//------------------------------// // Chapter 2: The Moment of Decision // Story: At the Gorge // by Jordan179 //------------------------------// At that moment, a gap greater than the gorge yawned wide: history hung with that bridge, everything poised on a knife-edge. It was true that, had Rarity Belle plummeted into the abyss, there were other candidate Generosities waiting in the wings; just as if Applejack had fallen, another Honesty would have emerged. Celestia played a long game, and thse two young Ponies were but two of many pawns awaiting promotion. Still, they would have been lost -- and the time was fast-approaching when every hoof and horn and wing on Earth would be needed to fight what was seething on the other side of the dimensional barriers, lusting to consume all Light and Life. Melanie Rose Apple and Tangelo Orange were fundamentally-simple Ponies; they grew and sold fruit, recking neither of millennial strategies nor of Cosmic destinies. They could see no farther than their own horizons. They were simple -- but they were good. And the honest hearts that beat in their breasts would not let them stand idly by and watch an innocent young filly perish, while they might by action save her. this was not what they were, it was not what they wanted to be. They were brave and decent Ponies, and by their nature were compelled to act. And so Rarity Belle would live to see the sunset, and the way of the Changelings to Reconciliation be eased, and one day her ki-rin children would fly over Canterlot. Tangelo was, of course, not thinking in any such grand terms as -- with one final encouraging look back at his wife and elder daughter -- he flung himself out over the gorge to seize the remaining rope of the bridge firmly in one powerfully-hooked foreleg, his muscles straining and tendons taut, reaching out with his other foreleg to begin sliding down the rope toward the terrified, squalling eight-year-old filly, so desperately clinging to the lowest point of that hempen rope as if it was life itself to her -- because it was. One day Rarity would be a powerful being, for whom a mere gorge would hold little danger -- but at this moment, she was but a helpless child, close to madness from fear. "Hold on, little filly!" Tangelo called out to her as she clutched the rope. "I'm coming ... I'm almost there! Just a little bit longer ... just hold on and you'll be all right!" His green eyes shone with determination. They were good eyes, honest eyes -- eyes one could not help but trust. He was, to little Rarity, the perfect picture of paternal reliability. Rarity was raised by a loving father, and she would throughout her very long life to come be amenable to soothing from a strong male. At this crucial instant, Tangelo succeeded in calming her just a little bit -- enough that her pinpointed pupils widened slightly; widened, and focused on her would-be savior, making his way hoof over hoof down the rope toward her. Rarity was still terrified, of course. But for now, she was once again sane. "What -- what do I do?" the little Unicorn squealed. "Hold on to the rope tight, till I grab you," said Tangelo. "When I've got a firm grip, wrap your forelegs around me, so you don't slip. Got it?" Rarity nodded, her eyes fixed on him with renewed hope. "Good girl." Tangelo's tone was calm, even as he closed the distance. Tangelo had reached Rarity. One questing foreleg stretched out and grasped the filly's small barrel, pulled her toward him. She let go the rope and practically scrambled up Tangelo's back, realizing even in her ultimate fear that the last thing she wanted to do was block Tangelo's vision or impede his ability to climb back up the inverted arc of rope. She was still only a child -- but a very intelligent one. She settled around his neck and shoulders. "Halfway home now," Tangelo told her. In truth, he did not like the way the rope had yanked as they had shifted positions; there had been a tearing sound and a sickening give to it that spoke unpleasant volumes about what was probably happening within its hempen twists. It would definitely need replacing when the Apples rebuilt the rest of this bridge. It was going to fail -- he knew that. He just hoped it would fail when he and his passenger were off the bridge and well clear of the end. Doesn't have to hold long, he reminded himself. Just long enough. Tangelo began climbing up the rope toward Melrose. This was more difficult than had been the way down; he was going up the gradient now, and while Rarity was only a small filly, even her young weight was by no means inconsequential in such a situation. One foreleg anchored Rarity solidly in place, while his other three limbs gripped whatever parts of the ropes they could to keep him from falling and enable him to progress, hoof-suckers and telekinetic fields alike working at their utmost capacity. He looked up at the cliff-edge. Melrose had wrapped herself around the anchor post, eyes closed in concentration as she focused completely on her self-appointed task, forelegs embracing that crucial wooden cylinder as if it were the barrel of her beloved husband, hind hooves digging into the ground to set herself firmly. Not even her farm-grown Earth Pony strength could hold that bridge for long if it gave way, but while there was life in her, she would not abandon Tangelo. Closer to the cliff edge, little Applejack, aware of her inability to help in any useful way and not wanting to do anything to distract and thus imperil either her father or her friend, watched in mingled worry and admiration. She knew she was witnessing something heroic: something like the stories she and Landscape read together in their tree-house, but infinitely greater because it was happening before her, it was real. Surely her father could not fail? In the stories, the heroes never failed. And they were almost back to the edge now ... There was a ripping sound. Melrose's eyes opened wide in horror as she saw the rope begin to give way, one after another of the strong strands that composed it snapping, the frayed ends springing clear, further weakening its structure. She was a farm-filly, she was familiar with ropes and loads, and she knew all too well how catastrophically sudden might be the failure , how lethally-dangerous the suddenly-freed end to any mare unfortunate enough to be at the striking end. She also knew that this rope was the only thing holding her husband back from plunging into the gorge, hundreds of feet to his death. She had only a moment to decide. Being who she was, she really had only one possible choice. She moved so fast that everything seemed to happen at once. The rope snapped. In the instant of its snapping, before the end had time to convert its tremendous potential energy to kinetic energy, Melrose Apple was upon it, teeth firmly grasping the far end. Still, the stored energy was immense; Melrose merely made of flesh and bone. A true horse would have died instantly, the system of rope and teeth working to snap the spine at its neck as if the breaking bridge were some horridly-elaborate gallows. Even Melrose but barely survived -- her muscles were torn and her neck terribly wrenched, in ways which under other circumstances might have given her medical problems for the rest of her life; though in that transcendent, adrenaline-fueled moment of self-sacrificial love, she did not -- and never would -- realize this. But the High Eldren had crafted well when they made the Earth Ponies. Their natural magic was turned toward toughness, the telekinetic reinforcement of their bodies, so that they could survive hurts that would have slain any lesser beings. And the Apples of Sweet Apple Acres were among the strongest of Earth Ponies. So it was that, instead of being flung back a corpse, Melanie Rose Apple clung to the rope, with all the strength that love and stubbornness alike could grant her. She held the rope in her bleeding mouth, hooves dug firmly into the ground, the muscles and tendons of her already-injured neck bulging before the tremendous task she had set herself. Neither pain nor fear showing on her brownish-ivory freckled face, for she was in a place now beyond such concerns. In her expression was nothing but concentration, and an utter, almost-inequine, determination. In that moment, she was beautiful beyond measure, but her husband was in no position to appreciate this. For when the rope had snapped, a wave had rippled down its length, a wave which had almost bucked Tangelo into the gorge. With his own Earth Pony strength, he had just managed to hold on, but little Rarity, a mere filly and a Unicorn at that, had slipped from his grasp. She would surely have fallen, had not Tangelo managed to reach down with one foreleg and catch her, with a tenuous hook of one cannon around another. Tangelo dangled from the rope by one foreleg, Rarity dangled from Tangelo's other foreleg by her own -- sobbing, terrified, her fine mind useless in its ultimate madness. And, for all her strength, the turf beneath Melrose was giving way. Grip as best she might, inch by inch, she too was sliding toward the abyss. Tangelo's hind legs scrabbled for purchase on the rope above, while with all his might he willed that his hoof should continue to hold Rarity's, to preserve her from an early doom. One hind leg hooked the rope, and for a moment he had a better position, enough of a grasp on the rope to permit him to use his full strength. He looked up, and met the fearless brown eyes of his wife as she slipped closer and closer to the cliff's edge. He, too, faced a decision. If he let go of Rarity, betraying the innocent young girl whose life was literally within his grasp, he could grasp the rope with all four hooves and scramble to safety before Melrose was forced to let go of the rope. Or, he could ... but who would catch Rarity? He looked to the left, and saw the green eyes and golden mane of his daughter. Those eyes were so much like his own! Not merely in coloration, but in the look in them. Applejack was scared, but she was not letting that fear rule her. He knew that she rarely would allow her fear to overcome her, that she would be brave through all the challenges of life. He was sorry, now, that he wouldn't be there to help her surmount them. All his life was coming to the point of decision, and there was really no choice, for Tangelo Orange was no more a coward than was his wife. He had helped load tons of fruit, he knew well the principles of force and momentum involved in this action. He fixed Applejack with his gaze, inclined his head toward Rarity, then back at his daughter. His meaning was obvious. Applejack nodded. He swung Rarity back. All through this Rarity had been whimpering. Now her voice rose to a keen of terror as -- and this was something Tangelo had not planned -- her grip loosened and she began to slip down his cannon. He had only one chance at this now -- if he tried to hold on to her past this she would now surely fall -- so with all his might he contracted his body as he swung her forward. His face was contorted into a snarl of sheer determination as he threw Rarity at Applejack. The maneuver was not executed perfectly. He had hoped to toss Rarity onto the cliff edge, with Applejack there to grab her and keep her from rolling back down. Instead, Rarity was released on an arc which would have merely slammed her into the cliff just below the edge, meaning that she likely would have slapped into the rock and then fallen to her doom. Applejack was too fast for that. Barely even considering her own danger, she flung herself half over the edge and caught Rarity in her forelegs, her every muscle straining with the effort of hauling up Rarity's deadweight up from one of the most awkward possible lifting positions, hind legs gripping the ground as best she could to prevent both of them from plummeting down the cliff. Rarity's eyes had been squeezed tight shut in an atavistic desire to shut out a terrifying world. Now, feeling and smelling the familiar presence of her friend, she opened her eyes, and in a sudden desperate hope clutched with her forelegs, scrabbled with her hindlegs, helping Applejack save her, as both fillies struggled toward safety. Tangelo saw that Rarity had a good chance, now. Then, of course, he looked at his wife. Melrose was almost at the edge now, the rope slipping to the end of her muzzle, now held only by the relatively weak grasp of her forward teeth, her jaws unable to engage their full leverage. Her mouth was streaming blood; lips and tongue obviously flayed by the rough hempen fibers. Her eyes were clenched tight, her legs set rigidly, her hooves holding her firm against the full weight of both Tangelo and the bridge itself. Even as he watched, he could see her slipping further toward her own doom. "Let go!" he shouted. "Melly, let go! You can't hold it any more! The ground's giving way! For Celestia's sake, let go!" At that, she opened her eyes. Her look was neither of fear nor sadness, but one of utter, implacable determination. Was it his imagination, or did those eyes seem to be faintly glowing at that moment? Possibly, for in the next moment she gathered herself together, made one great effort, and somehow dug her hooves deeper into the ground. And she hauled back on the rope, and -- impossibly -- began to pull them both back toward safety, exerting from her feminine form a strength of which no stallion should have been capable. For a moment, it seemed as if Melrose had the power to defy reality with the force of her love. For a moment. In the next moment, the edge of the cliff cracked under her hooves. The immense strain, suddenly released, snapped both Melrose and Tangelo into the gorge. There was no time to react, no way for either of them to save themselves, or one another. Neither of them could reach any object with which they might avert their fall. The looks of helpless despair on the faces of her parents, as they fell into the abyss, would be seared into Applejack's brain; would haunt her nightmares over the long decades and centuries of her life to come. She could only wish that she had seen no more; but it was reality, it was Truth, and Applejack could not avert her eyes from the rest of their fall. So, watching with equal helplessness, Applejack saw her mother smashed against the cliff face halfway down, her purposeful reaching for a hoofhold suddenly and sickeningly converted into a hideously random motion as life was dashed from her frame. She saw her father's hopeless reaching out to his wife as he saw her demise, then his dreadful relaxation, his resignation to his fate as he fell the rest of the way to the stream. She later heard from her grandmother Greenie that, at terminal velocity, a water surface might as well be solid ground, that only extreme skill permitted a survivable dive from hundreds of heads to its surface, and even then one was likely to be injured. Greenie knew this because, for a time, she had made a specialty of diving into water from a barely safe altitude, as a daredevil performance. Understanding the physics of a Pony's impact into water had been for Greenie in that career a literal manner of life and death. Applejack did not need to be informed of this fact. For she saw the sickening impact of Tangelo against the surface of the stream, the way that his body broke and rippled in a manner most inconsistent with any survivable dive. He went immediately down A moment later the mercifully-unconscious and probably already dead body of Melrose Apple splashed into the stream after him. Strain as she might to see, still half hoping against all reason -- she did not see either of them surface. With that sight, Applejack was filled with a sudden angry strength. Not gonna let Rarity fall, she thought. Not gonna let it all be for nothing. And, with a surge of effort which would leave her muscles aching for days to come, she hauled Rarity over the edge of the cliff, both of them rolling away from the chasm, Rarity clinging to Applejack with a frantic need for safety. "Applejack, I'm so sorry!" Rarity cried. She, also, had seen what had happened to Applejack's parents, and knew full well why they had perished. "Sorry ... sorry ... sorry ..." she repeated again and again between convulsive, heaving sobs. There was nothing Applejack could possibly say. There was nothing she cared to say. Something she had almost thought impossible had happened, and the world was wrong, and would never again be right. She could not hate Rarity, her friend whom she had just saved from death, for having been the accidental agent of this disaster, but she did not at this moment want to look at her. Nor did Applejack have the energy, really, to care about Rarity. Or herself. Or anything, really. There was no emotion in her; she had gone horribly numb at her core, in a way she had never felt before in her young life. It was not sadness, and certainly not happiness. It was like nothing she could put into words. Rarity's desperate apologies meant less than the wind down the gorge, or the sinister sighing of the stream at its bottom, which had now claimed two lives which had been very dear to her, back a few minutes -- or had it been a hundred years? -- ago, when Friendship and Love and Life had still been ideas which had meant something to her. Now, they all meant nothing. The world meant nothing. Nothing mattered, least of all the lump of equine flesh lying on her side who went by the name of Abigail Jacqueline Apple. At that moment, had somepony picked her up and pitched her off the cliff to follow after her parents, she might not have fought to preserve her life. There was nothing she could do to make this better. There was nothing anypony could do to make this better. Nothing will ever be better again, she thought in her ultimate despair. All Applejack could do was lie there, eyes wide open in horror, and regard her mother's brown Stetson hat, which some vagary of the wind, like the vagary of life which had happened to claim her parents, had chosen to relinquish from the abyss and give back to her. The first minute of the rest of her life had begun.