We started out at a brisk canter, Applejack and my wolf. Soon, however, we had slowed to a trot, and then a walk, and then to a slow, methodical trudging. From the corner of my eye, I could see Applejack trying to bore a hole through my wolf's head with her eyes.
I think the worst of us came out when we were alone. For Applejack, the absence of Rarity seemed to disinhibit her emotions, as she glared at me with a mix of emotions that I couldn't comprehend.
The Other's memories supplied me with the concept of grudges, and I scoffed. What a horrible waste of time and energy. And yet, it shed light onto what I was observing from the Apple farmer. Did she hate me for trying to eat the lizard? Did I cross uninvited into her territory? Did I kill her family?
Actually, now that I think about it, none of those sound like reasons for protracted anger. If a wolf angered me, I would destroy some of their branches and be done with it. Simple, easy, quick, and clean. All would be forgiven that day, and we'd get over it.
My wolf's ears splayed back and a soft growl escaped its lips when I caught Applejack staring at me again. We hadn't even walked that far, and yet I was finding her company less and less tolerable as time went on.
I did say that being alone brought out the worst in us. Zecora, it seemed, had given me something solid to lean on, something to make me feel like a person. Whatever that something was, I couldn't find it here with Applejack. The beast at the core of my being was screaming at me to kill her.
"We're here," I growled.
"These are mah zap apple trees," Applejack declared.
"Then you are doing a terrible job of caring for them. They are sickly; one bad flood or one dry year could kill them," I retorted.
"Are ya saying that Ah don't know how to care for mah own trees?" Applejack yelled. Her voice had subtly changed; it was harder and more clipped sounding.
She really has no idea, does she? Pathetic. I scoffed, "Obviously. You are deaf to their cries, you choke them in packed soil, and you haven't fed them — not once, I see."
"Now yer just makin' stuff up. Trees don't need to eat food; sun, rain, wind, and soil are all they need," the orchard's caretaker said. "Mah family's been takin' care of trees for generations. There ain't nopony in Equestria that's better at growin' apples than Apple kin, and we'd all attest to that fact of life."
If I had had real eyes instead of these glowing green lights, I would have rolled them. I stepped up closer to her and put my wolf's muzzle right in her face. "You forget that you are talking to a carnivorous tree, and unless you feel like getting a personal demonstration of how I feed myself and my allies, you will. Listen. To. Me." I growled at her, letting the putrid, rotting breath of my wolf spill onto Applejack's snout.
She nodded.
"First, timberwolves have no stomach. Our puppets don't need to eat. Instead, we bring our kills back and grind them up for composted fertilizer, a fertilizer that we share with our allies, the zap apples. You have been neglecting to restore the nutrients to the soil," I told her.
She huffed, blowing her warm breath into my wolf's eyes. "Ah ain't killin little critters to feed some trees. If they want compost, they're getting the pony made kind."
"As long as they get the rotten compost, where it came from doesn't matter," I stated. "But that doesn't matter if the soil below is too hard. Normally, my roots' movement can break up the soil for them, but they don't have that here."
"We've got a plow, but that might cut into the roots," Applejack replied.
"Hmmm... That might work for the soil that's further away, but it won't help the nearby soil. You could add worms, but that might not be enough," I said. Hmmm... What to do? I know that Applejack wouldn't like it, but frankly, I care more about my allies than her.
My leaves rustled despite the lack of wind. I decided to go ahead with it. From within the hollow cavity in my wolf, it withdrew one of my fruit — an apple with a polished metal-like appearance — and quickly buried it in a hole I dug with my puppet's claws.
The orange farmer asked, "What are you doing?"
"Planting my seeds; these trees need an ally of their own and a dedicated caretaker nearby," I replied matter-of-factly.
"You're plantin' a timberwolf? Are ya tryin' to kill everypony on this farm?" she shouted, her voice as close to a roar as a pony could make.
"No." I turned to the zap apple trees, which were already sprouting their leaves again. "My allies, I ask of you, give a gift of magic to my offspring. Help him grow so that he may protect you."
I howled. As my voice spread across the orchard, I also poured my magic into the seed to both encourage it to grow and to direct the power of the zap apples, a power that I could feel rapidly building. All around us, the trees started sparking and popping as they built up their power. Then, with a mighty boom, hundreds of bolts of magical lightning struck the spot I had planted my fruit all at once. The power was so great that I could feel some of the energy be absorbed by my transmission seed and forced up the link and into my real body; it was an exhilarating feeling.
When the light died down and my wolf's eyes could see again, it spotted a little tree about the size of a small shrubbery, with a single transmission seed dangling from its lowest branch. I plucked the transmitter from its branches and then immediately cut the magic holding my wolf together.
It collapsed, leaving my seed unable to move, but it also provided my offspring with a supply of wood from which to built its own wolf. And build it did; the smallest sticks and twigs floated up and joined together to form a little pup small enough to fit in the surprised Applejack's hat.
My pup looked up at Applejack. Its eyes, formerly a pale green, turned vibrant the moment it spotted her. I felt a twinge of jealousy, but knew that it was the right thing. If it imprinted on her as Pack Leader instead of me, then I knew that it would not harm her.
It yipped and nuzzled up next to her, already trying to worm its way into her good graces. She stepped back, but it just moved along with her. Meanwhile, I worked on pulling wolf back together.
"My pup has imprinted on you," I told her as soon as my puppet was whole enough to speak. "You are its Pack Leader, not me. It will follow you and it will protect your trees with its life."
"Ah wish ya'd have asked me before ya went and planted one of yer kin right in the middle of mah orchard!" Applejack yelled. "What am Ah gonna do with a bloodthirsty timberwolf on mah farm?"
"Tame it," I answered. "It is the duty of the Pack Leader to enforce the rules of the pack. Give it food when it is good, and attack its tree when it is bad. That is what my former pack leader did to me, and what I do to my own pack."
Applejack snorted. "Ya better hope that this helps mah orchard and that you pup doesn't hurt anypony, because if it hurts me or mine, Ah won't hesitate to chop him down."
"That is entirely up to you, Pack Leader. Train it well, and it will reward you." I looked down at the little pup that was weaving its way through Applejack's legs. I barked, "Pup, protect Pack Leader and Allies." Then, I turned my attention once more to Applejack. "Come; we have zap apple trees to care for."
It occurred to me just after my wolf had gone off with Applejack that I had never attempted to split my intelligence like this.
The reason there is a limit to the number of wolves we could control at any given time is that there was a limit to our magic and our ability to control multiple puppets at once. I could produce as many transmission seeds as I wanted, but I could only control twelve at a time, and each feels like a limb that I’ve always had. Similarly, I can flail them around from the get-go, but I can only dance with practice.
But language felt different. As much as I could practice moving, thinking of strategies, and coordinating my puppets, I couldn't practice holding two conversations at once.
But it would be interesting to try.
"Well, I should show you what you'll be designing for, if you feel up to the challenge?"
Rarity nodded. "I am. I assume then that you don't want clothes for this... puppet, then?"
"Yes and no," I replied. Then, I bent my Lycan down until its back was lower than Rarity's. "Here, climb on. We have some distance to cover, and I think neither of us want this to take all day. Zecora, do you want to come too?"
The zebra shook her head. "No, I have potions that I must brew; go on without me, you two."
I nodded. After a quick exchange of farewells, I allowed Rarity to climb up on my Lycan's back. The moment she was secure, my puppet burst into motion and sprinted through the forest at an amazing speed.
The novelty of carrying a pony wore off soon enough, so I decided to ask her a few questions. "How did you levitate my flowers?"
"With my magic, darling," she replied. "All unicorns can do basic levitation once they mature enough. Some of them, like my good friend Twilight Sparkle, can do all sorts of impressive spells."
"Spells?" I asked. I envisioned her chanting and dancing around a circle, making my puppet's tail wag a little more from silent laughter. "How does one cast a spell?"
"Hmmm... You know, it's hard to put into words exactly what I feel for someone who isn't born already knowing the feeling. Let's see, I gather up my magic and squish it together in my core, then I form it into the right pattern and fill it with my desires, and then I push it out of my horn and into the very fabric of the world."
Well, that's nothing like how I would describe my own magic, which was more like a bendy branch that reached out and gripped whatever I wanted to hold. While it didn't vanish completely, the budding dream of me being a spellcaster died back down.
I ducked under a low-hanging branch and dashed between two trees. "What kind of things do you use your magic for?" I asked her. Even if I couldn't use the same magic as her — really, why had I even thought I could in the first place? — I could get some ideas anyway.
"I have a couple of cleaning and drying spells, a gem finding spell, and a..." She went on like that for a while, describing the magic she knew and answering my questions to the best of her abilities. Frequently, Rarity said that I would need to ask a pony name Twilight Sparkle for more information on the intricacies of magic that she herself didn't know.
The more I listened, the more disheartened I become. Her magic sounded so utterly unlike my own that I feared that I would never be able to learn it. Up until then, I had never considered using magic like that, and now I knew that her way of doing it was out of my reach. Well, at least now I'll have something to research regarding my own ability.
I suddenly halted my Lycan, eliciting a yelp from Rarity. We weren't quite in my clearing yet, but we were in my grove of ally-trees. The scent of my lure flowers was strong here, and against my puppet's back, I could feel her pulse quickening and her breathing deepening.
"Oh my... what a lovely place."
It didn't look like anything special to me, but I didn't know how ponies perceived the world. Maybe they could sense something that I couldn't. And, as if answering my unvoiced inquiry, Rarity said, "The zap apple trees are so gorgeous, with their rainbow fruit shining in the light! And the magic in the air — it's so much calmer than the wild magic of the Everfree. You live here?"
Setting her down, I said, "Yes, just up this way."
She followed me through the grove. We stepped out into the sun, a stark contrast to the dim light of the Everfree, and I heard a gasp.
Actually, it was two gasps: hers and mine. She was looking right at me with an expression of pure wonder on her face. Yet, at the same time, I could see her with my own senses, instead of my puppet's.
Unlike them, I did not see the world with visible light. Instead, my senses seemed to track some sort of weird light-and-smell hybrid that only appears in living things. It was a sense that the Other did not have. Perhaps it was some sort of magic sense, and I had simply not recognized it for what it was until now.
Whatever the case may have been, Rarity was brilliantly enticing to my body's senses. I would even go so far as to say that it was a million times more enticing than the manticore that I had killed.
With great deliberation, I forced Lycan to grab Rarity and drag her back into the grove of my ally-trees. "Stop! Unhand me!" She yelled, and I was sorely tempted to let her go, to let her move closer to my sweet blossoms, to rip out her throat and bleed her dry...
But I didn't.
I realized, as soon as she was out of my sight and I had my wits about me again, that I had never brought an intelligent being to myself. If magic had anything to do with intelligence — and my growth suggested that it did — then this painful thirst for blood might come back the moment anybody came near me.
The spike of loneliness sobered me up very quickly, and reminded me that I still had a squirming pony in my puppet's arms. "Rarity, calm down."
She huffed and went still. "How rude. What was that all about, anyway? I just wanted to take a closer look at that gorgeous tree. Was that you?"
"Yes, and while I thank you for the compliment, I must admit that I had a significantly less pleasant reaction to seeing you with my own... eyes, no offense," I replied.
"And by that, you mean?"
"An almost overwhelming desire to eat you," I bluntly replied. The bluntness stemmed from the fact that I was struggling to deal with what had just gone through my head, rather than a disinterest in tact. Upon seeing her face, which appeared just as shocked as I felt, I added, "I'm just as horrified as you are. No one has ever seen the real me before, not even Zecora. How was I supposed to know that you're look amazingly delicious to my real body's senses?"
With a shudder, my support of the puppet collapsed, dropping it in an undignified heap. In a worried voice, the seamstress asked, "Jack, what's going on?"
I didn't answer at first. Instead, I picked up the puppet, balled its fist, and then punched the nearest tree as hard as I could. The softer wood of my puppet shattered against the zap apple tree without harming it. Then, the splinters reassemble into my Lycan's fist and a I punched again. "Damnit!"
"Jack, stop!"
I whirled around and bared my fangs, and yet Rarity stood her ground.
"What has gotten into you?"
I forced myself to calm down from the sudden frustration. "I wanted this to be special. I wanted you to come and see me, to see what I've been making. I wanted you to see me, so that you could design something for a tree and its puppets to wear, and yet I freak out once you get here."
Thoughts and anxieties started whirling around in my mind, faster and faster. Fear bubbled up until my mind could focus on nothing else. What if she hated me? What if she told others, and I lost Zecora and any future companions that I might have? What if-
"Lumber Jack, calm down; you're panicking," Rarity's soft voice said. And just like that, I had an anchor in the maelstrom of thoughts.
"Do you hate me?"
"Why would I hate you, darling?"
"Because I want to eat you," I replied.
"That's not what your actions are telling me, Jack," Rarity said. "What I see is a scared pony — I mean, wolf — who just dragged me away from a potentially dangerous situation. If you had really wanted to eat me, don't you think you would have attacked by now? Instead, you're crying."
I was crying? Strange, I didn't even know that my puppets could cry.
"But I do want to kill and eat you really badly..." I paused. "I'm just more afraid of being alone."
Rarity put on a smile. "See, you're smart enough to squash those instincts. I think that says a lot about you."
"Thanks."
At that moment, something occurred to me.
The pup following Applejack and nipping at her ankles suddenly let out a strangled yelp and collapsed to the ground, unable to hold itself together.
A loud crack drew Applejack's attention to the spot further east in the orchard, where the pup's tree was growing. Or rather, had formerly been growing. Instead, the young tree was uprooted and clutched in my wolf's jaw.
It spat out the writhing sapling. "That was a bad idea."
Applejack's eyes went wide. "Ya... Ya killed it. Yer own flesh and blood..."
"It was for the best. I can always plant another elsewhere, where it isn't liable to go on a pony-killing rampage."
“What!”
“Later.” With that conversation forcefully ended, my wolf went back to digging through the dirt around the base of each of the trees. At the moment, I didn't really think about how my actions reflected back on me.
After calming down a bit, I apologized to Rarity. “I didn't mean to break down on you,” I added. Damn these emotions; they were so hard to control, and they kept changing on me. I felt like my mind was swaying in the wind of a storm, just hoping to survive without being knocked over or struck by lightning.
“Jack, it’s fine. If you don’t feel comfortable with me here, I can leave... provided that you show me the way back, of course,” Rarity replied. “Now, I know that you said you can’t go out of the forest, and you obviously wouldn’t want me nearby to take measurements, so... I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Do you know what a photograph camera is?”
I nodded.
“Good. Tomorrow, I’ll meet your puppet somewhere near where we met today, and I’ll loan you my camera and a measuring stick. Take a photo of yourself with the measuring stick against your trunk, and I’ll use that to figure out your proportions. Bring it back, and we’ll design you something quite elegant. And when it’s done, I want photographs of you wearing it! Ohhh, this is going to be such a fun challenge.”
I smiled at her. “You think so?”
“I do, dear. I’ve never made clothes for a tree before. Although, I do have a question: are you a mare or a stallion?”
Wait, what kind of a question was that? That made no sense. “I do not understand; I am not a pony.”
“No, no, what I meant was are you a male or a female?” She asked again. “I have specific designs for each gender.
“Again, I don’t understand. My flowers contain both male and female parts. All timberwolf trees are identical in this,” I replied.
Ok, I admit that I knew what she was talking about once she rephrased her question, but since I really had no preference or emotion regarding the Other’s idea of gender roles and I had no idea where I stood in regard to her people’s ideas of gender, it didn’t really matter what I dressed as.
“Hmmm, tricky,” Rarity replied. “Well, I suppose something more feminine would definitely fit better with those gorgeous flowers of yours. But then there’s your very predatory nature... oh, IDEAAAA~!”