//------------------------------//
// Chapter 4. The Lost Generations 
// Story: Apples: Immortal Tree 
// by Julia 
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There was no hiding what had happened, Applejack feared. But she had grown quite close to the thought she was deathly honest. Honest straight to the grave. She choked up the courage to face Big McIntosh, who merely asked her what was it that brung her to such a terrible break down. Was it Granny Smith's death, was it the changes which flooded over the years that would leave Equinopolis forever different, or was it just the angst of life. McIntosh really knew how to pull Applejack's heartstrings when it came to self-assessing and self-help, and he only got better now that he was married to a teacher. Applebloom, despite being all banged up by her older sister, still was too stubborn to allow her to refuse help from her. She too tried to get answers from her sister, and did not take any substitutes this time. Bringing up the fact that she was older and more than ready to take on certain truths as she did that beating, Applebloom eagerly awaited the answer. As did Big McIntosh. This whole situation and the thoughts and concerns circling fiercely like a storm in Applejack's head sent her into a flashback, and the pain of dying did also.




Applejack could remember that day as if it were yesterday. She awoke as a young filly in the company of both Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash, who were styling one another's manes. She coughed and noticed she had quite a sniffle with her, she stood up and looked around scardily, noticing she was alive once again. She looked up to the ceiling and at the walls, windows showing outside to a bright, sunny day with rainbows arching over the sky. The sweet scent of flowers shot through her nostrils, and very soon she realized the pollen was tinkering with her allergies, well, at least of this generation. 

"Twilight! Twilight! Where are you?! Megan! Twilight! Posey? Fire...fly?" she realized that she was within a different timeline, possibly even a different dimension. She could not bare the thought of never seeing her friends again, but now, all she could do was hide behind the skin she now was clothed in and play along until she got herself some answers. 

"Applejack? You okay?" Pinkie asked as she strutted over to her and nuzzled her shoulder and neck. "You're shivering, like you've just seen a ghost!"

"Yeah Applejack! You seem quite spooked, as in that manner which Pinkie just addressed," Rainbow Dash said with a laugh, a laugh far to girlish to fit present Rainbow's at all. Applejack had met the Rarity of this world, and looking back in retrospect, she could now tell that the souls of Rarity and Rainbow had to have been either swapped or turned down completely for the next life, because there was no way that that could have been Rainbow Dash. From a pony who she had to style manes with to a pony who was just as rugged and daring as she was. Maybe not enough to drink a potion that would kill her, but daring enough. 

Applejack chuckled, "Oh, it's nothing!" Applejack knew she was in for one heck of a ride. 




It would be another three thousand years before she began to experience even the slightest bit of pain from traveling from time to time and being reborn as much as a Buddhist monk with a time machine, and even then it would take another ten thousand (so thirteen thousand years) before she actually had to find an effective way to cancel out the pains, and that same method stuck with her for the rest of the fifty thousand years to her current life in the future timeline. 

Through this generation to the timelines leading up to the next, she figured she should learn more deeply on the choice she made pertaining to her dimensional jump, and came to the conclusion that the dimension and timeline which she jumped from was the Mother Dimension. Even she did not like the science fiction-esque name she labeled it, but it would have to do for all eternity. NOT implying she as in she liked science fiction, not that that there was anything wrong with science fiction... Applejack was more of a western style pony, except for that Cowcolts and Aliens, she did not like that. 

But Applejack surely knew that if it were possible to go back to the Mother Dimension, which her research actually supported, through flashbacks of a realm of memories and visions of future events that include her actually experiencing changes in body physique as well as even biases, she knew time travel was a given in her near future. But... time travel, how? Time machine? Hidden powers? Leaning towards finding a method of performing the latter, Applejack left her friends once again to find out the truth, well, not really truth, but more like a way. A way to travel back in time. Surely, as crazy as all of this sounded at first, especially to somepony like herself, she had to realize she had just traveled through space and time, literally AND TIME, to a different timeline or dimension with not only her past memories but also with a spiritual awareness of the fact she had only done this and was able to do it via soul exchange and astral projection. 

As a soul was invisible but possibly detectable due to experience-able feelings, Applejack knew such a force would be able to perform pretty amazing feats, like traveling through space and time, for example. If she could harness the soul's full potential, especially after being exposed to what it could do as in bending the very physics which bound it, then she would be able to do anything, unrestrained and unrestricted. She ventured away from the girly rainbows and giggling, bubbly madness of what she was born into and searched intensely for any dark forces that could be of any help at all to her cause. 

She found a dark forest in her voyage on the lush terrains of which she explored, and this would later be burned into her mind as a precursor to the present Everfree Forest. She found a large, strangely ornamented flower-shaped tree with many smaller flowers and vines of thorns embracing it tightly. This tree bore a crystal which was deathly pale and looked fairly dead, not up to the shine which its host shone with its bright, blooming scarlet flowers. They no longer tickled the pony's nose, as it had already been one hundred years and her body had perfected due to a future Applejack being born and not having the allergy that once was. She then wondered if she could make for herself a time-resistance, just in case there be an Applejack who gets herself killed or something terrible and it affects past Applejack, i.e. current Applejack. 

The whole thing greatly confused her, and she actually thought that maybe it was a weird thing that future Applejack could effect past Applejack rather than past Applejack effecting future Applejack. She concluded that the timeline she was in was a branch of the Mother Dimension, obviously, but also that the time was moving in a constant vein of existence which traveled to a short-lived timeline, which Applejack labeled as leaflines. This meant they were no more than repitions that occured within Applejack's existence which made up for only 1% of her entire existence within the Tree of Life. They would sprout up on the end of branch timelines and then end abruptly with no definite births or deaths, they usually only lasted a day, and the longest one ever lasted was a week and five days. Applejack experienced leaflines during sleep or while day dreaming, and seemed to be accessible only when her body was under the influence of either DMT or a different hallucinogenic drug of some sort. 

This proved that certain substances could directly effect her soul's ability to bend the fabric of existence itself, but did not allow her to directly influence existence in anyway either than being there. This is also supported by the fact that she also trained herself to become fully aware of what dimension or timeline she inhabited based on her familiarity with the experience. 

Whenever she tried to leave her immediate location within leaflines, she would find herself waking up in the branch dimension again without concluding the events which transcribed within the leafline, no matter how much she tried to hold on to her existence there, much like a dream. The branch timelines were hard to distinguish from her Mother Dimension, as they were full existences in which she could roam freely and had full access to any abilities and memories which she had, as opposed to leaflines were she only had knowledge of the current situation and bits and pieces of certain things that happened in the branchlines or the Mother Dimension, much like dreams. 

She then realized that she spent more time alive and roaming in branch dimensions and timelines than she did in the Mother Dimension. The Mother Dimension was obviously the Mother Dimension. Applejack, sparing no time, found the crystal to be nothing more than a fruit that was the host of a very hallucinogenic substance which allowed her the ability to return back to the white dimension which she found herself in after dying in her Mother Dimension's counterpart timeline.

She felt as her soul was unleashed and reached her full potential, as she actually managed to master arts of bodily and spiritual abilities that range from astral projection to even elemental control, and depending on the magic-dependability of the generation or timeline she was in, was how effective her abilities were. Depending on the fruit of the tree, which only sprouted in that branch dimension and it's branching timelines to leaflines, Applejack went in and out of this white realm, which she labeled "Skyline", to train and to watch over and manipulate the lives of everypony in the timelines within branch dimensions, but never the main dimension or the Mother Dimension. 

Using these abilities, she erased any form of impurity within these realms and made the existence of the ponies now less than an Eden paradise. But... Applejack began to feel the power corrupting her, so she wished upon a star, one of the trillons which filled the already white sky in Skyline, that somepony, anypony would come to stop her. She was filled then with uncontrollable rage, and with this rage, she brought down the moon upon one of the timelines, cutting it off from the branch dimension. Still filled with the wrath, she proceeded to kill many ponies of multiple timelines and even managing to kill a couple of leaflines off with manipulating fate outside of its respective space-time. She tried to do more, but was stopped by Megan, who had become a Venus-like goddess, and Twilight (Velvet), who was an alicorn. Applejack became her present self, the one which lived in the newest generation  (which was also conveniently put into the Mother Dimension).

"Applejack... are you scared?" Megan asked, caressing her mane and rubbing her cheeks gently. "You ought not to be, as surely your god-like existence gives you abilities which transcend even mine. You cannot escape from your hatred, your jealousy of all the other ponies... trapped within the White Dimension, and manipulating fate to cause chaos. How proud I am of your progress, but how disappointed I am with your choices."

Applejack began to cry, and Megan showed her her reflection within a mirror. She was colorless with black eyes and red irides. Her cutie mark was nonexistent, and a dark aura flowed from her body and mane and tail. "Wh...what have I become? Who...who am I?"

Twilight approached Applejack and caressed her head with her own. "You have become what the ponies of the past life would call the Demiurge. You have been granted abilities transcending all others by eons and eons! But you have used your powers for hatred and selfish purposes, causing pain to all who dare to anger you with their mere existences."

Applejack looked upon a coming darkness within the Skyline, turning its white purity into a jetblack darkness of red stars and watchful eyes, accompanied by open mouths, starving to devour the souls which Applejack had taken for herself. 

"B-but, look at them! They prance around so openly, no pain, no suffering, just mere mortal perfection! They live and die and care not one bit about it! They disgust me!"

Megan brought Twilight away from Applejack, looking to her with weary eyes, nearly spilling tears. She merely shook her head and brought into existence the Sephirotic tree which held the Elements of Harmony within it. She used its energy to harmonize Applejack's, but the pony resisted fiercely. "Just let go of all of your hatred! Please! For us!"

Applejack watched as memories flooded her mind, they were Twilight's and Megan's, along with a lot of others from the Mother Dimension, the memories which were made after Applejack's death, Megan's quest in Skyline to gain power, Twilight's becoming an alicorn. 

Applejack felt tears coming into her eyes, and soon she accepted her fate, but her heart grew darker, creating a storm of tendrils escaping from her chest, spraying blood in all directions. The tendrils became Applejack's coat and mane, giving her a black appearence, with red energy and blood spilling from where the spikes of the attire pierced her skin. Her eyes were bloodshot, and crazed, racing in all directions and trying to decipher what was going on. 

Applejack rose her hooves to the sky and created a snake of pure darkness, using the forces of Tirek and dark magic, releasing again the disharmonies into all of the branches and even the Mother Dimension. 

The darkness spoke for her, "An existence so pained, so lonely, an existence as such allures me! I am her poison! She is mine, and we will spread more to become our fruit of discord!" 

The snake circled around Applejack's body and created a cadeuces from her throat out of her spine, at the tip of the rob was a sun. The snake became Applejack's tail, and she grew thirty times her original size. Letting out a huge roar, Applejack dashed towards Megan and Twilight. The Skyline turned black completely, and this memory was lost forever. All Applejack could remember was waking up as a blank flank within the current timeline, in the house of Twilight Velvet. One of so many timelines from this current generation of the Mother Dimension.