Chapter 1: Arrival
“Dear Twilight Sparkle,
My faithful student, as much as I admire your work on the study of Magic I regret to inform you of the cessation of funding to your laboratory. I have stalled the Powers That Be long enough to allow you time to pursue another line of magical inquiry. Please consider your research into the nature of death to be henceforth removed from the Canterlot Magical Society’s list of supported studies.
Without concrete results it is difficult to justify the ongoing costs of this laboratory - and, much as you have been my star pupil, I must also remind you that the expense has been disproportionate to what you have been able to bring forth to the Royal Council.
While there are those in Canterlot who view your research as dubious in terms of its ethics, I still have enough influence to protect you - but it is difficult to continue doing so when there is no positive result from your study of pony mortality. You are no doubt aware of the danger this presents you and your researchers if you remain in Canterlot.
I am not unsympathetic to your endeavours. If we are to restore the fabled powers of the Elements of Harmony, I agree that we must understand the nature of death itself. Even Alicorns such as I will age and succumb to mortality without them.
I have therefore arranged for your transfer to Ponyville-upon-Gorkhon. There is a particularly long-lived pony there by the name of Starswirl Kain, who may be able to assist you in your research. If he is as truly immortal as some claim, you may be able to find proof enough to save your laboratory.
I highly encourage you to also make some friends while you’re there.
May you trot ever in the warmth of the sun,
Princess Celestia”
Twilight Nightovna Sparkovsky put the letter down, letting her head rest dejectedly on the train carriage’s window. They were already almost at the strange town, though it had been three solid days of travel. Her diminutive dragon companion, Spike, tried to offer her a reassuring smile - though it hardly seemed to cheer the purple pony up much. She gazed outwards; the apple orchards had long since faded into the distance, and they were deep into the Equestrian Steppe.
“I can’t believe she sent us out to the middle of who-knows-where,” Twilight grumbled. “It’s so deeply unfair. We were so close to greatness!”
“It’ll be okay, Twilight. The Princess even arranged for us to stay in the town’s library! Imagine all the strange research they’ll have there - doesn’t that make you happy?”
“Yes, actually. Yes, it does,” she replied, perking up a little. “I’ve read a good deal about pony history, and a figure resembling Starswirl has come up more than a few times. If he really is this immortal pony, then even if we don’t get to talk to him we’ll still find valuable information about his stories and history. It might be the breakthrough we need. As soon as we arrive I intend to spend as much time as I can setting up a laboratory in this library.”
“Remember, you need to make friends here, too,” Spike cautioned. “We can’t have another Canterlot situation on our hands.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Twilight said, dismissing his concerns with a wave of her hoof. Spike raised an eyebrow, unconvinced.
“I’m being serious, Twi,” he said, though his juvenile voice lacked the gravitas he longed for. Twilight looked on, out the window, gazing into nothingness. She didn’t take in a single word he said.
Hours passed. Night fell. The pair finally disembarked the train into Ponyville in the early hours of the morning, when all the world was asleep - or, at least, it should have been asleep. The sounds of a scuffle, muffled shouts, and general boisterousness of drunken colts sent a shiver down Twilight’s back. She ushered Spike away from the station quickly, opening her map of Ponyville to get her bearings.
The town’s library was built within the confines of a great oak tree; a suitable place for a pony researcher to build a makeshift home. It even had an observatory at the top, though Twilight ignored it in favour of the plethora of books stacked around the walls.
“Excellent,” she muttered to herself, setting up a microscope, a series of slides, blood samplers, and a large set of medical equipment near the hay cot. Spike had already fallen asleep in a small nook, beneath a pile of old books. She sighed, placing Spike in a slightly more appropriate cot - though it was still spartan and somewhat uncomfortable.
“It’s too late to go see Starswirl now,” Twilight hummed to herself. She glanced at the clock; a few hours longer and the town would see the dawn of Celestia’s sun. Too few to get a full night’s rest, but too many to pull an all-nighter again. “First thing in the morning, then,” she muttered, reluctantly trying to settle herself down to sleep.
“My dearest daughter Applejack,
I’m writing to you after so many years apart ‘cause I’m hoping you’ll find a way to return quickly to us.
Something has set Night-mareish Fear in my bones. A difficult trial is coming, and I ain’t got no idea if we can face it. I really do hope your studies have borne fruit, and that you’re a skilled surgeon. Such a skill will come of use soon, much as I don’t want it to.
I’m the only physician in Ponyville. But I’m growing old. In my bones I feel more aged than even Granny Smith, though I’m a might younger than her. Something ain’t right.
I don’t fear death. And neither should you. Death is, to a healer, just a partner in a barn dance. The other half of a conversation. The constant witness to our work - even when we succeed. It ain’t old age, or what comes after it, that worries me.
Instead, I’m beset by the thought that I might fail to pass on my role.
Make haste, my daughter. I truly need you.
Your loving mother,
Pear Butterakh”
The last train into Ponyville. It had been a long time since Applejack had set hoof in her hometown. A place she had once known so well now frightened her; she was an alien amongst her own people.
Training to be a healer had seemed only right - after all, every mare in the family line before her was a healer, too. But they were Menkhu. Butchers, in a way. Old holy ponies. Blessed with the knowledge and the skill to heal, but a far different knowledge to what she’d learned in long distant university halls.
Still, she was a deft hoof with a scalpel. And she hadn’t forgotten how to buck apples. She was still her mother’s daughter.
“Best turn yer mind to the here an’ now, Applejack,” she said under her breath, hugging herself for warmth. She walked down the train carriage to find her second class seat; a cheap ticket was all she had the bits to afford, even with all her fancy education. She’d never quite blended in with the other ponies studying medicine, always feeling a little too big, a little too burly, a little too low-class when placed alongside unicorn nobility.
She’d showed them all up, though. She was the only pony actually willing to get her hooves dirty. She was real good with a scalpel and bonesaw.
Somewhere in the first-class carriages a purple-maned pony and a strange little creature were talking in hushed tones, but Applejack paid them little mind. The mare seemed a pretentious sort, and her companion seemed a touch too incompetent for his niceness to mean much.
She was in no mood for making new friends anyway.
Setting her cap down over her eyes, she tried to let the jostling of the train carry her off to sleep. It wasn’t much, but an hour or two of rest was better than nothing.
“So strange seeing one such as you here,” a raspy voice said. She snapped around, looking over her shoulder. There was no one there. “I haven’t seen you around these parts for years.”
There was no one anywhere.
She was in the pitch black. Floating aloft on nothing.
Her stomach lurched. But she didn’t fall.
She paused, taking a few gasping short breaths of air in as she convinced her body she wasn’t in danger.
“Ah, I’m dreamin’ ain’t I?”
“Why, of course you are, dear Applejack. But that doesn’t make it any less real, does it?”
“Uh, beggin’ yer pardon?”
“It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it. Just think of me as a… fellow traveller, of sorts.”
“A fellow traveller, huh? Well, then would you mind showin’ yer face?”
“Ah, a brave little pony, I see,” the voice rasped, a smirk dripping from every word. A small candlelight illuminated itself in the distance. Applejack stared at it, trying to make out the visage of the pony behind it - though it was almost impossible to make him out.
“I ain’t afraid of nightmares.”
“Night-mares? Oh, my little pony, if you think I’m some mere tantabus you’d be sorely mistaken. I’m just an… interested observer.”
“Then observe away. But leave me be.”
“Ah, perhaps I will. Perhaps you and I shall never speak again. But I thought it only fitting that after visiting the mother, I should at least exchange pleasantries with the daughter.”
“You - what did you say?”
“Take heed, dear chosen child of the Apples; your mother was right to be cautious. Perhaps you may outwit that which hunts you. A gentle suggestion; without friends, you are all sure to lose. Good evening.”
The speaker vanished in an instant - but just for a moment Applejack could have sworn she saw an enormous beak, and the glittering eyes of carrion fowl.
The rest of her dreams were no more restful than the first, but the memories of them slipped away like water through her hooves. She awoke in full when the train finally blew its whistle.
She had, at last, arrived home. Back in Ponyville-upon-Gorkhon.
She stepped off the train, hauling her few meagre possessions into her saddlebags. She hadn’t made it more than ten steps into the trainyard before she heard hoofsteps approach behind her.
“Well, well, if it ain’t the prodigal Apple, returning to the scene of her crime,” said the voice of a colt behind her. She didn’t recognise it.
“What in tarnation? You mean me?”
“O’course we mean you, murderer,” another voice said - this time a mare’s, approaching from the front. She was masked. Her cutie mark was covered. Two more colts stepped from the shadows of the trainyard, surrounding her.
“What the hay is this? I’m Applejack, y’all know me!”
“I don’t think any of us know you any more,” the mare replied, revealing the glitter of a knife in her hooves. “You killed Pear, you pay the price. Matricide ain’t somethin’ we tolerate here in Ponyville. Buckin’ traitor - get her!”
The next moments passed in a blurred rush. Applejack wanted to ask what the hell was going on, to know what they were talking about, to process the fact that they thought her mother was dead, to understand that they thought she had killed her own mother, how the hell any of it made any sense -
But those questions didn’t matter.
Acting on muscle memory, she ducked.
She kicked out.
Her hooves made contact with another pony’s chest.
A blade slashed her side. Her leg was bleeding.
She flailed. A pony’s face hit the side of the traincar.
Another cut.
Another hoof in somepony’s jaw.
A knife, skittering across train tracks.
Three dead ponies, and another one injured, gasping weakly on the side of the tracks.
“Oh. Oh horseapples,” Applejack muttered, her flank openly bleeding. She staggered forward, collapsing from the headrush. “This ain’t good…”
Pulling herself to her hooves, the mare crawled into the outskirts of Ponyville. Amidst the industrial warehouses were still a few trees. In one of those trees was a treehouse.
It would do for now. A brief place to breathe and to patch up her wounds.
She stumbled up the ramp and pulled a makeshift draw-switch beside her.
The house wasn’t empty.
“What?! Who are you?! This is a house only for blank flanks!”
“Ah, I uh… Oh, fillysticks,” Applejack muttered as her vision swam. The blood left her brain.
She passed out. The orange-coated filly before her looked on in horror.
Pinkie Pie woke up in a shallow grave.
It was kinda bad, kinda dirty, kinda muddy, kinda dusty, but still kinda fun because if you looked really really hard sometimes you could see little earthworms and bugs and other cool things and gemstones and like isn’t this so exciting like seriously we get to even star as one of the main characters in a cool new fiction and we get to have like such a melodramatic start to it all plus also like it’s the one about the plague game that got kinda popular a while ago and that’s really really cool right isn’t it????
Pinkie Pie turned to the audience, grinning a little too widely. She was just really happy to be a part of the production.
“Wait, sorry, is this the wrong tone? Is this too enthusiastic? Do I need to, like, put on my serious growly grouchy oopsie doopsie meanie weanie Pinkie face for this? I could just do the whole thing as Pinkamina instead would that be better because I can do that instead and that wouldn’t even be hard for me I could be all like GRR and Scary and like even do the Cupcakes thing because y’all loved it when I was being scary an-”
“No, no, Pinkie,” a purple-maned alicorn replied, cutting off her incessant stream-of-consciousness. She spoke from off-stage. It was difficult to fully see her face; any time Pinkie tried to squint too long at her, all she could see was an expressionless mask. Spindly, black-clad limbs. The garb of a stagehand. Or a director.
“I know you’re enthusiastic to play the part well, but just relax. The first play was a flop. This time we’re going to do it a little better.”
“Okay! Gotcha! And scene!”
The world went dark.
Pinkamina woke up in a shallow grave.
She had no memory of how she got there. She had no memory of who she was. Nothing really seemed to make much sense.
She supposed it should be scary, yet no fear entered her heart.
“Remember,” the stagehand spoke, “you’re basically a criminal. You’ve got to have the mindset of a thief.”
Pinkamina, her mane flowing deceptively straight, turned to the stagehand. Her face was expressionless, but there was a dangerous fire in her eyes.
“Why would they call me a thief, pray tell? What did I steal? Why does the Law detest me so?”
“Ah, fantastic!” The Stagehand said, gesturing to the camerapony; Pinkie was her favourite method actor, and at last she had a chance to capture her brilliance on the stage. “Yes, good, keep going!”
“The only thing I remember is that I am an outlaw, and will forever be persecuted… Was I really that good a thief, I wonder? I have nothing of value, just myself and these rags I am wearing. My crime is horrendous, still.”
Pinkamina climbed out of her grave. Rats scurried before her. Dogs howled, and bulls moaned their guttural cries in the steppe beyond.
By Celestia, playing both good and evil roles at once was just so fun!
“I am beyond redemption. Back in the day, every heart was open before me. Now, whatever door I approach is slammed in my face. Where should I run? With whom shall I seek shelter? Shall I find what I stole and give it back? Who will agree to take it off my hands?”
She turned, staring directly at the camera; a Brechtian to the bitter end, she had no love of the fourth wall nor its needless restrictions.
The audience in her eyes, she begged for the response she would never receive;
“Who will answer my questions, if not you?”