The night had already descended in the land of Equestria and Luna had brought her moon up to light the sky, along with the millions of stars keeping it company. The landscape seemed frozen because of the lack of equines moving and even the wind had halted. It was one of those beautiful summer nights.
Most of the ponies were sleeping, completely missing this beautiful scenery brought to the ponies by both the nature and the magic of the younger alicorn sister. There were some exceptions, of course, most notable of them being Luna, filling her duties as the goddess of night and guarding her subjects while they were getting the rest they needed.
Among the exceptions was a single drunken stallion living in the town of Ponyville. This stallion, known by his friends as Thunderlane, had had a wonderful night with his friends, who had suddenly all disappeared to enjoy the rest of the night with the cozy blanket over their fragile bodies, leaving Thunderlane alone in the dark. After a while of trying to realise what had just happened the stallion had decided, in his drunken state, that it was best to start heading home instead of crashing at a friend’s place. So, there he was, slowly and unsteadily heading home to get some of the heavenly slumber. It seemed like a normal little walk to him.
Little did he know about the events that would take place during this little walk.
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“Lousy friends leaving me all alone. Stupid alcohol making me all dizzy. Bucking hooves not working properly,” Thunderlane ranted while making his way home, trying to keep on the path but failing horribly at it. At least he hadn’t tripped yet.
He had been at one of Cloudchaser’s parties, known to be the best place for the small group of close friends he had gathered over his lifespan to spend time during a beautiful evening. This time the party had gotten a bit wilder and, understandably, the pipes that brought the alcohol from the barrels stored in Cloudchaser’s basement had been in some pretty hard use. The party had lasted quite long, but suddenly everypony had just either grabbed a partner and left to do Celestia-knows-what or just picked up their stuff and left to sleep. Thunderlane, being in his drunken state, had been left alone and as Cloudchaser had decided to go to bed as well, he had been pushed into the depths of the night without anypony or anything to support him.
Everything around him seemed both so very familiar and something he had never seen before. The mixture of darkness and alcohol was doing its magic with his vision. It also seemed to affect his motor skills, sense of time and brain functionality, the latter one causing for everything around him suddenly seem much more disturbing and scary. The trees were stretching their branches towards him and he could have sworn that something was moving among the large trunks of them. The shrewd little stones were getting in the path of his hooves on purpose and the evil light of the moon was giving life to the surrounding shadows. Everything seemed to have some hostile thoughts towards Thunderlane.
That’s when he started picking up the pace. First it was mainly a pathetic-looking wobble, but soon his brains started to remember the concept of running and his hooves were getting steadier, thus increasing both balance and speed. In no time he was running at full pace, dodging branches and larger stones while trying to build a good picture of his surroundings. He succeeded in the first two ones, but the third one was still quite hard as he didn’t have such a great vision in the dark, even though the moon was providing him with some light. It was only a matter of time when he would bump into something and pretty much every pony in the wide world of Equestria would have realised that it was better to simply halt and take a good look around to see if there actually was something wrong. But Thunderlane’s brain capacity had been reduced by the drink he had been downing quite furiously earlier and the rest of it was being allocated to performing the simplest tasks such as making sure his heart didn’t stop and putting one hoof forward while keeping another one in the ground.
After a good two minutes of running, the bump came. It wasn’t a light bump, but rather a bump that managed to both sober Thunderlane up a little and give him a nice little headache that was surely going to develop into a much worse one after the hangover would arrive.
Upon the impact, Thunderlane immediately fell to the ground. The stinging pain in his head triggered a reflex that flung his hooves towards his head to try and cover the hurt spot. He stayed in that position for a good while, lying on the ground, forehooves over his head and face pressed into the soft soil he was lying on. He didn’t count minutes, but something close to twenty must have passed without him moving a bit. To some passer-by it would have looked like he was sleeping.
After the headache was starting to get a bit better, he finally lifted his head up to have a look at the thing he had bumped into. Surely enough it was a tree, quite a big one in his opinion. The tree had survived without any major damage; the biggest thing Thunderlane’s head had managed to do was a small spot where the bark had either gotten damaged or fallen completely off. Nothing permanent.
He cursed under his breath, took a quick look around and decided that it would be the best to get home to have a better look at the damage the tree had done to him. He got up on all fours and turned towards the path that was running just next to the tree he had had the little accident with. He was about to step on the harder soil of the path and just keep on going, trying to forget about the little embarrassing incident, but the cracking sound of a twig snapping in two froze him on his tracks. He slowly turned back to face the blackness that resided behind him to judge if he should be running or walking back home. He saw nothing but the silhouettes of the trees and the occasional ray of moonlight making its way through the gaps between the leaves of the green coat every tree had. Once again he was about to turn his face back towards the path and keep on heading home, but this time a voice, the voice of a mare, to be exact, stopped him.
“So, how’s the little late-night walk going? Having a lot of fun? Meeting some new friends? Getting in nearly-fatal fights with trees? Don’t spare the details,” the voice said, the source of it still unknown to Thunderlane. He was shaking at this point, so he didn’t manage to process a good answer for the voice. After waiting for a while, the voice continued.
“So, did the evil tree steal your tongue? Better check out,” the voice said and soon after that something, strangely resembling a pony, floated out of the darkness and towards the tree. Thunderlane hesitated for a while, but eventually turned towards the tree to see who or what the source of this voice was.
He didn’t see anything but the backside of the thing, that he could now confirm to be an equine, having the body shape of a pony, limbs like a pony, mane and tail like a pony and generally everything a pony had, making this thing Thunderlane’s type of species, a pony. It seemed to have the coat colour of violet, although the darkness could have fooled Thunderlane’s eyes. It was an earth pony. At least it didn’t seem to have any wings or horns anywhere. The pony also seemed to be a mare, judging by the shapes of its body.
With Thunderlane watching, the mare literally opened the tree, almost tearing it two, with bare hooves, lifted the upper part upwards and stuck one hoof in, as if she was trying to dig something out of the tree.
“Hmm. Let’s see if we have a pony’s tongue here,” she said and started pulling out things.
“A Cat’s, a rat’s, a dog’s and a wild hog’s, but no tongue of pony here,” she said, pulling out four things that seemed to be tongues of different animals judging by both the resemblance and what she had just said. “That means you still have yours in your mouth.”
The mare placed the upper half of the tree safely on top of the lower half and suddenly the parts were fused together again, as if nothing had ever happened to them. She turned around, looked at Thunderlane and started walking towards him. Seeing the mare get closer caused Thunderlane to panic a bit and he tried to use his hooves to back away from the approaching mare, but found them quite useless. There was only a single thing he could do to stop the mare from doing whatever she was going to do.
“Stop!” Thunderlane shouted, slight panic in his voice. The mare stopped and observed Thunderlane for a second or two before speaking up again.
“There we go, it wasn’t that hard. Now, can you do other words or is your vocabulary extremely limited for an adult stallion like you? We could start off with you telling me your name. That sounds like an easy task, doesn’t it?” the mare asked, looking at Thunderlane and cocking her head to the side a bit. Now that Thunderlane was able to get a better look, her actual coat colour seemed to be a bit lighter than the actual violet, but Thunderlane had never been too good with colours and their names, so he just decided that the coat of the mare was light violet.
But the coat was not the important thing about the mare. The most important and extraordinary thing was, by far, the propeller beanie the mare was wearing. No matter how much Thunderlane tried, he couldn’t get his eyes off the hat. It simply didn’t make sense. The mare seemed to notice this too, judging by the look she gave.
“Admiring my fabulous headpiece, are you now? How nice, a lady always likes to get noticed. And that is what colts aim for, making ladies feel nice. Complicated stuff,” she said, clearly getting a little distracted. Thunderlane used this opportunity.
“Who are you?” he asked, bringing the mare back into reality.
“Well isn’t that rude of you, I asked you first. Answer my question and I’ll answer yours,” she said, obviously getting a bit frustrated. Thunderlane had no other option but to give away some information about himself to this pony that seemed like a total lunatic, an action he was surely going to regret later on.
“Mine is Thunderlane. Now, tell me yours,” he said, attempting to take on a bit more formal tone as he realised that everything he had said before had been said with his drunken, somewhat-slurred voice.
“Thou asketh for me to give away my name and abandon my anonymity?” she replied while performing a motion with her hoof, a motion that surely had some kind of a meaning Thunderlane didn’t understand. He decided to repeat the question, as he really wanted to know who he could report to the local police station after this incident was over.
“Tell me your name,” he said, gaining an offended look in return.
“And why should I tell it to you?” the mare answered.
“Because you said you’d answer my question. What is your name? That is my question,” Thunderlane replied, getting quite annoyed by this whole situation.
“Yes, I do recall doing so, but your question, word-to-word, was ‘Who are you?’. That is the question I’m going to answer, if you would be a dear and keep your mouth shut for a second and give me the time to put together a valid sentence,” the mare said. It took a while for Thunderlane to understand, but eventually he realised that there was, in fact, an offense hidden into that blur of fancy talk the mare had spat out. Just as he was about to shout an angry ‘hey!’ at the mare, she opened her mouth and provided Thunderlane with the answer to his question.
“I am the thing that resides in every single one of you. I am the thing that is often shunned and even locked away. Yet, still, I am the thing that has been there, creating every single one of the greatest achievements of the ponykind. I am the wisest stallion to walk on the surface of this planet and I am the poor fellow locked into a padded white room. I am your mayor, your friends, you mother, your father and you. Who am I, you ask?” the mare said and started slowly walking closer to Thunderlane. He tried to retreat, return to the path and just run away and have a police officer or two scan the area in the morning, but his hooves were bound to the ground by the roots of the nearest tree. He was unable to move and the mare was getting closer and closer, a wicked grin on her face. When her face was only inches away from Thunderlane’s, she stopped, leaned over, positioned her lips close to Thunderlane’s left ear and whispered:
“I am madness.”