Equestrian Nightmares

by leeroy_gIBZ

The Old Orchard

It took a lot to feel things these days; Braeburn Apple noted mentally. A lot indeed, his mind affirmed as his body strode silently through a forgotten collection of decrepit farmhouses. Around him loomed -like vicious crows- the burned-out corpses of his childhood, Each a blackened and stained monument to a collection of sins too hideous for modern print.

Braeburn felt a great kinship with them.

Despite the cloying scent of the charred cherry orchard’s perpetual decay, he strode on unchanged through it, like a thief sneaks through a house at night. He recalled vaguely the former significance of this place, and he remembered likening this rotting haven of his to the kitchen of some great long-gone giant.

The whole farm had almost been a playground to the tired stallion a decade or so before. The forest specifically was a dining hall to Braeburn, with the great boughs that towered above him becoming the legs of some massive table, and the carmine canopy of the blossoms themselves the room’s tablecloth. He used to feel safe there; huddled in his ramshackle treehouse, safe from the thunderous wrath of both storms atmospheric and storms domestic.

Though he no longer felt cold, or warm, or much of anything else for that matter, his scarred hooves still subconsciously went to the buttons of his shroud as a shiver ran up his spine. He had arrived at the still.

The still; whose awful stench of homemade brew stank strongly in the morning air. The still, whose surrounding grass remained a few shades blacker than the rest of the farm’s. The still, where his mother used to drink herself asleep, and where she would be found most evenings. A single tear rolled down what little face he had left. This place, this temple of intoxicated damnation, was where the whole thing began. It was where his life began.

Just as he had so many times before, he leaned idly against the repurposed boiler – now little more than charred rust – and pictured the scene in his mind: His mother, Miss Candy Apple, and his father, some unknown farmhand, passionately in love against one of the nearby trees. He recalled himself, in a horrifically similar position, calling out for his mother, who lay dead to the world against a different tree, not fifteen feet away.
It was a day much like this when he had decided; decided that enough was enough! It was a day much like this one, cold enough for a living stallion to feel but hot enough for the perpetually unpicked apples to smell, when he limped back to the farmhouse fifteen lonely years ago with tears in his eyes. It was a day, much like this, when Braeburn distinctly recalled his younger self dragging a leaky jerry can of petrol back to his treehouse, and waiting there until his bitch of a parent had woken up and dragged her sorry hide back home.

Atop his exploded throne, Braeburn then grinned a scorched, scarred grin full of a smouldering malice and a pride that burned stronger than his fear.

Suddenly, like the scarecrow he now resembled, and as if struck by the lightning of Victory herself, he sprung to his feet. Though nothing could hear him now, he still cheered. He cheered with all that his skeletal form had on a moldy Spring solstice – both here and now and fifteen years ago today – as he felt properly sure about the only thing he had felt sure about.
He danced as he did it, a clumsy waltz of festering revenge, as he swung and spilled the fuel all over mother’s brewery. He chuckled and cheered as he lit his fuse and watched his ever-so-cunning plot come to fruition.

Braeburn Apple remembered winning for once and yelling angrily and screaming curses all the adults so often yelled at him as the fire snaked triumphant towards that terrible shack.
Then, quite predictably, it exploded and blew the colts’s face clean off his skull.

The next part, Braeburn recalled with a shiver as his unliving corpse returned to its stumbling pilgrimage.

The fire had spread.

It had spread right back to the supply shed, where it had set the buildings menagerie of inflammability alight. That too, had exploded. That concoction of flames had then spread to the living quarters.

He remembered watching incorporeal as it had stuck to his mother’s skin like napalm, and how she had run screaming out of her house. He too recalled, with a wry grimace, how she had still attempted to search for her son, and save little Braeburn from the inferno. Obviously, she had failed.

His annual journey came to an end not a few seconds after that awful memory did. He was at the Tree. The Tree was the only one on the property still to bloom majestic every Spring. The dead stallion knelt down on shaking, decaying flesh and bone, and scrabbled about in the black earth.

Beneath that silver sky, that empty monochrome clear yet overcast, Braeburns’s skull managed another pained smile as he found what he always searched for: A skull.

It took a lot to feel things these days; Braeburn noted mentally. A lot in indeed. But giving his mother that kiss goodbye always did.

Comments

[Starlight Nova]

I haven't read the story yet, so I'm a little confused... Does Pinkie Pie appear in this story or not?

[leeroy_gIBZ]

9411002
It's a collection of short stories. Pinkie Pie will appear, yes, but hasn't in the 3 so far.