First Fruits

by the dobermans

The Nightmare and the Idyll

A breeze blew across the glade. The way that the odors of rot wafting from the statue’s gush of slime mingled with the fading scent of flowers magnified the obscenity of the ruin. First felt the broken curves of the pure, solemn form in the marrow of his bones. It was another turning of the wheel of night and day; a part of the soul passing into memory, yielding to the next season the only way it ever could.

It was the weight of that thought that bore his gaze down and away from the spectacle at last, to fall on an unmoving Sundew. She seemed much smaller than she had when she led them to the warning bell, her tawny shoulder blades and ribs bunched and sharp like a pile of fallen forest branches. Her hooves still covered her ears and face, and from below them, a voiceless keening sounded; a whisper edged with sorrow, screamed into the earth.

First undid his shears and let them slip free. He knelt, remembering what he’d learned not a few minutes prior in caring for Wild’s dismay, but knowing too that this situation was different. This was a pain he himself felt, one that struck deep at the nature of Caretakers and Lorekeepers and Wayfinders, and their kinship under the moon. The toil of his friend’s hooves had come to naught. He pressed his cheek against her drooped ear, losing the battle not to cry.

“My heart …” whispered Wild. She joined First, stumbling down to lay her foreleg over their fallen guide, unable to cease her gaze or her disbelief at the garden’s ruin. A solitary firefly wavered at its edges, its light signaling long, waning pulses. It bobbed too close to the surface of a poisoned clot of moss and went dark.

A shiver from Sundew broke the destruction’s spell. “This is horrible,” Wild said as gently as she could. “Did it take you long to create? The garden?”

Sundew raised a hoof and brought it down to thud against the earth. She repeated the motion, tolling out a steady rhythm. Twenty-two times it fell, First counted.

Wild had taken notice as well. “Twenty-two. You’ve been working this ground for twenty-two moons?”

Sundew looked up and shook her head. Tears glistened in trails from her unpainted eyes.

“Twenty-two … years?”

The tired head dropped back behind the walls of its foreleg fortress. It nodded slowly within the dark, bony confines.

Wild stroked Sundew’s mane for a while. First watched her, mulling the gravity of what he’d just heard while imagining his father’s sanctuary being ravaged the way the hidden garden had. He was afraid that if he spoke now, his words would fall short and his new friendship with Sundew would be over.

It was Wild who spoke instead. She stood, and taking a few restless paces into the reeking glade, kicked at a tuft of dead moss. The vegetal skein tore away to reveal its roots: a mass of white, frenetic worms.

Her neck bowed downward in shame. “I’m so sorry. This is my fault. If I hadn’t brought Baal-Kaas’s vengeance here, you would be dreaming in peace tonight under Selene’s wings in your special place.”

Sundew heaved a raw sigh and began to rise. First slid back and joined her. On the far side of the clearing, Cinnamon was hopping down the haphazard spiral staircase of limbs that fanned from the tree she’d used to flee the attack of the bog bodies. She bounded down from the lowest bough over the arches of the roots, and skirting the slime-soaked earth that surrounded the statue, ran to the ponies to leap at First’s chest.

He caught her in one cradling foreleg. “Cinnamon, girl, did you see what happened? You’re alright. We got the Roses. All of ’em.”

Cinnamon responded by rubbing her whiskers against his scarred neck. As he hugged her closer and felt her trembling subside, he caught Sundew observing them. The fire had not yet returned to her eyes, but there was a spark, and an alacrity to her movements that hinted at yet unquenched anger simmering beneath her defeated bearing. She turned in the direction of the forest, tossing her mane for him and Wild to follow.

As soon as he saw the yellow firefly light illuminating the doorway of Sundew’s cottage and what lay beyond, First could tell that the swamp stallions had been busy at work. The slumped pile of debris had been cleaned from the floor, and to his amazement, even in the chill darkness of the early morning hours some skilled craftstallion had rebuilt the corner shelves and set what items had not shattered back on display. Passing the sentinels stationed at the inner perimeter, he caught the wag and scrape of the business end of a broom sweeping the last of the wreckage out over the doorstep.

Inside, it was like the battle that had nearly cost Bellows his life had never happened. A low table made of freshly sanded wood beams now stood where the big stallion had lain beaten. A carpenter was still stooped over it, his eye level with its plane. He gave it a perfecting caress with a scrap of sandpaper and stood wearily up, smiling at his work. The songs of the grasshoppers rang in through the single, paneless window while other ponies tidied the far corners.

“What … the …”started Wild.

One of the laborers turned an ear, his face still daubed with red battle clay. He set a bag of acorns into the drawer of humble pantry cabinet he was re-shelving and strode toward her. “The folk of Frogmire hold Lady Sundew in great esteem,” he explained. “The wisdom she deals to us has changed lives, with proof, and always for the better. We repay her no matter the cost or the hour. And your pardon; I am called Acorn Whistle.”

Sundew gave him a gracious nod. Rearing up against the wall, she poked her muzzle into the twisted sinews of the roots and drew out what looked to be a wrinkled tulip bulb. The red-masked warrior saw it and knelt, wide-eyed. One of his companions ran to fill a water kettle and hang it over the hearth’s guttering flames.

Sundew strode to the fresh-sawn table with her prize. Setting it on the fragrant surface, she traced an invisible word in the air with her hooftip in the direction of the bowing Acorn, who was still enthralled by the dirty nodule. Catching her sign and entreating look, he leapt upward, retrieved her writing supplies, and deposited them reverently in front of her.

She scratched a few moments with her quill and held up the parchment for them to read.

A jewel of ðe Oaks, plucked from ðe branches ðat spreade alle þrouȝ ðe sod below.

Wild smirked. “An Oak’s jewel? It could be the second you’ve found.” She nudged First’s good shoulder.

First consulted with Cinnamon, who had no explanation for him. He gave Wild an expression like he’d run out of bits at the market and shrugged.

“She means a truffle,” she replied to his unspoken question. “And by the looks of it, one of the extremely rare Mare’s Eye variety. The fungus that produces them exists in only a few forests in Equestria, and only yields fruit every thousand moons or so.”

First inspected the black, flakey bulb with newfound awe. Cinnamon reached up to perch her front paws on top of his head to peer down on it as well, sniffing after whatever faint scent it may have been adding to the already heavy vapors of sawdust and dirt. Their curiosity earned them a furtive smile from Sundew.

The warrior who had set the kettle to boil extracted it from the hearth, and after one of his companions had placed three glass jars on the table beside the truffle, he filled them with steaming water. A third stallion stepped forward bearing a basket of herbs. With a painter’s precision he placed thick layers of fresh mint leaves on their surfaces.

“I’m sure there are chefs in Canterlot and Manehattan who would fight each other to the death to win this for their larders, if one were mad enough to auction it or something,” Wild continued as they made their arrangements. “Believe me when I say that it’s worth more than your average dragon’s hoard.”

The last items to be laid out were sprigs of lavender. The stallion who had dispensed the mint balanced one across the rim of each jar. Below, light green wisps began diffusing downward into the brew.

“I’m not sure, but it appears as if they’re preparing a ceremony of some sort,” Wild whispered into First’s ear. “Kind of like when we perform our Devotions before meals, maybe?”

Sundew bowed to each of the three warriors in turn. Taking up her quill, she scratched out a few more words and raised the parchment once more.

We must dyspel ðe evyll of ðis niȝt. Restore what was lost to us.

“There’s a way to restore your garden?” Wild asked.

Sundew’s quill swirled out more fluid strokes.

Ðere ys. Yn remembrance, and yn cheere of good companȝ.

Her smile was full of pain as she took the truffle in her teeth and sipped from one of the jars, letting the tea flow past it. Once she’d drunk, she returned the truffle to the table and bit off one end of a lavender sprig. Letting out a long sigh, she sat back and closed her eyes.

“Please, honored friends of Selene, do as Lady Sundew did,” Acorn entreated. He motioned to the two remaining jars. “Long ago it pleased our Mother to add the delight of her favorite flower to her Paradise. We taste of it when elders or children pass away, but oft it is taken in times of great loss as well, to remind us that the bitter comes with the sweet.”

Wild hestitated. “You too know of Selene’s Garden? Strange … you speak in the way the old books are written. Are you all Caretakers somehow?”

“No, none among us has that fate,” Acorn replied. “The knowledge that has been passed down has it that in days of old, the Lavender Concourse was a reward for the groundskeepers who excelled in flowercraft. All the blithe acres unto the horizon in a secret dell were frosted green below flames of mauve and violet. Joyous Grove himself designed it, as with all the Garden’s wonders.”

Wild gave First a look, but said nothing that would interrupt Acorn’s telling of his secretive tribe’s history.

“It was the happy lot of our far forebears to tend and to mend the knolls of the Concourse, lost to us for thousands of moons. Even now we search for it, believing it near at hoof. We have always searched.”

He fell silent, as if sifting through his memories to hear some ancestral whisper of the hiding place of his people’s corner of the lost Garden. After a few moments’ reflection he gestured again at the jars. “But please. Lady Sundew does all things for a purpose. The mint makes of water, tea, to make us more than mere horses, and the lavender reminds us of our place, but it may be that the Mare’s Eye shall impart some special virtue of its own.”

First watched as Wild mimicked Sundew’s ritual, then did the same. The truffle’s flavor mixed with the mint like a flock of pheasants breaking from the underbrush in every direction. His thoughts chased the odd savors down their varied paths, leaping between airy memories and down into murky wooded remnants of dreams. He saw his hoof reaching for the lavender of its own accord. There was a crunch, and a prickling on his tongue, and a moment later the wild images were threaded with twists of sorrow and elation.

More thoughts surfaced in the dark melee, words spoken in mares’ voices. He recognized Wild’s, but there was another, deeper and more noble. He thought, with a pang of compassion, that it could be Sundew’s.

The three of them were together in the forest of his dreams, the pregnant darkness pressing in from all directions like they were suffocating in the vile depths of the marsh. They were marching in the trackless mud, sure of their destination, but sharing the same mix of awe and fear. Roars and crashes rose up all around them; loud, deep gagging coughs and breaking of long-dead tree limbs. Through sheets of rain he saw Wild turn toward him and speak. From her mouth came words of an ancient tongue in Sundew’s voice. On hearing them, Sundew herself stopped and pointed at the beam of moonlight that had broken through the storm to fall on his engraved blades. First looked up, eager to see its source.

The eye of Selene bore down on him from a brilliant moon.

A hoof brushed his shoulder; a real one, and not that of a phantasm from the land of visions. He opened his eyes and saw Sundew by his side. She nodded, tracing arcs along both of his forelegs and his muzzle.

“First, I think … no, I know she wants to see your blades,” said Wild, rubbing her temples. “Stars above, she needs to see them now! Where did you leave them?”

“By her garden at the end of the path. I didn’t want to hurt her when I …”

Before he could finish the sentence, Acorn Whistle bolted out of the hut, and in less than the time it took for Cinnamon to bathe her paw, returned with all five of the slime-slickened weapons. He let one of the sentries dump a bucket of water over them and wipe them clean with a giant leaf of an elephant’s ear plant that was growing by the door. Inspecting them with reverence, Acorn gathered them up and arranged them in parallel curves on the table beside the jars of tea.

Sundew caught sight of the images etched into the luminous metal. Her eyes widened, and she trotted forward to take a closer look.

“Have you seen these pictographs anywhere before?” Wild asked her. “Do you know what they mean?”

Sundew pointed to one: a reptilian, slitted pupil staring out in hatred, then a second; the crescent moon surrounded by its miniature trees and fields that Wild had spied when Bellows had first revealed them at his shop.

Sundew wrote again on her parchment.

Ðe Niȝtmare and ðe Idyll. Ðe Garden, whych ys her soul, was ðe Idyll. We alle know ðe Niȝtmare. Such ys lyfe: a niȝtmare and an idyll.

She let them read. While they struggled to make out the words of her archaic script, her hoof began to work at the dirt floor, digging gouges into the dust. All that surrounded her could feel the heat of her anger radiating stronger as the seconds passed. Snorting at last in controlled fury, she scrawled a final, ink-trailed line at the bottom of the page.

On ðe morrow we venture forþ to take ðe heade of Bäl-Käs.

Comments

[jmj]

Bal Kas is in for a whooping! Great chapter after the battle! Sundew is a super cool character.

[ThePeer]

why do all the horses in this comment section have black fur