The three mares entered the library. Twilight headed directly to a bookshelf and Applejack stood awkwardly in the middle of the room. Rarity sighed dramatically and brushed her mane out of her eyes as she entered the cool interior of the tree. Her actions were not designed to deliberately draw Spike's attention to her... but she did so enjoy the attention.
"Hey Rarity," the dragon's greeting was simple and monotone.
The lack of any signs of infatuation or desire was unusual for Spike and troubling to the white mare. "Hello Spiky, are you all right?" she answered with the hope of drawing him out.
"I guess so, I'm pretty-*gurble hack blech*!" Spike belched in surprise and a scroll coalesced out of his green fire. The paper scroll was sealed with indigo wax and a raised silver crescent graced the center.
Twilight looked up when she heard Spike's gastrointestinal mail system but her eyes narrowed when she saw the markings on the scroll. "You have got to be kidding me!" She yanked the scroll out of Spike's claws with her magic and focused balefully upon the scroll. "You...Have...Got...To...Be...KIDDING ME!" she growled through clenched teeth as she crumpled up the letter in time with her words. She then flung the offensive object into the fireplace, since that was where letters of this sort were supposed to be flung. She was disappointed that there was no fire in the fireplace, it being high summer, but she felt a small measure of satisfaction from the gesture.
Applejack watched the small drama unfold with worries about her personal safety running through her head.
"Spike?" Twilight addressed her assistant with a voice under absolute iron control. "I'm going to need that amulet you said looks like a brass top, also the medium-sized map of 'Ponyville and Environs'."
"Sure thing," Spike agreed without any protest of debate, raising yet more questions for Rarity. He disappeared through the door to the cellar.
Twilight pulled a book from the shelf and placed it on the table in the center of the library's reading room. At the same time she removed the wooden bust that normally served as a decorative centerpiece. "Ok, you two. I can find them but I'm going to need something that resonates with their magical signature."
Blank looks answered her.
"Something that belongs to them," she explained in simpler terms. "How did you think I was going to find them?"
"Um, magic?" Applejack answered, honestly.
"Rarity? You should know better than this!" the purple mare scolded.
"Dear, magical theory wasn't exactly my strong suit while I was in school and that was longer ago than I'd ever admit to anyone," the white unicorn demurred.
Twilight took a calming breath and then explained. "I can't just 'magic' their location. I need something to provide a sympathetic connection to at least one of them. A cherished toy, a gem they enchanted, a bit of their mane, the blood of a parent or child-"
"Stop, that last one there. We got that." Applejack interrupted.
Rarity's eyes widened, "Applejack, she didn't mention a sister's blood. You don't want to start up any rumors, do you?" Rarity's sing-song delivery was desperately trying to make the issue sound like a lighthearted faux pas.
"The essence of a sister, while sharing some qualities with the target just isn't close enough to allow me to tunnel through the sub-etheral field-" Twilight lectured, only to be interrupted again.
"I heard ya. Do it." Applejack held out her forelimb to Twilight.
"Um, Applejack, sweetie, can I talk to you over here for a moment first?" Rarity frantically beckoned the earth pony into a corner away from Twilight.
While they were rapidly whispering to each other, Spike returned with the requested supplies and spread the map out over the table. Twilight, while not trying to listening in, did hear a few snippets of the hushed argument as she prepared the map and amulet.
".......all that work...." Twilight heard in Rarity's hushed tones.
"....lies....." Applejack countered.
"...Manehattan...?" Rarity asked.
"....family..." Applejack's voice sounded resolute.
"....parents...." Rarity answered, sounding disappointed.
"Fine."
"Fine."
Rarity turned her attention back to Twilight, "Um, Twilight, darling? Is there any chance we could ask you to keep a tiny, tiny, little secret?"
"You mean the fact that Apple Bloom is AJ's daughter, conceived out of wedlock while she was a living with the Oranges in Manehattan? Twilight replied without looking up from her preparations.
Rarity gasped dramatically, "You knew?!?"
"Despite the fact that Applejack is quite possibly the worst liar in all of Equestria, I didn't. At least not for sure. Until now."
"Oh." the white mare said, uncharacteristically embarrassed. “So, is there any chance you could keep that little tidbit to yourself?”
"It’s none of my business." Twilight said dismissively, continuing her work. "If you want to keep lying to everyone about everything, that's your prerogative."
Applejack looked like she was about to be sick.
"Applejack, your hoof please." Twilight ordered, he own held out sole up.
The mare in question approached and cautiously placed her hoof in Twilight's, she smiled with hope of forgiveness as she held hooves with her lavender friend.
Twilight met Applejack’s effort of consolation with a nonplussed, raised eyebrow. She bruskly flipped the mare’s limb over to the more clinical sole-up position. Taking the brass amulet in her aura's grip she stabbed the point down into the soft portion of the mare's foot. Twilight knew that no more than the smallest drop of blood was required for the spell to work. She also knew that Applejack didn't know that and that the farmer had more than a little payback coming to her. Applejack's eyes shot open as she hollered out in pain. Twilight didn't smile at the tiny act of revenge but wanted to.
"All right, that should just about do it," Twilight said with a self-pleased tone as she released the wounded appendage.
Applejack cradled the abused limb to her chest, her eyes accusing Twilight of capital crimes.
"You’re really going to be upset with her for that? After everything else?” Rarity chided.
"Ok, ok. Just find her, all right?" The farmer rubbed her wounded hoof against her fur but accepted it as a form of penance.
"Working on that," Twilight held the amulet in her aura and swung it over the map. At first the shining brass behaved like a pendulum, simply swinging back and forth. As Twilight pushed more of her magic into the item, the droplet of blood began to smoke and sizzle while the weight began to swing over a gradually smaller area of the map. Eventually the chain grew taut and the tip of the amulet pointed at the Whitetail Wood. The tip was not exactly still, it shifted ever so slightly as its target herself moved. "Got her," Twilight exclaimed with triumph.
The two mares and one dragon all peered over the edge of the table to see. "Huh, I guess she went back," Applejack conceded.
"I can teleport there using this spell's connection to her," Twilight explained as the strain of the complicated spell began to show on her. "But…I can't carry anyone else with me," the unicorn gasped. "Meet...me...there?"
"As fast as I can." Applejack vowed.
Twilight vanished in a flash of purple.
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Apple Bloom didn't know where she was going. She didn't know how long or far she had been running. As a working farm-pony she was no stranger to fatigue but this was the most exhausted she had ever been. Every muscle burned, begging for her to stop, screaming for her to drop the nearly catatonic unicorn she carried on her back. With every step her hooves grew heavier and roots and stones she would normally step over without notice caused her to trip and stumble. Each time her gait faltered, the wights gained on them.
Sweetie Belle had kept up with Apple Bloom for the first five miles or so, a miracle bred of terror, but eventually the unicorn could go no further. She had fallen to the earth after tripping, covered in foam and gasping. Apple Bloom had tried asking, pulling, scolding, pushing, screaming, begging, and even reluctantly kicking her friend in an effort to get her moving again. The earth pony's fear climaxed as the skeletal forms broke through the underbrush, mere steps away. She nosed underneath her friend, slinging the foundered filly over her back like a sack of apples, and resumed fleeing the vengeful dead.
Countless miles had passed since Apple Bloom had taken up the burden of her weeping friend. She knew she could run faster and further without the filly on her back but could not abandon her. The pain blinded her to everything but the effort to keep moving. She had no idea if she was running in a particular direction or in circles; she had no landmarks with which to orient herself. She simply ran, forcing breath into burning lungs and pumping her leaden legs, never daring to pause. Her mind only barely registered the flash of purple ahead and to the right. She ran past it, whatever it was, without a moment’s thought.
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Twilight appeared in a flash of purple light, her legs wobbly from the long-distance teleportation. She saw Apple Bloom running towards her with Sweetie Belle draped across her back. The mare smiled warmly, attempting to project a calming presence towards the obviously panicked fillies. She crouched back on her hind legs and opened her forelimbs wide, expecting to gather the lost girls into her arms and comforting them.
As the two shot past her without even a glance, Twilight's brows knit together in confusion as she regarded them over her shoulder. She turned back towards the direction the fillies had come from and her blood ran cold. Six animated skeletons of what appeared to be deer were running towards her with gaits reminiscent of broken puppets. Despite their clumsy movements, the wights were closing the distance rapidly. Their leader, a large stag with a forest of antlers crowning his bare skull, locked his vacant eye-sockets on Twilight. Despite the lack of eyes, Twilight shivered as she felt that she was being observed and judged. The rest of the herd pulled up alongside their leader and joined him in regarding her.
“Um, hello?” Twilight said tentatively.
The stag lowered his head, bringing his jagged and broken antlers to bear on the purple unicorn and charged.
From Apple Bloom’s point of view, Twilight’s yell grew rapidly in volume as the adult galloped into view alongside the running filly. "What did you do?" Twilight demanded of the child.
"They wanna kill Sweetie!" Apple Bloom wailed, explaining but not quite answering the question put to her.
"To where are we running?" Twilight asked, careful not to end her sentence with a preposition.
"Away!" the filly cried breathlessly.
In response, Twilight grasped Sweetie Belle in her aura and shifted the filly to her own back. Apple Bloom's pace increased to match the mare's as the weight was lifted from her. It didn't take long, however, for Twilight to begin to feel the first twinges of muscle fatigue. She wasn't exactly out of shape but having to gallop cross-country while carrying a filly, immediately after a long-range teleportation, performed as the culmination of a very complicated dowsing spell, just minutes after having had her heart broken was a bit much, Twilight admitted to herself as she began to breathe hard. She thought about slowing down and pacing herself as she did during the Running of the Leaves but a glance over her shoulder at the pursuing wights killed that idea stone dead.
Twilight still had the dousing amulet around her neck and a realization came to her as she felt its weight thumping against her chest. Running aimlessly was only delaying their capture, not preventing it. They needed a destination and the drying remnants of Applejack's blood dousing amulet could provide that. Searching for someone who shared half the essence within a sample was complicated, projecting that information onto a map was also complicated, and using that resonance connection for teleportation was even more complex. Using the blood on the device to supply a bearing towards the donor would be simple, so simple she could even do it while running from undead horrors, she hoped.
Twilight began trickling a tiny fraction of her power into the amulet and felt it lift away from her breast. The chain bounced and pulled but it gave her a general direction to follow and that was what they most desperately needed. "Apple Bloom! This way!" she shouted and the filly followed her as they galloped in a long arcing turn. They kept that bearing for several minutes and Twilight began to marvel at the endurance of the earth pony child as she herself struggled to keep running. The wights never wavered in their pace and every time one of the two ponies stumbled, the horrible things gained on them. The skin on Twilight's flanks twitched and crawled as she imagined the filthy bones reaching out to do...things to her. She then realized she had no idea what the skeletal forms were capable of. "Perhaps," she wondered, "the necromancer would know."
"Bloom...what...do...us...if...catch?" the mare asked the Apple Bloom, between gasps for air.
"Dunno...bad...kill?" was the child's less than helpful reply.
Twilight's vision had narrowed into a grey-tinged tunnel filled with clawing branches and tripping roots when she finally glimpsed a glimmer of unfiltered sunlight in the distance. They were close but exhausted; Twilight knew her reserves were running dangerously low and she could see that Apple Bloom had finally reached her limit. "That settles it," she told herself. "We make our stand at the clearing, alone if I have to." Despite her inner monologue, she prayed to Celestia that Applejack had set some sort of land-speed record and would meet them there.
Twilight reviewed her catalog of spells, quickly calculating how much time and energy each would require and weighing those investments against their estimated utility. Her face grew grim as she reviewed her results. She glanced down at the filly desperately stumbling forward in a flight for life. She spared a quick glance over her shoulder and immediately bared her teeth in a rictus of terror. She looked back at the child beside her and when Apple Bloom met her eyes, the Twilight mouthed the words "I'm sorry." The filly's color visibly paled as Twilight tucked her head down and forward and pushed with everything she had for every modicum of speed she could pull from her aching body.
"Twilight! No! Don't leave me!" Apple Bloom screamed with a mixture of terror and utter betrayal.
Twilight was tempted to turn around and tell the filly that it wasn't her that was being abandoned. It was Spike, Shining Armor, her friends, Celestia, and Luna who were going to be abandoned by her. She had found in her calculations no combination of actions and/or spells that could save all three them. "Two out of three isn't that bad," she told herself. Herself answered back, "two out of three is 66% so the last thing you do in life will be to earn a 'D'." She told herself to "Shut up," and concentrated on buying fractions of seconds with damage to her body.
The mare leaped over the last row of ferns and into the thick, golden sunlight. After the half-light gloom of the wood, the unfiltered rays of Celestia's orb felt like plunging into a warm bath. She took one more galloping stride for maneuvering distance and spun. "There are worse places to die," she told herself as she spun to confront the wights. "Been there, done that," she added with a fey laugh.
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"Don't leave me!" the filly begged, unbelieving, as she watched Twilight abandon her and pull further and further ahead. Apple Bloom could now hear the snapping of twigs and crunch of leaves all around her as the pursuing ghosts gained the last few centimeters separating her from them. "I'm going to die, right now," she thought with shock as antlers brushed her flanks. She tore through the ferns, aiming for the thinnest portion of the vegetation. On the other side she found a goddess.
A violet alicorn reared with wings spread wide, rampant as if upon a banner. Her mane streamed out upon an astral wind, an image of the horizon at the moment between day and night. She was a vision of power and beauty beyond mortal limits and the yellow filly's heart broke in that instant. She stumbled and fell, prostrate before this goddess and was powerless to regain her footing.
With a voice like a thunderclap, the alicorn spoke. "Halt specters of the fallen! I abjure thee!"
Apple Bloom then heard a voice from behind her and turned her head to see. The great stag, bones wrapped in spirit addressed the goddess. "Blood," he said in a voice like the rustling of old paper.
"Not from these children!" the alicorn declared and from her horn a translucent wall of magenta energy followed the sharp border of the wood.
The stag's response wasn't verbal. He simply motioned the faun, his murdered son, to stand besides him. His expression dared the divine being before him to find any difference or justification. Apple Bloom, herself quaking before the goddess, tried to imagine the rage that simple act of defiance took.
"Begone!" the alicorn ordered while stamping her hooves, shaking the earth the filly lay upon. The deer turned and without hurry dissolved into their forest.
After several moments the deer failed to re-appear and the goddess turned her attention to the filly. "Well, that went better then expected." she said, smiling radiantly. Apple Bloom responded by immediately passing out.