilight and craned her neck over and around the smaller mare's in a hug. "Please, let me try." "OK." Twilight agreed while sniffing back tears. "So, did we make up?" Luna asked the purple unicorn. "Yeah...for now." Twilight returned the embrace. Luna squeezed tighter. "Dearest, I read several books about relationships this last week." "That means a lot, Luna. I appreciate that you are putting effort into this." "Several of them referred to traditional activities usually taken after making up from an argument." Luna gave Twilight her special smile. "Lu-na!" Twilight scolded with a giggle. After thinking about it for a second, Twilight grinned to herself and shifted her head around to allow them to begin their making up in earnest. "Twilight!" The unicorn faintly heard her name called in the distance. "Luna? Did you hear that?" She asked. "Twilight!" A country twang flattened the "i's" in her name to "a's." "No, I heard nothing." The alicorn leaned into Twilight, angling so as to kiss her. "Ignore it or else you might-" "-Wake up," Twilight finished as she opened her eyes. Above her was her ceiling and she was laying on her couch, where she had gone to nap. Sitting up and rubbing her eyes she started a curse to express her acute frustration, "Bugg-" It was then she opened her eyes and noticed Apple Bloom standing directly in front of her. She was covered head to fetlocks in burrs, thistles, and various insects and was very obviously distressed. "-gs." she finished in an attempt to preserve innocent ears.