The Most Honest Thing
Apple Bloom frowned at the… well, intruder was far too kind a word, but she’d been raised right and wasn’t going to uphold her family’s legacy by giving the pony in front of her a title it hadn’t earned. Not yet, anyway.
“You heard me,” hissed the mare, horn already recharged from her last show of force. The wall next to the entryway was smouldering, and distantly Apple Bloom wondered if she’d be the one who’d have to clean and reinforce that, or if she could convince Big Mac to do most of it. But for now, the rude pony was demanding her attention, because, well… some ponies didn’t have much in the way of manners.
“Ah didn’t, sorry. What can I do fer ya?” She did her best to smile, ignoring the horrible stench the stranger brought with her. “Ya need food? Ah’m afraid we don’t have much to spare, but Ah’ll see if we have a few bites for the road.”
The mare spat at Apple Bloom’s hooves. “Food? Don’t be stupid, you brat. Somepony in here’s got something I’m after, and I’m not about to let you get away with hoarding that power all to yourself.”
“Mahself?” Apple Bloom was stalling, and she knew it, but Big Mac wasn’t due back to the barricaded barn until later that evening, and there was no way he’d see any sort of signal she could send him. Still. “Ah’m sorry, Ah don’t know what you-”
“Your sister! She had the power, and I know many ponies that’d give anything for it.” The mare stomped her hoof, and the cloak covering her back shifted, revealing twinned long scratches against her sides. One of the Ascendants, then, looking to become an Alicorn to survive the horrors ravishing the land ever since that day, months ago, mere months. That’s all it’d taken for some ponies to show their worst sides, and if Applejack were here, she’d have said that sort of pony was probably just looking for an excuse.
But Applejack wasn’t here. And if Apple Bloom had anything to say about it, she never would be.
“Ah don’t have a sister,” she smoothly responded. A lie, but she hadn’t inherited her sister’s penchant for Honesty. “An’ if Ah did, she wouldn’t have any more power than the average Earth pony, Ah’m afraid.”
The intruder laughed, and coughed, and the skin and fur around her eyes shifted slightly, like an ill-fitting scarf, and Apple Bloom shuddered. The first signs of Sun Sickness, then. She was desperate, and that made her even more dangerous. “You’re lying. You’re LYING! I KNOW it’s here, and I know you didn’t take it, because if you had, you wouldn’t be able to lie! Tell me, you horseapple smear, where’s the Element?”
Apple Bloom squinted at the horizon, but nothing in the bones of the drought-dried orchard moved. Her brother wouldn’t be back soon enough to help her, then. Fine. She could take care of herself, and if he didn’t like it, then that was too bad.
“It’s unaccounted for, ma’am,” she sighed, evenly meeting the mare’s blighted eyes with her own unimpressed gaze. “Ah’m gonna have ta ask ya to leave, as yer trespassing. Please take the warnin’ and go.” Or don’t, Apple Bloom mentally pleaded. Let me name you. Let me show you what happens when you mess with a REAL Apple.
“I don’t think I will,” was all the stranger said before she forced herself forward, pressing forward against the half-door Apple Bloom was using as part of a barricade, horn still lit but thankfully forgotten. “You’ve got it, and I can’t… I need to have the Element! Let it attune to me! I’m far more Honest than you’ll ever be!”
“Honest?” whispered Apple Bloom, and mentally renamed the intruder as a threat. No longer a pony, not in the ways that friendship could help, but still… alive, and unpermanantly so. “Whoever told ya that it always had to be Honesty? The Elements were somethin’ else before they met Twilight’s…” not friends. Friends wouldn’t do that to ponies they cared about. “... thralls, Ah think they call them?”
The threat took a step back, horn fizzing erratically. “What are you talking about? Twilight is trying to save us! Your sister is trying to save us! You took what she needs to free us from this hell, you all did, and now Equestria’s paying the price!”
“Ah took nothing,” said Apple Bloom to the threat, and took one step forward. “The Elements abandoned their Bearers when they abandoned us, and then the Elements found others. Mah Element… well, it used to be Honesty, but it’s taken a new form since the Bearer’s betrayal.”
She could see her own reflection in the threat’s glassy eyes, so she got to see herself flicker like a bad illusion spell just as the threat realized that maybe, just maybe, she’d made a mistake.
Something surged from where Apple Bloom’s hooves met the ground, an invisible force punching from the earth upwards, knocking the threat aside like a dead branch. “What… what are you…” Her eyes bulged. Something wrong was going on in her body, but she hadn’t figured out what yet. She collapsed onto her side, crumbling down like an old building.
“Ah suppose ya could call it Honesty, in a way,” admitted Apple Bloom, as thin tendrils of soil crept up the threat’s body, spiraling around her hooves and pressing inwards, towards the flesh. Mercifully, from Apple Bloom’s point of view, it covered what was going on underneath, creeping higher and higher up the threat’s cheeks, just barely hiding how oddly skeletal they’d become.
The threat trembled, crying out raspily as her mouth filled with dirt. “What is happening to me? What did you DO?”
Apple Bloom shrugged and focused on slowing, not taking everything, not now, as the earth swallowed the threat down to her bones. Her horn sputtered out with the hiss of dying magic. Not alive enough to be a threat, but not entirely dead until her lifespan was complete… Apple Bloom wasn’t a killer, but one more crying pile of bones and dirt she’d send back to her sister was, hopefully, that many fewer that’d come after her again.
“Well, yer alive, still, kind of, so once ya feel like ya can get up or the rain washes ya out enough to move, Ah hope ya do the smart thing and tell Twilight ta stop sending ya all, or Ah’ll finish the process on ya.,” said Apple Bloom with no small amount of relief to the shuddering remains of the pony. “But Ah was saying somethin’, before ya interrupted.”
The near-corpse whimpered, and Apple Bloom smiled grimly. “Yer alive, but there’s only one truth all living things must respect, an’ it’s that truth that the Element’s decided upon for me. Tell me, what’s more Honest than Decay?”
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I love how the cover art reflects this line and vise versa but with the unicorn being the one reflected. I find this very neat!
11405202
Thanks! I'm flattered you noticed!
This line's confusing me. Unless I'm reading it wrong, it seems to imply that the other Bearers "did" something to Twilight, something terrible enough that they no longer deserve to be called "Twilight's friends". And at first, I thought that might've been a hint towards the ambiguous "betrayal that lost them the Elements" that was alluded to earlier… but then the rest of the story suggests Twilight and the Bearers are still together, and that, if anything, Twilight's the ringleader of their "betrayal", whatever it was. What am I missing?
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved the story; I just suck at comprehending this brand of ambiguity.
Either way, kudos!
In an unspecified post-apocalyptic setting, Apple Bloom has to fend off a wandering zombie. Very well.
Except ... the twist at the end seems to say that it's Apple Bloom who is a monster. Perhaps the zombie isn't a zombie after all? It's mentioned early on that she brings a "horrible stench" with her, but it's a common enough trope that the uncorrupted smell foul to those already fallen.
I reread from the top to see whether I'd been fooled by the standard assumption that the viewpoint character is the good person. But the second time around the unicorn still doesn't seem the least bit heroic, making rude threats and demands and expecting to get what she's after by brute force. And if Twilight and Applejack are really out there, leading a resistance of the Last Good Ponies against the blight, then surely they'd be smarter than to keep sending single ponies to recover a lost element by mere bullying?
Of course it's entirely possible that both sides are evil. I suppose after a sufficiently terrible disaster, the only ones remaining alive will be those who become monsters. That's a defensible, if not particularly uplifting, moral.
Is there an underlying work explaining this setting that one should be familiar with?
11405361
Good point, I can see how that can read a bit unclearly! I intended for it to be the other way around, that Twilight had done something to her friends.
11405455
Long time no see, friend! Hope life is treating you well. There's no original work that this is based off of, I made it up myself. I wanted to see what happened if I played with the idea that Apple Bloom is the Element of Decay... and so I did, and I liked the idea enough to draw a picture for it and post it.
11405470
Ah, that makes more sense! Then again, that raises another question: if Applejack's simply a victim of whatever Twilight's done, then why does Apple Bloom have such contempt for her sister? The "REAL Apple" line suggests that she now considers Applejack a "FAKE Apple", and she later ropes AJ in with the rest of the Bearers who "abandoned us"… when your explanation seems to imply they only did so because of what Twilight did to them. I'm absolutely certain it's simply my misinterpretations intermingling, but the overall vibe I'm getting from Apple Bloom's opinion of Applejack is "How dare you get brainwashed against your will!", which doesn't feel right to me.
Could you tell me where I'm going wrong?
11405502
I... hm. I can, but I also can't, if that makes sense. I have my own idea of what happened, but I left it vague intentionally because I wrote this in half an hour, and didn't have time to go into details. This isn't a failure of understanding on your part, I just didn't specify! I am still debating expanding on it if people show interest in the concept, but if not, I was both fine with it as it is and yet I liked it enough to post, you know? The idea has stuck with me.
In my head, Twilight got corrupted, her friends got corrupted either trying to follow her or stop her, and the Elements of Harmony abandoned the group. They no longer had the power to control other ponies, and so they keep sending the few they did control that haven't been killed by the monsters/ancient gods/whatever they didn't take care of to go see if the most likely ponies had been attuned to the Elements of Harmony instead. Apple Bloom just got a particularly pushy mare this time, and sent her back barely-alive as an example to her sister and to Twilight, justified by the fact that she felt sufficiently threatened.
11405516
No worries! Please don't beat yourself up for "not specifying"; if anything, I really appreciated how those ambiguities set the mood! Like I said at the start, I just have a bad habit of staring into "the fear of the unknown" and asking "But what is it?" even when I know that it's beside the point.
11405470
Yes, it has been some time. Am doing well. Nice to see you still going strong; it is pretty rare I have time to sit down and read fanfic.
Thanks for the explanation.
dude, i love the concept surrounding this story the, post-apocalyptic setting, the elements abandoning the mane six for some reason and them scrambling to get it back (and maybe lying about them being stolen to cover that up) even the way you write applebloom is interesting!
Must be an awful feeling when the gods you've looked up to to keep you safe and protected just decide to bail out. Chilling stuff and great work as always buddy :)
11405516
sent her back barely alive? It seems to me that she was alive and mostly intact before being buried/decayed; and even if she comes out of the ground she will be come nothing but bones and dirt.
Is Apple Bloom actually doing unintentional necromancy? If she leaves her victims alive but naught but bones and dirt, then it hasn't she basically created an undead creature with the lifespan of the original?
Oh I love this. it brings up enough questions about what is actually going on that it makes me think there might be a bit of a misunderstanding on Applebloom's part. Even if there's not, she is also somewhat corrupted, turning to something so awful as this to survive.