"Yes!" Applejack interrupted "I know the ground is alive, but what that have to do with this?"
Nanda sighed.
"I am not talking of the ground, I am talking about the forest!" she pointed vaguely at the trees "The moles aren't a problem anymore, it wants to grow again! It needs energy for that!"
"Just tell me what's wrong with he- him?" she pointed at a nearby boulder in which the wisp, who Nanda called Amber, resided.
"Doesn't it seem odd to you that you haven't seen any spirit before?" asked Nanda in exasperation "The forest allowed them to exist, it was... loaning them energy, for safekeeping. Now it wants it back"
Applejack almost opened her mouth to answer, but closed it again when realization dawned upon her like a cold bath.
"Your husband...?" she asked as tactfully as she could, grimacing.
"Yes" she said simply, then turned to walk away "If you are done, I have to supervise that nothing goes wrong in the forest's heart"
Applejack watched her walk away, then turned to Amber's boulder.
"Can you move now?"
"I __in_-__ink" he tried to exit, but the only result was the air around it waving as if heated for a moment.
She grabbed a small stone from the floor, "Just use this"
-ยบ-
It isn't fair, thought Applejack I am supposed to be glad now.
The ancient acacia tree towered over most others, and was surrounded by a patch of terrain in which no grass grew. That and the lack of holes were probably related to the tree poisoning the ground it resided in.
But this is how it is.
She took a knife from her bag, gave a look to a nearby bag, and started the slow and laborious process of carving in the tree's bark, then its wood.
It took her a few hours, and her jaws ached when it was done, but she had inscribed her initials in it. There were more on it, some so high she barely could read them. Immediately above hers, there was "P. , B.". Far above it was "G.S."
She looked at the first for some time, vaguely aware of the sun reaching the horizon.
"You have her eyes"
Applejack didn't move.
"Amber took a liking to them from the start, and almost followed them out of the forest. It took us hours to convince him otherwise" Nanda walked to her side "He has been dissolving for decades now, minds only last so long with only a soul to maintain them, even my husband wasn't much better" Applejack didn't answer, so she continued "You thought that reaching this would be nice, didn't you? These things are like pieces of graves... as you follow the same path, you'll just keep finding their trail, have you not learned that by now?"
"I thought... I thought that I'd be able to ignore it, just this one time, after having walked half the globe"
"You could just take a ship back home. You should, as much of the path is far more dangerous than it used to be"
"No, I-" there was a splutter of black smoke above her head, and then another, making Nanda jumped away from the surprise.
With a green flame enveloped in purple magic, a package appeared and fell in Applejack's head.