The air picked up and flung a hooful of dust straight at her face. She squeezed her eyes shut as it whipped against her skin. It stung, but she was so familiar with the pain that her brain only allowed her to feel a minimal amount. The wind howled its resentment before screaming off to some invisible horizon. Warily, she opened her eyes again.
In front of her was a small sliver of the stripped illusion that had made up her old life. Before, it had been decorated with countless confections, vibrant green confetti laden with heavy red ornaments that appealed to all the senses. It was once a shifting environment that promoted the idea that things were ever changing and that everything was individual, the seasons of a simple life chasing each other like children at play. But now, with its mask stripped away, any passerby could see the truth. That everything was black and made out of grit. That nothing was gold, only gilded. That nothing was worth anything, and everything was worth nothing. That these withered husks that sat before her made up all of reality, and that it was nothing but a wooden cemetery, the headstones of which stretched on for acres.
Beneath each tree rested a sacrifice. There were all types of sacrifices, life changing and insignificant, each bled from a pony who so loyally tended this land, until they had nothing more to give and simply collapsed onto the parasitic earth, and rotted into reality. As for what they had sown? It grew out of the ground and performed its own masquerade before any number of irresistible forces decided to tear down its façade. She didn’t doubt that more than a few of them sprouted from her own wasted efforts. Her own stupidity disgusted her now. How ignorant was she that she missed the point of the same redundant lecture over and over for the heaping majority of her life?
Before the endless maze of tombs, however, there was a margin of cleared earth, and in it rested her one, true accomplishment. In a rough heap of semi familiar shapes, a massive mountain of charred objects towered. The ruinous silhouette flowed naturally with the dusty atmosphere and stood out as its own shadow against lighter patches of grey in the sky, where the sun hid itself from the view of the wasteland. It was the only monument to her ideas, and its height and width proved her devotion to the truth.
She rested, her eyes traveling the present’s landscape with no objective. A few dust filled gusts caught her unaware, but she simply closed her eyes, just because it felt good to. And so she was, her vision alternating between the earth shifting around the trees to pure darkness periodically. She must have sat there for hours, but as far as she knew it could have been an entire day or just a few minutes. The air had begun to cool, and it battered her body with more force and higher frequency. She stood up, shuffled towards the door, fighting briefly with the wind to shut it, before grudgingly turning around to the new environment.
Everything was covered with layers of dust. It had invaded and occupied the house long ago, even back then when the windows were boarded and wet cloth was hung to prevent it, but the only thing it prevented was the dust from leaving. There was a breach somewhere in the house stirring up the otherwise completely stagnant air. Even though it put some dust in her eyes, she was grateful for it. She didn’t want to see any more than she had to, anyway. She hated this place because it made her sick. She suffered from a gut wrenching sickness that was hidden deep inside of her and when agitated seemed to flood every part of her body with cool, liquid lead. But she needed this place because it toughened her resolve and trained her to be less vulnerable against the sickness.
She had tried to cure it before, by taking a random assortment of antibiotics periodically in the hopes that one would work, but there was no real way to tell which ones to continue and which ones to discard. She reasoned that she might eventually accidentally take a mix of drugs that might kill her, but in the end it was the lack of determinable success that drove her away. Finding a doctor was impossible, and would only make the sickness worse. She had barely even reclaimed the town from unbearable levels of intensity, her increased tolerance lowering the sickness down to an almost negligible level, and couldn’t imagine all the pain it would take to find a doctor outside of it. It was impossible to do anything but resist the sickness.
Still, even after three years of reclaiming the town, this house still had a strong effect on her, and that was why it was good for training. With her escape blocked off by the approaching dust storm, however, she stepped over to the nearest window and pretended that she was outside again.
That was when a rainbow cut through the grey sky, blazingly vivid and abrasive against the dull backdrop.
For a moment, confusion struck her. And then the sickness took hold. And then anger poured out through some open wound deep inside that she forgot she had, not countering the sickness, but inflaming it. The rainbow began to bend back towards the house at a blisteringly fast speed, and she ducked beneath boarded window cursing in a harsh whisper.
A moment or two passed, and then…
“APPLEJACK? APPLEJACK!”
She covered her ears as best she could. The sickness and anger were pounding at the back of her skull, making her want to scream out in rage and pain. She whimpered. She heard hoofsteps coming up the stairs of the porch, and then a heavy thud of something being dropped. She began to crawl as fast as she could to get behind a kitchen counter and be out of sight from the porch windows.
“AJ, IT’S ME, RAINBOW!” A familiar voice hollered over the wind. “ARE YOU HERE?”
She peered out from behind the counter to check if she had locked the door. The knob jerked back and forth futilely. She saw a pair of ruby eyes surrounded by a sky blue face pop up and try to peak through boarded windows through the corner of her eye. She jerked her head back around the counter, shaking and hyperventilating. She looked to her over and saw a trail of displaced dust from her crawling, leading right back to the window. She knew she wasn’t the only one seeing it. Her head banged her head against the counter in despair. The sickness had flooded her limbs and made them useless, seizing and strengthening itself by preventing her escape from the voice outside.
“AJ, KNOW THAT YOU’RE HERE! IF YOU DON’T OPEN THE DOOR, I’M GOING TO BUCK IT DOWN!”
She was paralyzed in fear. Copious amounts of sweat trickled down her skin, staining the counter and making the dust stick to her.
“AT LEAST LET ME KNOW YOU’RE OK, FOR CELESTIA’S SAKE!”
She tilted her head up in fear and pain, and after taking a deep breath, she screamed.
“AH’M FINE!” Her voice sounded like her vocal cords had rusted. She couldn’t remember speaking above a whisper for the last year or so.
“I BROUGHT YOU SOME REAL GOOD STUFF TO EAT THIS TIME, APPLEJACK! NONE OF THAT CANNED STUFF, ALL HOMEMADE PRESERVES THAT RARITY AND PINKIE MADE! HOW ABOUT YOU LET ME IN AND WE SHARE SOME OF IT, OK?”
She almost thought she heard a bit of hope in her voice, an odd type genuine enthusiasm that she couldn’t peg for a second. Why did they keep coming back and try to get her out of the house? She wanted to be alone, she didn’t want the sickness to turn her into a useless heap of flesh. For some reason they didn’t understand. They just wanted to play nice while she was in agony, an agony they seemed to not realize they were connected to. She was perfectly content when they weren’t around. If they wanted her to play nice with them, fine. Whatever it took to make them leave.
“THANK YOU FOR THE OFFER, BUT AH THINK AH’D LIKE TO BE ALONE RIGHT NOW, IF YOU DON’T MIND.”
Anger filled the other voice now. “YOU’VE BEEN ALONE FOR THREE ENTIRE YEARS, AJ! GRANNY SMITH DIED SIX MONTHS AGO AND YOUR BROTHER HAD TO DO THE EULOGY! ALL HE DID WAS WEEP FOR HALF AN HOUR, AND THEN HE COULDN’T THINK OF ANYTHING TO SAY, SO HE STARTED CRYING AGAIN. AND HERE YOU ARE, BURNING THINGS. SORRY, APPLEJACK, BUT THAT’S NOT HOW A NORMAL PONY GRIEVES! PONIES NEED YOU, AJ!”
Hot tears scalded her cheeks, causing a thick rage like she’d never felt before to rise up through her throat from a fissure somewhere deep in her core. It tore through every shred of civility and every nice nuance she could muster before finally pouring out of her. It even slightly subdued the sickness.
“AH DON’T REMEMBER ASKIN’ YOU TO COME HERE AND JUDGE ME. IN FACT, AH DON’T RECKON AH ASKED YOU TO COME HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE!” She cried, choking on sobs and rage. “IF THESE PONIES NEED ME SO BAD THEN WHY DON’T THEY WAIT? WHY DON’T YOU HELP THEM? CAN’T Y’ALL SEE I’M TRYIN’ TO MOURN? Y’ALL ARE RUINING ME BY COMIN’ HERE, RUINING EVERYTHING I’M WORKING ON. WHY DON’T Y’ALL JUST LEAVE ME ALONE?”
She sat there slumped against the counter, heaving, sputtering. The wind occupied the silence with its own rage, screaming the truth at her, at the pony outside, at the graves, and everything else in the wasteland that was too idiotic to understand that the world of the swirling, battering winds wasn’t dead, but that it was the world.
The storm had reached its apex, and the torrential cacophony seemed to fill the space of the house with sound as it beat it like a drum. Though her body was shivering and sobbing, deep down in her mind everything was calm and serene. The sickness had retreated a little, and the truth, her truth, gently cradled her to a peaceful sleep.