Eq Renaissance Part 4 (Ed)

    “You ain’t goin’!” Applejack insisted, her fists placed firmly on her wide hips.
    “Ah am,” Big Macintosh said calmly.  His sister had to step out of the way as he lobbed a balled up pair of socks from his dresser into the open suitcase on the bed.
    “No,” Applejack said.  “You’re not.”
    “Ah am,” Big Mac repeated.  He grabbed a couple of pairs of pants, a couple of t-shirts, and some clean underwear.  Turning around from the dresser, he found AJ now blocking his path.
    “I’m not going to let you,” she told him.
    “You can try to stop me,” he said, “but I wouldn’t recommend it.”  He walked around her rather than get physical.  He stuffed the clothes into the suitcase.  He wasn’t sure if it would be enough.  He had never really been away from home before.  Then again, he supposed that all his clothing needs would be met where he was going.
    “You’re needed here,” AJ argued.
    Big Mac stood up straight.  That was almost a good point, and he thought about it.  “You’ll do fine,” he finally told her.  “I’ll send my paycheck here directly.  I won’t be needing it.”
    “I’m confused,” Apple Bloom said, from her position in the doorway of Big Mac’s bedroom.
    “Hush it, Apple Bloom,” AJ silenced her.  “This is serious business and the adults are talking.”
    “There ain’t nothing to talk about,” Big Mac said.  He closed the suitcase and the latch shut with a loud click.  The case was molded plastic in an ugly pea green color.  Big Mac had fished the dusty thing out of the attic.  It and perhaps a dozen other things beneath the roof were the only personal affects that had once belonged to his father.  They weren’t even fancy family heirlooms, like jewelry or a watch or something, just regular stuff.
    He hefted the suitcase off of the bed, then stepped out of his bedroom as soon as Apple Bloom could get out of his way.  All three of them went charging down the stairs, oldest to youngest.  It was the same order they had gone pretty much everywhere, ever since Apple Bloom had first learned to walk.
    Big Mac made his way to the kitchen, and set his suitcase down by the counter.
    “You’re really serious, ain’t you?” AJ asked.  “You’re really going.”
    “Eyup.”  Big Mac started to pack himself a bag lunch for the trip.
    “Of all the stupid, hare-brained, dunder-headed things you could do...”
    “Yeah, well, I guess that’s me in a nutshell,” he said.
    “And what in the hey are you thinking you could make a good soldier for anyway, you big stupid oaf?  You couldn’t harm a fly.  You’d be terrible at it.”
    “That ain’t what the recruiter said,” he told her while getting a jar of peanut butter out of the cupboard.  “Remember?  He came to the school before I had to drop out.  He said I’d make nature’s perfect infantryman.”
    “And you really think that’s a compliment?” AJ asked.
    “What’s a infantryman?” Apple Bloom asked from the bottom of the stairs.
    AJ turned to her, “It means your big dumb brother is going to get himself shot and killed.”
    “Hey!” he said in an infrequently raised voice.  “Leave her out of it.  You’re scaring her!”
    “Oh,” AJ turned back.  “And I’m supposed to believe that’s important to you?”
    “What?”
    “You’re the one who’s scaring Apple Bloom.  And you ought to be ashamed.  Yer scaring me too!  It’s like you don’t even care about us.  You helped me raise Apple Bloom since Mom and Dad died, but now you’re leaving.  What would they think about you just up and running off now?  It’s like we don’t even matter to you.”
    “God DAMMIT!” Big Macintosh bellowed.  He threw the jar of peanut butter across the kitchen.  It crashed against the wall, knocking over a set of knives.  “Why do you think I’m going?” he shouted.  Apple Bloom jumped.  Applejack took a step backwards, afraid of something she had never seen before.  “Huh?  Well?  Can’t answer?  Got nothing to say now?  Cat got your tongue?” he berated her.  “Did you ever stop to think why I’m doing this?  Didn’t you see what they done to the princess?” He flung his arm out straight in the general direction of Canterlot.  “If they can do that to her, why couldn’t they do it to you?  Or to Apple Bloom?  Huh?  I don’t give a god damn about the princess, but I’m not going to sit around on the farm and let the same thing happen to you!”
    His voice cracked on the last sentence.  The volume in the room diminished.  Applejack’s eyes were welling with tears.  Apple Bloom was softly sobbing in the back.
    Then, all three heads turned when they heard the scrape of the tip of a cane across the linoleum floor.  She had been in the breakfast nook the whole time.  Of course she had.  She liked to sit there in the afternoon sun.  She said it always helped her arthritis.
    Granny Smith shuffled her way over.  Her head was bent low, and sort of swaying left to right, like it always did at the worst of times.  She stood between the two older siblings.  They both deferred to her better judgement.  They always had.  She stood before Big Macintosh.  He stood nearly as tall as a giant, his chest wide like a barrel.  She was frail and stooped, and somehow seemed to be getting even smaller as the years passed.
    As she raised a shaking, crabbed hand upwards, Big Mac bent low so that she could stroke his cheek.  Then he bent even lower so that she could kiss it.
    “Big Macintosh?” she spoke as he straightened back up.
    “Yes, Granny?”
    “Keep your head down.”
    “Yes, Granny.”
    “Always do what they tell you to do.  I don’t want to hear about you causing no trouble.”
    “Yes, Granny.”
    “You come straight back here just as soon as you can.  Safe and sound.  I’ll have a warm apple pie waiting for you.”
    “Thank you, Granny.”  He looked over at Apple Bloom, her tears drying on her face.  He waved to her, “Bye, Apple Bloom.”  He nodded at Applejack, “AJ.”  Then he picked up his father’s suitcase.  “Goodbye, Granny.  I’m gonna write just as soon as I can.”
    “That’s real sweet of you,” she told him as he walked out the door.  “Please be safe.  Bye bye, sugarcube.”
    Granny Smith watched his large form through the haze of the screen door.  Then she could only see the red blotch of his bright shirt.  Then she couldn’t see him any more.
    She turned back to the two young girls, but they didn’t say anything to each other.  They had always been such a tight knit family.  Now they just felt so alone.
    “Oh dear,” Granny Smith said.  She raised the palm of one hand up to her chin as if to bite at her nails. “He’s forgotten his lunch.”

    Big Macintosh walked himself all the way into town.  It was a long way, but he had walked it hundreds of times before.  He knew every turn and bend of the way.  Every landmark, whether it was as big as a house or as small as a rut in the road, was familiar to him.  Still, he tried to soak in every bit of the trip, put it in his mind, as if he might somehow forget it.  Or if, for whatever reason, he might not be coming back this way again.
    There was a bridge over a small muddy stream that he used to jump into when he was a kid.  There was a house with a chained dog in the yard that always barked loud enough to wake the dead every time he walked by.  There was a copse of fir trees, and the same stream meandered and passed under the road again.  Only here it stagnated into a little swamp filled with skunk cabbage and lilipads.  Houses came more frequently the closer he got to town, and soon he was in downtown Ponyville.
    The sergeant who ran the recruiting office gave him a form to fill out.  It was one page, sign at the bottom.  Big Mac was surprised at how simple it all was.  Then, the sergeant told him, he was in the army.  His first assignment, he said, was to go outside and stand in the line for the bus.  The recruits were all being bussed over to Hoofington and given a physical.  If they passed, which in Big Mac’s case seemed likely, they’d be taken for two weeks of basic training, and then off to war.  For now, there wasn’t anything to do but hurry up and wait.
    So Big Mac left the office and stood in line by the wall, now a private in Celestia’s army.  There were plenty of other green recruits standing around him.  He was, by far, the tallest and strongest.  In fact, some of them looked downright scrawny.  They could have been high school kids, too young to enlist.  Big Mac decided that he probably would have lied about his age too, if he were still that young.  Not that there weren’t other grown men here too.  There was this one guy with a chinstrap beard and a head full of well-groomed hair.  Big Mac chuckled to himself.  He’d like to see that guy’s face when the barber would shave his head clean.  Then his smile dropped when he realized the same was going to happen to him.  Caramel was here, although they didn’t chat much.  In fact, it was about as silent as a graveyard.  It seemed like everybody was too deep in thought.
    After about an hour of waiting, Applejack and Apple Bloom came running up to him.  They brought him his lunch that he had left behind, and also lots of hugs and kisses.  Applejack didn’t exactly apologize, but she didn’t exactly need to.  Big Mac got Apple Bloom to laugh and smile, and she looked like she felt a million times better after that.  Then they said their proper goodbyes, and he watched them walk back to the farm.
    They’d packed for him not one, but two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a banana, and, of course, a big red apple.  He ate it all, and washed it all down with the little carton of milk they had brought him.
    After a couple of hours of more waiting, the chatter started to pick up.  First it was about the weather, then it was about sports, then, eventually, it turned to the topic that everybody was avoiding, the coming war.
    “Where do you think they’re going to send us?” somebody asked.
    “Hoofington,” Big Mac answered.
    “No, I mean after that.  And don’t say training camp.  Where are we going to fight?”
    “Africa,” other people started to chime in.
    “Yeah, but which country?”
    “What?”
    “Africa’s not a country, it’s a continent.  Which country?”
    “Huh?”
    “I dunno.”
    “You know what I heard?”
    “What’s that?”
    “I heard it was the witch.”
    “What witch?”
    “The witch that lives in the forest.”
    Big Mac’s head snapped to his right, suddenly intent on listening to a conversation he had barely been interested in before.
    “Ah, she’s just a rumor.”
    “No, she isn’t.  I saw her once.  She used to come into town, and I saw her once.”
    “They say she’s the terrorist that attacked the princess.”
    “Oh, c’mon.”
    “She’s black, ain’t she?”
    “And that’s why we’re going to Africa?”
    “I’m telling you, it’s her.  Didn’t you see all the smoke coming up from the Everfree Forest yesterday?”
    “That was a forest fire.”
    “Now who’s sounding ridiculous?  You really think it’s just a coincidence?”
    “What was the princess doing in the Everfree Forest?”
    Big Macintosh tuned the conversation out.  Nobody noticed him turn pale, or the goosebumps rising up on his arms.  There was something to this, something he hadn’t even realized.  This changed everything.  He glanced around at his comrades-in-arms.  They weren’t paying any attention to him.  If anything, their argument was growing heated.
    He was getting thirsty.  That milk hadn’t been enough for two sandwiches.  There was an old, buzzing pop machine at the corner of the building.  He casually started to stroll over to it, acting like there was nothing at all going on.  He even searched through his pockets, looking for bits that he knew weren’t there.  Reaching the machine, he took one last look over at them.  Nobody was looking back.  His glance turned down.  His father’s suitcase was sitting on the ground, right where he left it.  There was no point in taking it, then everybody would see.  He would have to abandon it.  Big Macintosh ducked behind the corner of the building and was gone.
    The army never realized he was AWOL until the bus pulled into Hoofington and he didn’t get off.

    Big Macintosh took the back alleys.  He cut straight through town, trying to avoid as many eyes as possible.  He didn’t take the road, there were too many people.  Instead, he cut through open pastures; he knew the lay of the land well enough.
    He was out in the open, and that bugged him, but he figured there probably weren’t that many people looking for him at the moment.  At least if they were, they would be the country folk out here who didn’t even know he’d signed up yet.
    He didn’t dare risk cutting through the Acres.  If any of his family saw him?  Well, that would just cause way too many questions.  Instead, he raced through the Top’s family farm.  Then it was through a little grove of trees, and then into the open pasture behind the cottage of that quiet friend of AJ’s.
    Big Mac froze in his tracks, a momentary hesitation.  He had reached his goal without being spotted.  The dark shadows of the Everfree Forest yawned out in front of him.  He must have been crazy not to hesitate at least a little.  Then again, he had just deserted the army a couple of hours into his enlistment.  He swallowed hard, and stepped beneath the branches.
    A shiver went up his spine.  It was so much darker underneath the leaves that his skin seemed to grow cold.  Bird calls that he couldn’t recognize rang out among the trees.  He tried to go forward a few steps, but paused when he came across an enormous snake, striped in dangerous looking colors.  It saw him, then slithered along its way as if it didn’t have a thing to be afraid of.
    Instead of trying to penetrate the forest any further, he crept along its edge, just a few yards inside, so that nobody could see him.  Soon he came upon the one dirt road that led into the forest.  He took this, and started making good progress deeper in.
    Nobody came into the Everfree Forest.  That was good for him, because he wouldn’t get caught, but what was starting to concern him more now were the strange animal tracks that crossed the dusty patches in the road.  He had no idea of what kind of animals made them, or if they were even animals at all.  Big Macintosh was a very large man, but there were much larger things than him in these woods.
    He stopped long enough to rip a heavy branch off of a fallen long.  He used it as a walking stick, and it gave him some peace of mind to think he could use it as a club if something came out at him from between the trees.
    He turned off the road onto a much smaller footpath.  It was twisted and thick roots were tearing it up in most places.  He wasn’t really that worried about losing his way.  He had been here once before.
    She had called him.  He had woken up in his own warm bed in the middle of the night and he had heard her calling, not with his ears but with his mind.  He had found his way out here in pitch blackness, guided by a strange magic.  She had put a spell on him.  It was some sort of enchantment, or witchcraft.  He could have supposed it was a curse, although he hadn’t felt cursed.  Nothing stopped him.  The forest had tried, but nothing had stood in his way, all the way to her hut, where she was waiting for him.
    There, she used his body.  Then, without saying a word, she sent him back to his house.  Perhaps it was all a part of her black magic.
    The thing was, he would say if anybody had ever bother to ask him, she hadn’t even needed to use her voodoo.  The moment he had first let eyes on her, he was entranced, and not in the magical way.  She was so exotic.  As far as Big Mac knew, there wasn’t anything like her in the whole wide world.  It wasn’t that he was obsessed.  It was like she was always at the back of his mind, haunting him, showing him another world.  When he laid in bed at night, trying to fall asleep, if he closed his eyes tight, he could see her strange blue green eyes staring back at him in the darkness.
    He smelled smoke.  He had seen the smoke yesterday, but that was from well outside the reach of the forest, where it all looked like one big green endless sea.  Now he knew the fire close to her hut.
    Big Mac paused.  There was a strange noise.  It was short, but very deep in pitch, so deep it was barely audible.  It was coming from behind him, and up in the forest canopy.  It didn’t sound like anything he had heard on this earth before, and it felt surreal.  He had read once, in some book, that there are certain kinds of birds that can produce a kind of resonate thrumming deep in their chests.  Big Mac hoped that’s all it was, and rushed on.
    In a few hundred more yards, he found the ruins of her hut.  It was cracked open, almost like an eggshell, and whitish smoke was slowly drifting out.  He felt so sorry for her.  He didn’t even know her name, but he knew that whatever it was that she had done, she didn’t deserve to have her home destroyed like this.  He searched inside, but found no human remains..
    Big Mac did, however, find another trail behind her hut.  He headed down this trail at a brisk pace.  He could still hear that thrumming behind him, and now there seemed to be two of them, whatever they were.  Fifteen minutes later he stopped dread in his tracks.  Here was a forest clearing that had obviously been the scene of... something.
    It looked like some kind of battle had taken place here, although of what sort he had no idea.  Trees had been torn up by their roots and seemed to have been just tossed around.  Great swaths of brown-black earth had been torn up.  At one side there were the remains of the forest fire.  It sure wasn’t any natural fire.  The forest was too wet.  The fire seemed to have carved a very exacting path, very skinny and very long.  Big Mac stood at one end, and looked down.  He held up both hands, as if holding up a flame-thrower.  Everything in the path of the flame had been destroyed, burnt to ashes and then blown away.  Everything outside the path was still green and alive.
    He couldn’t tell which end the flames had come from, so he jogged down to the other end of the charred earth.  There, at the other end, was a near identical path of ruin leading in a whole new direction.  He took this, and found another.
    Eventually he came to the end of the destruction.  He had no idea what could have caused such damage, but his mind kept coming to the idea of a dragon breathing fire, no matter how ridiculous that sounded.  At the end of the last scorched path, he headed straight into the forest, thinking that there must be something else to find.
    Almost as soon as he had crossed under the canopy, the thrumming came on stronger than ever.  There were many of the unseen things around him, too many to count.
    He started to run, and blundered his way through the thick undergrowth.  He lost his club on a tangled vine.  His foot caught in a small hole, and he fell upon the forest floor, his ankle painfully twisted.  The thrumming was getting closer.  Big Mac got right back up again.  His ankle hurt bad, but it wasn’t sprained, and he could still move.
    He came to another forest trail, now irrevocably lost.  It was thinner and more uprooted than any he had seen today.  He didn’t complain, because whatever was following him was still after him, and he could make better time on the trail.
    Big Macintosh ran for his life.  Instead of giving him what he wanted, the trail seemed to grow even more rough.  The canopy shut out more light, making it darker.  The bushes grew in closer, and soon he had to brush them out of his face with every step.  The leaves themselves grew larger and greener, looking more like some kind of tropical jungle than the forest he had known.
    He knew he was making a terrible racket crashing through the undergrowth.  Whatever was following him would have no trouble tracking him.  For a brief moment, he considered ducking into the bushes and trying to hide.  Then he heard something else rustling through the bushes, and it was right behind him.
    Big Macintosh never had the time to turn and see it.  Something grabbed him, and dragged him into the bushes.  It was impossibly, supernaturally strong.  It felt like steel.  Big Mac was as helpless in its grip as a rag doll.  He tried to scream, but he couldn’t.  Then be began to relax, at least a little.  The thing that was clamped over his mouth was a human hand.