Chapter 29: Ballad of the lost minds

In the numberless amount of centuries since its gloried inception, uncounted and frankly unthought of by the Man in Blue, coffee was a systematically beguiling grail for all who reveled in its empyrean savor. It was a delicacy the brunete rarely ever indulged in if it wasn’t an apparatus to bring forth the onset of a mass exodus of lethargy. Rigorously employed to shrug the cumbersome adamantine chains of sleep and smother the incessant hankering to slothfully lumber back to his mattress. The divine home to his equally sacred metropolis, tenanted solely by placidity and the many facets and synonyms of the word and its blissful definitions. All welcomed with open lovesome arms gaping to greet its touch-starved chassis. Living in that hellscape of cleft-littered concrete, crocodiled sidewalks and rusted cadaverous exoskeletons of lorn vehicles, peace was a steaming commodity. An exotic, rarefied currency that most damned souls condemned to that crude purgatory without a means to revive it. One that anyone, even the most impoverished beings who every waking hour groveling in a drunken heap, would give anything and everything to their name to achieve it. 

As it so happened, and how Levi unquestionably preferred it, that euphoric kingdom of serenity had tailed him across the span of however many universes he surpassed. One clamorous skull-splitting vociferator, booming like the furious voice of God, and Levi Cronell was gone. Burglarized from the ordinary run-of-the-mill existence pent in a quotidian realm, where all possible captivating or stupefying knowledge and discoveries have all been incepted. Their mold-shattering creation passing, enjoying its cursory position as the apple of the nation’s eye, before finally washing ashore upon one of two islands. Staring down the barrel of execrable obscurity and fading into the most wretched of recesses, or rocketing to the moon. Achieving stardom and grandeur never once considered to be a veracious possibility. In Equestria, the mastodonic and, at least in the thunderstruck brothers’ perspective, unendly domain lived a colossal cornucopia. Its convex fruits of enlightening knowledge about species both foreign and revamped by the bewildering wizardly magic of these lands and riveting discoveries to pore his curiosity to. Sow the seeds of ribbing books into a muddled spate of excavated cognition and, for the first time in an amount of years unnumbered by the peppy duo, utilized intuit to thoroughly ascertain novel information. At long last, the dust-soaked stock-still cogs of his brains were accorded the invitation to chug and turn once more. 

Their fruitful and verdant odyssey into the unmeasured trove bereft of a constated depth or numbered fathoms of bounteous skills to hone into something warranting substantial marvel. Facts varnished in a scintillating coat of effervescent blandishment. Innovations and galvanizing discoveries sitting unexhumed and unseen thus far by the Man in Blue. Idling impatiently beneath the earth like chimeric buried riches with an existence suffocated by ineliminable ambiguity, the magnitude of its affluent profusion untold. The first merestone in the pair’s long-standing voyage down the gripping gem-studded tunnel, adorned with avant-garde ideas and concepts, dwelled within the palms of their het up palms. Tall pink-rimmed paperboard cups fraught with a soil-brown indulgence he scarcely wallowed in. Coffee. A sacrosanct, hallowed pleasure where fully casting cessation upon the humdrum of their everyday toils and availing himself from their mundanity. Observing and evaluating the potential alterations of the numinous Sangrail, slotting them into one of a duo of categories of extremity. Either a rattlepated brutality of the drink justified a sanction of vehement scorn, or the reverse opposite. Glorying in the honorful spring of unrivaled praise and gilded accolades. 

Sugarcube Corner was the saccharine marrow of Ponyville’s tycoon of intoxicating pastries and banquets. A revered castle home to the incontestable magnate of all things sugary and benevolent, Pinkie Pie, and the very same hub where Levi and Alan visited on a bitter Autumn day. A morning that, at least to the standards of the twain, was as uneventful and serene as an unpestered cemetery. Twilight spent the latter part of the betimes with a bold yellow feather seized by the ironclad grip of her proficient lavender magic. Extemporarily jerry-rigging the broad kitchen table into a stalwart garrison, with the sole barracks being the partly unfurled scroll of papyrus and the beavering quill. Joined exclusively by a tiny glass flash half-full of sable ink, she feverishly scratched her hastened thoughts. Exercising her errorless penmanship without a flaw or straggling line of black marring the cursive letters. A feat ne’er thought possible by either recently awakened man as they voyaged down the curling flight of birchen steps and gazed with eyes agog and mouths part agape. A short mite of conversation endowed with the split-second proposal by the eager Man in Blue came and went. An idea spurred by the jackbooted, unforgiving lethargy conquering his weary frame with a fist of robust iron. Lazing snarky and awash with arrogance upon an illustrious throne reserved solely for the vivace and vitality, cruelly snuffed by the unfeeling dismissal from the world of euphorically slumberous spirits. 

As Levi often did when a pluperfect opportunity such as this stared him down, all but roaring with every droplet of oxygen occupying its figure to be acted upon, the male gleefully surrendered to its cries. Recruiting Alan to an exponentially overdue chat belonging to the most enthralling, eye-catching variety. Sitting lesireful and careless to the potential droves of clandestine discord residing just behind the tree line. Hell, maybe even just past the town borders. And where the nebulous fringes of Ponyville were precisely located was a puzzling haze with a deprivation of a lucid answer. 

Lev and Alan spoke their cordial goodbyes to the ebulliently laboring unicorn, asked if she desired a confectionery dessert from the location stamped onto the crown of Levi’s list of undertakings, and the pair were out. Sauntering into the very same elysian terrain destitute of limpid margins and passed rife throngs of mellowly laboring ponies. A mite of tranquil short minutes thoroughly inundated by merry colloquy passed before the duo happened upon the treacly nave. The titanic building assuming the form, encompassing every last nook of every detail, of a colossal cupcake. The only inelegant addition bankrupt of the trademark cloying grandeur the shop held in a coffer of pride was a red-brick chimney. Erecting from the ceiling a few inches beside the pointed vertex of the edifice of icing upon the structure, turbid ropes of smoke lifelessly drifting from one of the bakery’s unseen cavities. The belly of this prime example of the quaint, old-hat inventions and construction implemented to the utmost and, to Levi, in the most fantastic comely ways imaginable. Behind Sugarcube Corner past the long tallow-colored counter with a delicate cyan top was a lone door leading to a small benign backwater. A spot with three round tables of speckless glass bordered by stark-white-painted metal with two chairs positioned at either end of the same hue. Fixed to the center of the gibbous disc of glass was a moss-green market umbrella. The tables dwelled in a long two-foot wide area of brilliant azure linoleum bordered by violet metal railings. 

At the far left table sat two men grinning to the brink where the potential of their skin grimly splitting open was all too possible. Chompers laid bare for all of Ponyville to see, Levi’s mouth of glistening opal and Alan’s ever-so-slightly yellowed teeth contrasting. The blemish nigh-impossible to remark and intuit in the benignant shafts of lenitive luster. Paperboard cups coiled by their eager digits and gazing into the eyes of the man they believed to be stone-cold dead out in the inhospitable, barbaric reaches of the Everfree Forest. Home to every mythical beast of antediluvian mythos and monsters of the human category. In spite of the direful circumstances and ruthless hampers that led them to each other’s presence, they somehow managed, by the bold stroke of undiluted joy coating his heart, to mirthfully guffaw over superb coffee.

“So, Levi, tell me that one more time.” Alan chuckled through a mouthful of amiable hilarity. “You found a what?”

“A manticore! The real deal, no joke. Scorpion, lion paws, all of the above.”

“And it was-” A chuckle severed his sentence in two. “Bothered by a thorn in its paw?”

“Exactly!”

“You almost got torn to bits by a thorn!” Alan reared his head and leaned back in his chair and pointed his riant visage towards the sky. Washed in the molten gold of the herculean benevolent sun. “I can’t believe what I’m hearin’!”

“I wish I was joking, man. It’s all fun and games now but in the moment, I thought I was a dead man.”

“No doubt. No doubt at all. Surprised you made it out without soilin’ yourself.” 

Levi rejoiced in a dwarfish sip of his shockingly wondrous coffee. A sanctified, reverable liquid where unsullied perfection was achieved solely by an elaborate, deemed tedious and inordinate by some, gauntlet of measurements and mixtures. Where the slimmest of failures during any facet of the congeries of processes would spell inevasible ruination. The decay of its former eminent grandeur stretching past miles beyond the feeble margins of salvageability. Borders that Levi believed were carelessly bounded as he spectated the verveful buoyant equine. Darting fervently to every corner and hastily scurrying across the peppy tiles. The radiant linoleum incomprehensibly outmatched in breakbone battle of who would be helmed as the most vibrant entity in that precious vicinity. A more fitting and warranted name being the sole matchless sanctified abode that Pinkamena Diane Pie could graciously name her sweet, sweet home. She bumbled around the vast space behind the counter, brisker than a hummingbird that jammed its slender beak into a lorn brick of cocaine. Scrabbling every which way with, from an outside point-of-view, looked as farcical as an up-priced circus act in a miserly carnival hellbent on raking in funds no matter the means of acquisition. Jamming her avid hooves into a manifold of buttons and slamming down plastic levers, time and time again. Her zealous nonsensical ritual only began to mold into a sensible, sane-minded routine when the duo of rangy cups materialized in her hooves. And a dumbfounded Levi watched helplessly from the buzzing sidelines occupied wholly by one another soul, a pleasantly astonished Alan. The brunete’s dispirited eyes spectating the unbounded carnage and unethical erroneous injustices upon his drink, like a bereft owner watching his dog be lambasted by a horde of coyotes. Thick rivulets of caramel spewed from a large steel box embellished with an innumerable catalog of buttons and switches. Hills of sugar dumped into the inky abyss without a scant atom of hesitation or any morsel of clear concise thought injected into her febrile movements. 

Her final stop was at the counter where the two men sat in silver stools with sky-blue leather cushions, its numberless years of rigorous use and service in the Corner’s lifespan unmapped upon its leather flesh. Dropping the paperboard between the two starkly differentiated brothers. Each one an austere, unabashed delineation of a stark emotion. Alan Sizemore, joy and lofty heaven-scraping spirits and expectations for the improper heedless savagery untamed imposed upon the drink. And Levi Cronell, as surly and disheartened as an ancient chipped gargoyle. The virtuoso stonemason chiseling a brazen hangtail visage upon an exanimate cadaver of stone. Gazing disenchanted at the ferverous pony’s splendorous orbs, mushroom clouds of elation bursting within their soft cyanic confines. 

Outside, however, the old ill-natured man with an immovable frown graven upon his dejected countenance was swiped away. Struck joyful and smiley by the drink’s altruistic reaches and influence. A detail he hoped Pinkie Pie noticed through the panorama of square glass panes beside them. 

“I am too, honestly.”

“What other legends did you see out there? Things that shouldn’t exist, you follow me?”

“Nothing that exciting,” Levi rejoindered with a plentiful draft of his coffee. Its infectious warmth delightfully hugging his organs and cascading his throat. “What I saw can’t really beat a manticore.”

“Y’never know. Maybe it can.”

“A sea serpent crying by a river about its mustache and some scary trees in the dark. Like I said, can’t beat the manticore.”

“Now that ain’t a fair judgment, is it? They're still interestin’.”

“Not as interesting as your story.” Levi smiled at his confidant, returning the paperboard to his raring lips. 

“I’ve told that a half-dozen times by now, brother. Just starvation and wooden wolves. Wish I could’ve saw a stinkin’ manticore or a giant snake.”

“Have you ever wondered how those timberwolves came to be?”

Alan cocked a brow at the Man in Blue. The sun’s redoubtable, ravishing creeks of radiance bathing him in a heavenly ethereal glow. Shafts of luster shoutlining the unflawed leather, sewn and stitched as one in glamourful harmony. The limitless adroitness in its creation bleeding from every fine unflawed grain of sable leather, united to form the picturesque garb sleeving his willowy framework. 

“I haven’t got a chance to stop and give it much thought. Haven’t had the time to stop and breathe until I got here.”

“You got any theories, Al?”

Alan paused and leaned back in his chair, whiter than the unabashed showcase of a full moon on an unstarred night, gazing into the cloud-freckled ether above with a thoughtful hum. 

“Some magic carpenter way deep in the woods.“

“Making the wolves?” Levi responded with a bantam swig. 

“Yeah, somewhere out in that forest with a couple of knives on a table. Carving away. Making as many wolves as his heart can handle.” Alan enchantedly explained while splaying open his stationary jazz hands, fingers spread like a Chinese shan. 

“And the magic?”

“I’m sure he’s got his ways. Either way, I’ll never understand how all that works. Even in America.”

“What? Magic?”

“Yep. It’s real now, brother. Now I’m obligated to learn it.”

“We got books and unicorns who can explain better than I can, and even I’m not entirely certain how it works.”

During the vast majority of Levi’s nightly hours-long sojourns in that pullulating mob of books and unbounded literature, often known by its layman name of the Library’s bottom floor, he was chaperoned by two friends. A duo of entities whose sole purpose on the earth they perused and tenanted day-in and day-out was to provision comradeship to the Man in Blue. The twain of cursory comrades armed with the consecrated almighty present of life by the rich tenebrosity bore a name. Deep thought and the moon. The moonlight smiled down upon him and beglossing his frame with its pale varnish. Lathering his blank visage, twisted in a mangled contortion of fathomless thought and scrutinizing pondering. His laboring mind ambling to engrossing realms zealously devout to one category out of the multifaceted catalog of perplexing wonders. For the last three nights preceding Alan’s palliating knocks upon his front door, he sauntered into one of the innumerous idiosyncratic dimensions equipped with nought except the elephantine, growling stomach for knowledge quartering in his skull. He read impassionedly, sweeping his mesmerized irises across page after page of throngs of paragraphs. Ferociously snagged by its enthralling contents with barbed keen hooks, no intention extant to release him from its brawny grasp. After all, if the magic of these ambagious ponies and their kin can drown an entire nation in perpetual darkness, what mind wouldn’t thirst for more? Scrounging the unending scapes of the library’s pages, feasting from stark cover to stark cover. Foraging for answers to his boundless rotund storm of restive inquiries.

“I ain’t tryna figure out how it works. All that scares the daylights outta me.”

“What’s there to be scared of?”

“I don’t know. Just the…unknown aspects, I guess. Everythin’ I can’t come closer to understanding. That’s what freaks me out.”

“Well, we got all the time in the world, brother. No rush to find out what’s what.”

Alan paused. Viscid soupy quietude infected their stalwart bubble of serenity. Their retirement to their own personal cubby of the world unrectifiably sullied by a vile cogent intrusion, reckless to anything harboring a semblance to rational thought or reasoning. It begriped a singular epithet, dread. One of the most august, well-thewed elements among the limitless variegated regimes of Mother Nature’s infantry. The whelming alarm from the interminable peril gnawed at the resolute demarcations of their personal impregnable bubble like starved mosquitoes. Ruination of biblical proportions looming direfully as an unwelcomed itinerant blight upon the sun-kissed horizon. The sole extant parallel to the dissonant madness yet to fully bloom into the catastrophic pestilence it truly is was the Book of Revelations. A spoilsome foe so exorbitantly infatuated with destruction in carnage that, from an outside perspective, seemed to plant his roots in whatever fictitious world he thought was deserving of his brutality. Yet, life and the unfeeling world around the duo was heedless to their feelings and vehement objections. Whatever grisly event would besmirch the torrent of headlines next would prove that twentyfold. 

The raven-haired man leaned forward with a stony spartan visage and scooted his drink a few inches to the right. Fashioning a perch for his folded bronzed arms in its absence. 

“Do we?” He asked gruffly. 

Levi stared blankly for a split-second before glorying in a saccharine draft of his coffee before placing it upon the table and sitting up, spine level with the chair’s backrest. 

“What’re you getting at?”

“I mean, if we let Gary off scotch-free, there won’t be much of a world left. We’ve already been livin’ on borrowed time for years now.”

“No one’s letting him go free, Alan, I thought you understood that by now.” Levi retorted.

“I understood we’re letting money-hungry bounty hunters handle this!” Alan hissed. “We’d be better off going after him ourselves. I’m shocked we haven’t already.”

Levi’s hands fell and slapped against his thighs before he tilted his head in both directions. Motioning for the closer examination of the tight-knit intimate hive of homes and cottages encompassing the flourishing thrumming heart of the town. 

“Look around us.” He spoke while holding his hands in either direction. Gesticulating towards the thin school of chinwagging sans souci ponies of every category and classification, not one bearing any similarities to another sans their specific species. Some dragging wooden wagons with a rich brown varnish draped with a blonde burlap sheet, secreting their passionately devised wares from the peeping eyes of the outside world. Others colloquially meandering about, paying a cursory visit to a neighboring friend or beloved family member, either indifferent or uneducated about the harum-scarum menace on the vista. 

“We’re practically on the Oregon Trail, Al. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was secretly 1850 here.”

“So?” Alan fired back with a curled lip. “What’s that gotta do with anythin’?”

“We don’t got cars or planes or helicopters with thermal cameras. Nothing. It’s just us and our wits.” Levi replied. “If we did have the slightest clue of where he was it’d take us weeks in a wagon to get there, and he could be gone with the wind by then.”

Alan harrumphed and compacted his fists, staining his knuckles a luminous ghostly white, with a scalding glare trained at the unblemished table. A skiff of the soothesome sun’s fair consolatory rays, blending and ingratiating flawlessly with the chill Autumn gales. His gooseflesh-riddled triceps graciously mitigated by the behemoth of unadulterated molten gold above their heads. The fulgid gibbous glass sparkled like morning light upon the face of a lake, a fervid troupe of scintillating gleam dancing across its surface. Every individual sparkle an aureate rhinestone studded upon its comely visage since the hour of its inception.

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

“It ain’t good, it ain’t smart neither, but it’s what gotta be done, brother.”

“He could be outside Ponyville right now waiting for us to leave. What happens when he gets in here and we’re gone on a wild goose chase?”

Alan flattened his hands and stood them straight on the table abreast and aimed at his brother emphatically. Every word brought a knock of knuckle against glass. “If we find a wagon and get some supplies, we’ll be-”

“What about weapons?”

“You got that sword, doncha?”

“I already had that run-in with him a few weeks ago and he damn-near killed me, Alan. Even with my sword I’ve only been practicing for a week, not good enough to kill anyon. Especially not Gary.”

Alan paused and met Levi’s irises once more. “You got me there, brother.”

“I know.” Levi took a gratifying swill of his coffee.

“What weapons do we got? Which ones can we get?”

“Listen, one of Mortimer’s guys, Dread Shot, told me of a vendor in Appaloosa who can provide some good honest guns. Nothing automatic or modern.” He raised his cup into the brisk frosted air. “Here’s hoping they’re high enough caliber.”

“Guns?” Alan inquired, dubiousness prolifically oozing from his words. 

“Old-fashioned ones. Six-shooters, repeaters, shotguns, that kind of deal.”

Alan released a brief hum in profound thought. “Ya think it’ll be enough?”

“All we can do is hope and pray it will.” Levi replied. “I know how much you love doing that.”

“Whatever you say.” Alan chuckled

“Look, we can take a hot air balloon out there after this and buy ourselves some. It’s by a river called Fool’s Doom, I got plenty of bits.”

“That’s another way we can look for him! A balloon. Why didn’t ya say that sooner?”

“Because it won’t work,” Levi sipped his coffee, the full quantum of the dark lake of caffeine and caramel almost a quarter-full now. “Did you forget how high they go? We can’t see through clouds.”

“Alright, all’s I’m sayin’ is-”

BOOM!

The unpropitious, skull-fracturing guttural cry of unmitigated lightning erupted from the terrifyingly near distance, its fulminous ruinous bellow like the vociferation of a chagrined god. Extending its planet-sized head from His lavish gilt-edged throne. Tucked away in the most grandsome unspinting guildhall in the superfluent firmament it asserted hard-and-fast, indomitable preeminence over. With a colossal heart enkindled by whatever beseeched the ire of the resolute maestro of sovereignty, he departed from the stars and shouted His blinding wrath unto the earth. Perplexingly, the injurious fragor of the most tumultuous caliber was grounded. 

Not bound to the unfettered metropolis of a radiant azure sky smudged with elongated streaks of jagged slender clouds. Not the tonitruous offspring of some cement-grey thunderhead, a meager byproduct of a pewter-colored sky as though the globe was plunged into a vat of roiling molten iron. The daunted earth steeling away from the austere acapella of grumbling stentorian thunder and raring bolts strutting across the doomful vista. Practically trembling with elation to pounce from their discordant grim cage and impale the unwary soil. 

Although, none of those pestilential prospects could blossom in reality’s rolling welcoming fields with a sky exquisitely forged in incomprehensible splendor of the highest caliber. Akin to the azure beaut presently above their muddled heads. Not a hint or stray thread of the silvery gloom that heralds a storm of the Homeric proportions rioted by the lightning’s boom. 

The men bounced an inch of their seats and the sparse mob of ordinary ponies threatened to leap from the fear-laden suit of their skin. Burdenous double-wheeled barrows piloted by yoke-clad ponies ceased, cessation strangling the mild groaning of their antiquated wood. Euphorically gallivanting fillies engrossed in their infantile games and civilians sauntering to where their errands dwelled halted. Their heads aimed at the crevasse between two quaint belts of homes to the right of Sugarcube Corner. Rapt by the conduit of the tumult.

“It can’t be rainin’ again!” Alan groaned, vexed.

“Look at the sky, it can’t rain. Rainbow said we’re clear for another week.” Levi spoke, captivated by the din spewed from the minute path. Slowly rising to his hearty feet. Alan followed suit swifter than his comrade. 

“What’re we dealin’ with, brother?”

BOOM!

Lightning bellowed once more and shook Ponyville and its timorous residents to their perturbed cores.

The crowd recoiled and sprung miles into the air like frightened cats.

Levi flinched.

Alan winced at the dagger-like stabbing of his ears and blinked hard at the violent rumpus.

“We’ll see soon enough.” Levi muttered with furrowed brows. 

He and a myriad of inquisitive, perhaps overly so for their own good and well-being, tentatively stepped towards the path. Alan Sizemore lacked the temerity necessary to accomplish the task, standing rooted to Sugarcube’s tiles within the violet rail margins. A fleeting haven that undertook the Augean duty of bolstering the noirette to the all-too-probably peril and its potentially ravaging ramifications. About a half-foot in front of Alan, far closer to the narrow mouth incessantly vomiting raucous vociferance, stood Levi Cronell. His poker face gilt-edged and adamantine, as stringent and regimental as unadulterated, pristine titanium. However, to the bewilderment of no entity neither man nor pony in that disconcerted herd, his mind was an ineffably factious and inaccordant civil war. Each smoking round zipping from a barrel with the tug of a trigger was an atrocious thought. Every pin ravished from the oval frame of a grenade a perturbed assumption as to the identity of the dissonance’s generator. Mortar fire of baseless ostensible suppositions pockmarked the scarred terrain, triumphing over malignance and dominated by felicity once upon a bygone time. His psyche dashed into avenues of black direful thoughts. 

Could the thunder be gravely misidentified gunfire? Perhaps an assault by puissant weaponry unfathomed by the Man in Blue? Maybe unique solely to Equestria? Could Gary have returned and brought the sinister forces of Hell with him in his back pocket? Did these sonorous booms come garnished by a dale of corpses? 

BOOM!

The anonymous broadside upon his senses exploded from the path again. 

The crowd retched and recoiled in unison, Alan teetering on the verge of bursting from his skeleton and forsaking his unnerved suit of skin. Alan’s widened optics flicked to the sky for a split-second and all the clouds were gone. Just the golden beam resting in an ocean of cyan. Another anomaly patiently awaiting a coveted explanation.

BOOM! 

The answers to the town’s collective unforbearing churning pool of inquiries and scorching questions would arrive anon. Levi clenched his fists.

A lone unicorn clad in a red-and-black checkered flannel shirt with unrolled sleeves and buttoned to his throat pointed down the path. Jaws divorcing and bushy jet-black beard oscillating with his stentorian shout. 

“I SEE IT!”

“See what-?”

The author of the arduous, ear-splitting raft in all of his enigmatic glory was spat out by the gaping entrance to the path. It didn’t walk or run. Didn’t bellow or cry out. Didn’t bear bipedal legs or cloven hooves. More importantly, they didn’t possess any of these common familiar attributes and extremities.

Droves of chickens spilled into the nave of the town, darting higgledy-piggledy in towards no lucid destination with no prime objective stamped onto their marble-sized brains. The locuplete discordant horde was far larger than his rampant berserking mind could’ve ever began to conjure, his mazed globes agog and paralyzed. Refusing to fully fathom the farcical sorry-excuse for an extreme circus act before him. Pinning the blame of the thunderous booms upon the broad body of these plump farm animals was too irrefutably nonsensical to be considered. 

Alan dovetailed to his side and strode across the grass. Standing beside him with unequivocal, peerless disarray flooding his peepers, they stared confounded at the variegated broad body of fenetic chickens. Nigh on forty of the feathered bags of nerves stormed the core of Ponyville. Their ranks ever-increasing with the inordinate addition of countless stragglers sprinting out of the path’s maw, abstracted and lagging behind the central legion. Levi’s befuddled emeralds washed over the mob while they haphazardly and thoughtlessly melded into the sporadic group of townsfolk. The aggregate of the chickens were colored in their quotidian insipid scheme, far from deviating from the conventional criterion. The other majority bore a sprawling manifold of contrasts to its banal brethren. Feathers coating its stout frame and riding up its neck were a bold, mesmerizing fiery orange like Jack Daniels’ bottled flames. The tart depths of an ochre whiskey bottle colored green with wild envy at the lucent hue. Its belly and posterior feathers were colored a sublime resplendent yellow, leagues brighter than the celestial spheroid of fire injecting tinctures of life into the Earth. Every soul with swelling able lungs and a rhythmic hale heart stared with deep-seated bafflement at the…whatever Ponyville could possibly classify this exotic oddity as. Was it a threat that necessitated exacting scrutiny, or a ludicrous act of scoreless humor? Not a mortal in that crowd knew, not even the sun, who ogled inquisitively at the absurd unforeseen affairs unfurling beneath it. 

“Whaddya think, Levi? We needa call the National Guard for this?”  

“I don’t know who to call, maybe Applejack.”

“The apple farmer?”

“The only apple farmer,” Levi replied, prising his bound up stare from the twain of mammoth crowds and greeting Alan’s irises. “Maybe these are hers.”

The knockabout uninvited feathered visitors melded into the static crowd of ponies, idling while the emancipated birds halted at their hooves. Curiously eyeing the equines and herky-jerkily rambling in abnormal circles around them, keen bemired talons lacerating the turf. 

‘I must be dreaming. This has to be my imagination.’ Levi chimed in the anonymous sanctity of his thoughts. ‘I can’t understand this.’

Another enigmatic straggler trotted into the town’s core and took the mighty gallant step into deviancy. Rupturing the chains of its brethren's creed of staying in that tight-knit clod and, geared by unknown motivations, beelined to the Man in Blue and stalled at the steel ends of his boots. Begrimed talons mere inches from the notch glimmering silver at his toes. Only when he pivoted his head and aimed his countenance at the quizzical creature was when it truly dawned that, in his nearly month-long tenure in Equestria thus far, he’d never laid eyes upon a chicken. Perhaps in this outlandish, outré universe largely unplumbed by the pair, this was the average custom. But confirming those suspicions at that precise instant bore no position in the realm of possibilities. 

“Well, wouldya look at that.” Alan grinned down at the rooster. “I think he likes you, brother.”

The vivacious cockerel snapped his syrup-colored eyes to meet the brunete’s with a lowly mite of conscious thought behind them. Just a ring of rich amber with a deep stygian core like vortexes to lifeless kafkaesque dimensions. Brazen orange neck hackles akin to a scarf of pacified fire and gilded saddle feathers unmatched by the sun. Crimson comb flopping flaccidly with the c**k of its mindless head and a low, trill floating from its onyx beak. 

“You think?” Levi mirrored his brother’s beam. His high-strung guard waxing with each hushed cluck rising from the chicken’s throat. Its community ambling aimlessly behind him awash with avid curiosity, differing starkly from the waning interest of the townsfolk. 

“I know.” Alan responded. “But what about the noise?”

“Yeah, what abo-” 

In the matter of two seconds, bereft of exaggeration or unethical stretching of the truth, the mystery corralled back into the limelight by the raven-haired man was granted its answer. The chicken flicked its head towards the ground with a violent flare of marmalade-tinted wings, its beak divorced. Springing an inch or so above the soil, the chicken burped. At least, that was the name of the event as far as Levi’s understanding was concerned. 

The chicken burped. 

A bolt of concentrated, undiluted lightning exploded from its maw.

 The rooster’s golf-ball-sized head devoured by a convex flash of empyrean alabaster-white light. In fact, the entirety of Levi and Alan’s vision was callously robbed and in its stead was the almighty blast of candescence like an explosion of the moon. The earthbound supernova struck the hapless man stone-blind for seconds on end that stretched into oblivion. His ears lambasted and colonized by an incursive bombination more stridulent than a constellate of blades scraping glass. 

The bolt barbarically speared the ground between the small aisle between the two men’s bodies. Skeleton rocked like a cannonball pelting each and every facet of his limbs and bones. Ribcage staunched by an Augean, hulking fist his chassis of flesh and marrow stood zero chances of besting. Chiliads of morsels of dirt and pebbles accompanied by the sporadic root cruelly wrenched from its domicile battered the full breadth of his frame. 

The brothers took flight in the panicked air. Jettisoned by the blast and left for dead about a half-foot from the cavernous crater. The volcanic dagger-like maw of an hellacious heat his brain was unqualified to apprehend locked onto his left ankle. Gnawing like Hell’s brawniest jackal and thrashing its blistering mouth with whetted teeth and a dancing tongue of torrid slag lapping his flesh. 

Ears plagued by an eternal drone. An impregnable bulwark for the leviathanic manifold of sounds and grating cacophonies spurred and given life by the inexplicable vanguard of monstrosities storming his home. 

Eyelids opening to greet a world now consumed by ravenous conquistadors bent on preaching the divine word of chaos wherever its feet land. 

The unamenable helter-skelter world-rendering in every known sense and utilization of the word. 

A sickening, bone-trembling capella of booms sounded like an unrelenting air raid. Mortar fire launching in ravaging clusters from an infrangible fort, where breaching and ceasing the limitless cataclysms soaring through the clouds was an unachievable feat. A pathetic pipe dream with no light existing at the end of the murky, sloughy tunnel. Where ghastly tenebrosity clung to the gloomful walls like blackened putrefied mucus and thorned vines swingled from the ceiling. Each poke from the noisome armor of spikes circumscribing the vine an unsympathetic prod from reality. Injecting its unassailable influence, blighting his bloodstream with the acidic, unfeeling toxin of unheard proportions. Reality stabbing his frame and clawing at his bare flesh. An alarming reminder of the dastardly realm he was unobligingly subjected to. 

His eyes were released from their cursory sentence of mordant frenzied darkness. Lids dividing to the dazzling fury of the sun upon his irises, spawning a viscous film of tears. The broadside of golden benign rays against his globes was short-lived and snuffed by the inalterable behest of a…eccentric cloud. One of tens of hundreds that, in the span of the fifteen seconds he spent in a quaggy haze, marauded the sky. Clouds in the precise copybook shape of molars roved across the cerulean ether and sweepingly forayed the airscape. The ivory smears present mere minutes prior were nothing but a vaguened recollection now, a memory where the prospect of recalling was inconceivable. 

“Brother!”

 A voice echoed ceaselessly in the grand foggy hall of his skull. His hearing being returned piecemeal, each second a new fragmented shard was placed into the kaleidoscope ruptured by lightning. In sync with his intimate’s shout was the unceasing grating symphony of lightning and dissonant warbling of chickens was screaming. Unholy, opaque, stomach-twisting screaming. As though the blast launched him from this world governed by an inherent ordinance of peace and serenity and slung into the fathoms of Hell. Lambasted by the loathsome cries of the pitiful damned. 

“Brother!” That voice echoed again. “Are you alive? Levi? Levi!”

The aghast shout attained an achievement Levi thought impossible. Trumping the nauseating, poignant symphony of grating, frenetic shouts and the stately clobbering of an uncounted nimiety of hooves. The uneventful yet semi-tranquil atmosphere burgeoning from a flat undisturbed lake of conglomerated bemusement and anxiety into an incoherent warzone. All in the matchless, milliseconds-long snap of a finger. The blink of an eye, the flick of a lighter, the vague wispy phantoms of the calm that previously begriped Ponyville’s reigns gravitated towards nullity. A new creed was in order now with an immediate sedate ingratiation, disusing and slighting the ireful prospect of any answer that smelled of insubordination. 

“Ye…Yeah!” Levi called into the tempestuous, skull-splitting vortex of frenzied cries. The ground rumbled and vibrated under his back. Illimitable ponies ran amok in every direction imaginable by the conscious mind. Some darting back to their homes imprudent towards their means of arrival. Others undertook sprinting in frightened circles around Sugarcube Corner, pursued by the volatile phoenix-colored roosters. A Lilliputian sliver of the petrified garden aimed their head forward like charging bulls and ingeniously scudded out of town. Deserting Ponyville and falling prey to a bizarre state of circumstances ne’er predicted by any being currently breathing and present on Earth. These autonomous horses, some with robust ironclad hindlegs that could split a jaw into fourths, others armed with ineffable magic and possibilities, were bullied out of their homes by chickens.

In an unanticipated way, Alan wanted to laugh at the absurdity, but all he could manage to do was sloppily scrabble over to the unenergetic Man in Blue. His hands encumbered as though clad in leaden gloves and feet frozen glacial ingots of ice. The blurred, swirling image of Alan Sizemore’s dismayed countenance spurted into his vision. Within a matter of meager seconds, the domineering face was blessed with the powery gift of focus. The mazed irises bluer than the ravishing sky his head completely eclipsed, rowdy stygian tentacles of his haphazard locks, light stubble coating his jaw. All the while, the chickens rousted the civilians with a morose drought of ruth. Storming every which way and expelling lightning from their craws sporadically. Some were separated by seconds, other by half-minutes, but never permitted a conclusion.

“Levi! Levi, are you hurt? Look at me!” The noirette declaimed, soldering his hands to the scrambled man’s shoulders and pinning his arms to his side. 

“I’m fine!” Levi wrenched his right arm from the imperious male’s clutches and manacled a hand onto the other’s wrist. Alan shifted to a squat and rose the pair to their feet. 

“You sure?”

“That doesn’t matter, how’s everybody?”

“I think you can see the answer to that.”

The hell-roaring lion’s growl of thunder blighted the Babelic town. Aswarm with uncounted insatiable scores of chaos-famished chickens, their interminable booms of lightning disgorging from their guts uneducated on the simplex concept of relent. Every raucous detonation of sound like two galaxies bound by rigorous velcro mercilessly torn from the clutches of one another with a colossal guttural snarl. A clamor that refused to surrender to nullity’s ironclad creed, reverberating through every cranny and cavity in the known universe. 

“Get serious, Alan, how is everyone?”

To the duo’s right, a novel newfangled belligerent encroached upon the already discordant array, surpassing the unfeasible labor of amplifying the Homeric muckle. Inflating the iron-handed dissonance to heights never thought possible by any living being that ever laid their inquisitive sight upon Ponyville. Rotund beach-ball-sized spheres of stone-grey smoke leaped innumerable feet at a time across the trodden scape. Pluperfect orbs of smoke bounded with incomparable fervency and furor with fluffled saw-toothed flanges twirling and threatening to lacerate the torrid ambience. The foreboding, direful color a consummate grey flawlessly mirroring that of a forthright thunder. A herd of roughly twenty of these hellacious tumbleweeds bounded in unison, unmarred by the cloven-hooved petrified stampede it flamboyantly encroached upon. Whenever it touched the ground and hopped into the sky once more, the deafening thunder cracked. 

“Just fine!” Screamed Alan. “They’re all runnin’, they’re gonna be okay, I think!”

“We gotta get to the Library!”

“What about-”

“They’re gonna be fine like you said, they’re getting out of here! I gotta make sure Twilight’s alright!”

“I’m right behind you, brother!”

Their enkindled bones, coated in a glistening varnish of raring gasoline, burned rubber down the rampacious northern road they once strolled down as a softhearted easing pastime. A tranquil pleasantry undertaken by the Man in Blue. now conjoined by an equally stressed Alan, to recuperate from the world-shattering onus saddling his gloom-stained heart. Now, anarchy was the only noisome language that besmirched the tongue of the assailed tenants. Ponies scrambled into their susceptible homes on both sides. Front doors slamming. Hardy deadbolts feverishly spun and actuated. Windows bashed back into their frames. Curtains slung together and squealing against their rods. Walls quaking against the herculean brawn of  the tumult. The unwearied phalanx of beaked instruments of mayhem not putting forth the slightest ounce of effort in a pursuit. Raiding the eastern facet of Ponyville while the angered tumbleweeds bombed into the western sect. 

The men halted at the staggering head-spinning awe of the Golden Oak Library. Standing monolithic and unperturbed by the mass genocide of Ponyville’s paramount trademark beatitude. With each sonorous boom of a ruination-hungry bolt and grumble of the mind-boggling nimble thunderheads, another seam was slit in Ponyville’s shoddy seams. Unraveling and sinking deeper into the pot-bellied stomach of primordial, unmendable disharmony with the passing of each panic-bathed second. 

The far-flung cacophony sounded almost akin to a decadent skirmish between an elephant and a lion. The explosions of the leathery titan’s footsteps and the snarls of nature’s sovereign ensnared in an inhumane clash, where both parties pledged to fight until their conclusive breath. 

Golden Oak’s prodigious breadth was bordered by an inaesthetic collar of bowling-ball-sized six-inch deep craters like clods of soil abstracted by a titanic ice cream scooper. Placed upon the towering cone of whoever bestowed life to this vile stage play slaking the malign muse of some unseen kafkaesque entity. A masterful farce powered solely by the unholy hankering for…whatever this pompous ungovernable display strived to achieve. Levi wasn’t entirely keen on the exact sadistic, malevolent audience would pay top-dollar to bear witness to this vile grandeur. But if there was one thing guaranteed, a deviant singularity amidst unending plains of discordance, was that those avid spectators were far from displeased. 

Outside the solemn Library stood six ponies, resting uneasy with frayed, inflamed nerves kicked into the highest gear possible with the solitary exception of a hovering rainbow-haired pegasus. Her expertly secreted apprehension about the mayhem blanketing her cherished home radiating with every anxious wing flap. Twilight’s enkindled horn levitated the coveted object of Levi’s agog desires. A war-torn, eroded scabbard with a pristine holographic gladius sleeved within. Its lanky listless belt pendulating below like the swinging cadaver of a snake. 

“Twilight…” Levi dashed to the congeries of disconcerted souls, some more stoic and tacitly composed than others. “Twilight, what the hell is going on?” The male seized the scabbard and slung the flaccid strip of threadbare leather around his waist. Quivering fingers twiddling with its gleaming silver clasp as he spoke with arid sweat-choked lungs.

“I don’t have a clue!” 

“Does anyone have a clue?” Exclaimed the Man in Blue. “There’s chickens shooting lightning out of there mouths! We gotta figure something out!”

“I saw!” Spike chimed, all but welded to the side of the lavender unicorn. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“We’re all at a loss.” 

“Ain’t this grand.” Alan griped. “What about them people in town? We gotta help.”

“How do you suppose we do that?” Levi coiled his digits around the sleek hilt of his superlative sword. Unsheathing the crystalline magnum opus of the maven who manufactured it with its honed edges singing against the leather. 

“Their chickens, just kill ‘em! It’d save us all the trouble.”

Fluttershy’s heart lurched at the noirette’s sanguinary proposal.

“I think we got more important things than them chickens,” Applejack interjected in her low hayseed timbre. “The apple trees were alive! Started swingin’ all about and chasin’ me and my family! Ran us out of our own farm, Levi.”

“One of my rabbits turned into a b-brute! I’ve never seen anything like it.” The timorous pastel yellow pegasus squeaked, seeking fruitless refuge behind her salmon-pink locks. 

The chagrined growl of thunder sounded from the genesis of the northern path. Their unwarranted reckoning slamming its unrenounceable fist upon the door. Levi snapped his emeralds towards the din and back to the group, an oriental pearl of sweat galloping down the bridge of his nose. “We don’t have time for this. Twilight, what’s the plan here?”

“We were on our way to a hot air balloon to get to Canterlot and get the Elements of Harmony. It’s the only way.”

“Only? What’s that gonna do, we don’t need the Elements.”

“I’ve only heard about this kind of magic in books and my magic won’t do anything to stop the source. We need those Elements to save Ponyville.”

“I heard one of ‘em scream somethin’ about a Museum. Pointed down that way. Said it’s all comin’ from there.” Alan stammered with a rugged index jammed back down the northern road. The very same paved by primordial, irrevocable havoc. A rip-roaring path feeding into the eye of the maelstrom of madness they barely eluded meager seconds before. 

The brunete’s heart pounded in a newfangled, exhilarating cadence. Singing an assuaging song of the most eye-watering caliber of beauty, bringing blissful cessation to the roughshod hoplites of befuddlement. Dredging the stomach-roiling slurry of fright, terror, and restive questions from his core. Salvation herded to the Man in Blue’s feeble, encumbered heart by a stupefying revelation, whose provenances of either truth or stark misdirection was ambiguous. 

Could all this be…a test? 

Not only a gauntlet for the rigid fortitude and long-questioned sensibilities of Levi Cronell, but also the alleged skillset of the entirety of their harried troupe. To subject the rudimentary capabilities of the octet to exacting tribulations with the guiltless civilians bated to paltry pawns. Apparatuses instrumented by the maestro of this behemothic travail to assay their ostensible, yet to be properly affirmed, prowesses. Looking upon the involute scenario the eight found themselves penned in the throes of, it wasn’t obvious to intuit as to why this ludicrous pretense existed. A band of mortals that, hardly a month ago were as quotidian and run-of-the-mill as a blade of grass, were now endowed with the responsibility of bearing the Elements of Harmony, Levi would be plagued by doubt himself. Dubiousness. The gravest pestilence ever conceived by humanity. Deadlier than a disloyal army of weaponized Judases, eager to swiftly turn their back on the compendium of ideals they vowed allegiance to. A mutinous regime that could briskly engrave the end of a city, no matter the magnitude of its grandezza and might. Doubt was nature’s first serial killer. Spelling the inexorable doom and self-fulmination of countless, leaving unbounded carnage and anguish in its smoking wake.

Levi twisted his skull once more and glowered down that boisterous path with knitted brows and unyielding emeralds aflame. A bone-splitting grip strangling the glossy gold-lined hilt of his sword. Channels of veins dilating. 

“Where are you all going, Twilight?”

“To the edge of town to get a hot air balloon.”

“Alan, you go with them and keep them safe. To the best of your abilities.”

Agonized sorrow harrowed his visage. Bottom lip threatening to tremble. “Have you lost your mind? I ain’t leavin’ you again!”

“You got to,” Levi dropped a condolate hand upon his intimate’s shoulder. Giving his flagging frame a mild yet hearty shake. “For me. You need to.”

“Can’t we both?”

“I gotta get to the Museum before more ponies get hurt-”

“What if you get hurt, Levi?”

“I might…but when has that ever mattered? Especially now. I’m the Element of Protection. This is my job.” He swallowed hard with shut eyes and sniffled before he continued. “And your job is to help them.”

“I take it there ain’t no convincin’ you, is there?” 

A chicken vomited lightning. Closer now. 

“GO!” The male barked, slinging his brother’s figure to the antsy ravel. “Now! We don’t got time to lose.”

Alan melded into the ragtag congeries in small, pitiful shuffles against the holey earth. A poignant gaze stood unceasing and stalwart in the face of the anarchy strangling every clean-handed facet of Ponyville. 

“I better not lose you again.” Alan exclaimed.

“You…” Levi paused as he shifted his heaving back towards his comrades. “I won’t make promises.”

“Where can we find you?” 

“I’m gonna shoot for the Museum. Judging by…all this.” He jabbed the honed point of his sword toward the gimped aviary, unfiltered insanity soaring to every corner of the town. “I’m sure it won’t be hard to miss.”

“You sure?” Rainbow inquired. “Who knows what else could be coming out of there?”

He lobbed a solicitous gaze over his shoulder at the remnants of the town. Its essence and every fine grain of beauteous alluring flair razed to pitiful pouches of ash. “I hope so.” 

“Just-”

“Get outta here! All of you!” Yelled the male, motioning to the right with a hardy swing of his blade. “You’ve got a job to do. So do I.”

“Stay safe, brother.”

He nodded with plaintive orbs. “I’ll be just fine.”

With vehement impetus traveling through an inspiriting exclamation to her team, the couriers of those land’s most formidable artifacts, the bunch set off. Twirling behind and haring off into the thick cusp of a raving Ponyville, in hot pursuit of a titanic balloon whose continued existence in the town was a slim roll of the dice. A high-wire gamble where the titanic, unfathomable losses of a brutish drubbing were far broader than the rewards of the victor. A frenzied civilian, the fear of God igniting their flagrant veins, could’ve easily, destitute of hesitation, pilfered the sole balloon and tucked tail. Nobody knew, not even Alan Sizemore. His feet remaining affixed to the spongiform soil for a few seconds longer with a mournful, rapierlike stare before he followed suit. Uprooting his obstinate soles and dashing into the labyrinthine knots of locked-down homes and cottages. 

Levi’s turn for indispensable optimized action had arrived. He spun on the heels of his bemired boots. The exclusive reminder that maroon leather formed the four-squared footwear was the tall shaft encompassing his calves, largely untouched by the sludge. Its steel ends like brown metal peppered by tiny dots of silver defiant to the mud’s loathsome suffocation. Marching towards the vast menagerie, a petty handful of chickens fed with Zeus’ indiscriminate wrath strutted out of the mouth of the northern path. Four lawless reprobates in total. Jutting its head forward with every stride and razor-like talons mercilessly impaling the doughy terrain, thoughtless to the further indefinable ruin they shepherded upon the hamlet step by step. 

The male accosted the feathered, nettlingly oblivious miscreants. Demanding the full volume of their attention with the minatory thumps of his boots. Heart encased in an infrangible cage of torrid, red-hot glowing coals.

“You!” Levi snarled through gnashed teeth. 

The rooster snapped its beady marble-esque globes unchaperoned by even the most slim hollow mite of conscious thought. Enlightenment to the grave jeopardy storming headlong to their precise location. Torrid flaming nuggets of magma hosteled in his sockets. 

“You little b******s!” The rooster stood unfazed with unwavering talons spiked in the dirt. He cocked his head at the Man in Blue. The creature’s comrades began to saunter to the sidelines. “Do you see what you did!? Huh!?”

He rammed a boot onto the ground a mere two inches in front of the cockerel. 

Again, stout in the face of morose peril. 

“I didn’t want it to come to this!”

SHUNK! 

Levi lunged on a bent knee and cocked his right arm before slamming the trigger on his bones. Somewhere in his stinging, scathed heart, a hammer smashed against the rear of a bullet. The full length of his scintillating, gleaming blade dove into the plump breast of exuberant orange feathers. Its entire breadth swallowed by the swath of shell-pink crude flesh beneath. A starburst of tiny fiery feathers ruptured from its chest and pendulated endlessly in the rambunctious air. Each puny sliver of flashing orange, its conspicuous color nigh-deafening, swung left and right to the furthest possible degree. Gravity all but stagnating and dragging the feather to the earth slower than carbon creating diamonds. A faint strident trill erupted from the appalled bowels of its throat before its rotund frame was claimed by stern flaccidity. Its slender neck struck limp like an empty sock and his skull plopping onto its chest and lolling to the side, unanimated obsidian eyes and parted beak trained to the erose eastern horizon. Abated toes falling slack and drooping down like a loose braid. 

Levi rose to his scorching calves and the knifelike hellacious iron maid his hapless feet were lampooned by. The rooster’s stone-dead cadaver stood unbothered and stock-still upon its whetted, crisp edges. The lax corridor of its neck oscillating against his breast with every slight tenuous movement undergone by its plaintive attacker. Dragging his penitent irises across the lifeless whiskey-colored frame. Painted like some inbred forebear of an incandescent phoenix, marred by decadent machinations somewhere down the lineage of untold length. 

Levi spun and faced the chicken’s mortified goons. A trio of strengthless impotent hens obeying the mundane color scheme of an average banal farm chicken. 

“I don’t wanna kill any more of you! Leave before you all die!” The male bellowed with a gusty stomp before the, unfortunately, breathing nuisances. “LEAVE!”

The hens followed the Man in Blue’s necessitated entreaty. Taking it on the arches and fleeing in an odious, grating orchestra of noxious trills and clucks. Tucking tail and scrambling to the Levi-free margins of Ponyville and, hopefully, to pastures far greener and further from the sanctified grounds of his home. 

He wrenched his gaze from the fleeting crowd materializing into the unseen ether behind a swath of houses and looked upon the skewered corpse with acute regret. “Damn it…” He whispered. “I’m so sorry, buddy.” He pointed the end of his blade to the ground and gave the sword two well-set shoves. Its form slid off the prismatic, mesmerizing crystal in a matter of three harrowing seconds and left in its grievous wake a glistening thick mantle of crimson. The chicken walloped the ground like a grocery bag of sand and a handful of diminutive scarlet eyedrops followed it from the sword’s tip. 

“Damn it…”

 He regarded the mass of feathers and ichor for a few seconds longer before launching off his heels, initializing a meteoric beeline down the northern path. Past two adjacent strips of hunkered-down homes, every naked crevice and peephole battened down to the absolute utmost, he stormed into Sugarcube Corner. Standing at the dawn of this visceral Tartaren flutteration. Succumbing to forlorn childlike pining for the warm tender embrace of better days. For the opportunity to relive those penultimate minutes before the town he loved and adored, bathed in praise and appreciation day-in and day-out, became seized by squalor. To bless that precursor before a pandemic of mind-twisting madness with the gratitude it deserved. 

That was then, this is now. And all Levi could do was take a feverous stab at any endeavor possible to alleviate the mayhem, where no degree of effort or retaliation could’ve possibly kept it at bay. Presently, all that could provision any minute ministration towards his benevolent cause was unflaggingly combing through every diminutive nook of Ponyville. Feverishly scouring the incalculable facets of divisions yet to be breached and canvassed by the sword-wielding antithesis to the opaque bedlam blanketing Levi’s inculpable abode.

He swept his formidably defiant eyes, obstinate to fear’s gluttonous intrusions. Starved for even a nanoscopic sliver of jurisdiction over the Man in Blue’s trembling hands. Governance over his roaring extremities, cramping fingers, wrists stinging like a bracer of piqued hornets. The paint-like sweat swathing his forehead and dripping off his sharpened chin and the ball-point tip of his nose. His blurred terror thirsted for dominance as he scrutinized both the land and air, glowering at the distasteful craters as though wailed on by a colossal icepick. Paused and tapped into the unbridled capabilities of his superlative senses. 

Sight? Nothing. 

Touch? Only the sleek metal of a glossy hilt.

Smell? Singed grass and sweat.

Hearing? Finally, oil was struck. 

An ear-splitting scream erupted from the eastern road tantamount to the sparking brakes of a halting train in coalition with a guttural mirthful laugh. One of which the likes of have never been previously intuited or witnessed by the Man in Blue. A sinister guffaw creakier than the rusted hinges of a backyard swing at a grandmother’s house. Combined with the most inherently bizarre and exotic of all the callous broadsides upon his senses that day was a groan. An almighty gruff groan trumped every sound and sensation that dared to perpetrate the inclement cardinal sin of meandering into its territory. Ascertaining a pinnacle dominion knowing a lengthy pamphlet of regulations instilled by a mighteous iron fist. Grievously pounding every modicum of a noise that threatened to wrench it from its throne, unsparingly jawing the ill-starred soul until it slinked back into the weeds. 

Levi whipped his blade towards the ground and shucked off the gluey jacket of sordid scarlet. In all of his years of penniless fighting and trudging through the vulnerose streets of Roseville, blood was a quotidian commodity. How he forgot how viscous and soupy it truly was a shock to some, but a God-given miracle to Levi. With his current state of affairs and cumbrous occupation he ne’er would’ve beseeched, it appeared he wouldn’t forget the sight for as long as he breathed in those alien lands. 

He practically jumped from his heels stabbed into the dirt and drove his smarting legs, a smoldering, torrid mining drill of agony gnawing every inch below his kneecaps. Bones adust with an unholy blaze bearing sky-scraping dimensions that he couldn’t begin to comprehend, even if he had a thousand years of unremitting thinking to do so. The male scrambled across flattened blankets of grass and flickered to the lavishly spewing fountain of the sound. Ponyville’s eastern road. He zipped around the corner and gazed down upon the unaccounted exhibit of unchained, undiminishing madness. Fanatically scrutinizing the hard-grained sight with widened astounded orbs. 

Two beings inhabited the width of the road. A vehemently overwrought earth pony, shrieking with the gallons of air tenanting her grafting lungs, and a colossal ineffable beast haranguing the ill-fated equine. Wide like a bridge’s support beam was a mammoth stygian tree darker than any genus of wood Levi had ever laid his perturbed eyes upon. Black as though a meager cut-out of the stark oblivion of a perfect midnight. Its jagged bark like war-scarred alligator scales with two stocky logs appended to its sides, carved in the almost copybook formation of human arms. Curved elbows and sanded wooden skin gave way to a balled fist of frighteningly authentic fingers with clusters of tiny budding branches sprouting from its fingertips. A twisted visage of oval-shaped vermillion eyes the color of lucent lazers absent of eyelids and a wicked grin akin to an overembellished cartoon villain. Graven upon his flagitious countenance was a skillfully carved smile, a broad stretched-out U with a gaping toothless maw. Those bone-shivering infernal caricatures of baleful glee erupting from that inanimate cavity. Forever imprisoned in that grim snapshot of an untoward Cheshire smirk bleeding sadism with each second. Time reverting to a pace easily trumped by a moving plodding iceberg. Seconds seeming like thousands of lifetimes. Perhaps time, in accordance with the dismayed Man in Blue, was paralyzed in its own intolerant glacier of primal fear. 

‘You’ve done it again, Levi,’ His mind chided. ‘What’ve you gotten yourself into?’

The roborative allure, once enkindling the tree’s blackened heart into ardent craze, had long since bled from the tirelessly shrieking mare. Veins mapping her willowy neck and protuberant windpipe bulging from the chasm of her throat. Vivacious yellow coat gleaming in a hide of sweat. Pepful orange braid dangling like a loose thread over the left side of her head. The tree’s profound irises, akin to heated bars of silver glowing fulgent scarlet in a furnace, leisurely shifted from his strident toy. Infernal beam of unbridled unabashed mirth shone glary like the uncurbed elation of a child on Christmas Eve. He completely twisted his frame to face the Man in Blue. The sound that reverberated from his craggy bark and hauntingly veristic arms was a gruff almighty groan. If the male had his eyes zipped shut and was robbed of all context of his ghoulish state of affairs, he’d be forgiven for assuming the din flared from the hull of an antiquated warship. The war-torn, dog-eared steel-and-bolt skeleton of a fearsome vessel that once stopped the hearts of weaponized vagabonding sea-goers aboard forbidding crafts of their own. Now, its pathetic whimper echoes in a macabre exanimate graveyard of similar beings. Piningly pleading with their fleshy architects and possessors to drag their deplorable lives to the terminus that awaited all of them. Foreshorten their chassis into a shambolic mound of ground steel and crumbled rusted metal. 

“Huh?” The tree grumbled. A sound like the warped wobbling of sheet metal played through an impaired gramophone. “Namuh a?”

If the devil were to ever be foolishly issued a mortal voice to spout his despicable declaratives to this serene world, this tree was it. The apparatus for the sovereign of Hell to speak and dance his forked-tongue.  

His previous victim shot a fleeting yet thankful glance at the Man in Blue before tucking her vibrant sun-yellow tail between her legs and running for the hills. Hopefully able to excavate a tiny filament of security in the razed town. 

‘What the hell is wrong with this place? Who’s doing this?’

“Nuf eb dluohs s**t!” The tree spoke. His lips, in spite of being nothing more than mere lifelike carvings upon wood, moved in unison with his dreadful words. If one could even label the jambled streams of nonsense shooting from his maw “words” at all. 

The tree’s movements were as awkward and stunted as they came. He waddled step by step. One stride sanctioned a complete twist of his jaggy body to one side and then a full twist to the other. All the while that sonorous moan boomed from its bark and annexed the airspace. Atop his head was a vast sinuous wig of rangy root-like branches that grew almost two-feet from his scalp, almost identical to a map of a system of warrens in physical form. The tree dwarfed the male tenfold, almost nine-feet tall, and his egregious hair painted the padded grass with a labyrinth of shadow. 

“Loof, won llits hlod.” He grumbled with speech somehow slower than the drying of paint upon a wall. “Kciuq esimed rouy ekam lliw I.”

Even with the matchless eccentric fashion of walking, the tree was far from sluggish. Covering almost a foot in two colossal strides. 

‘I don’t have time for this! This is getting out of control. I have to get to the Museum before…anymore of this happens!’

“Ynitsed teem dna drawrof emoc. Namuh, won ouy stiawa etaf.”

The Man in Blue had a decision to lean one way or the other on with nothing resembling a median present in this reality. Both options donning their own personalized roster of benefits and ramifications, some more inherently dire and cataclysmic than others. 

He could stand and wage an irrefutably unequal skirmish against this hellish autonomized obelisk of wood, with victory a hazy blip on the ruinous horizon. A vastly more preferable and exponentially less sanguinary lazed in Levi’s good graces. Fleeing. Cutting his soon-to-be losses and darting for the hills and leaving the colossus, a meager archetype of its diabolical hankerings and fantasies, to its own devices. With his novel status as Equestira’s solitary protector, he wasn’t entirely keen on how his unrefined proposal would sit in the eyes of the general population. After all, if some thunderstruck hunkered-down pony created a divisor between their blinds and bore witness to his yellow-bellied deed, what savage adjective would spawn on her mind’s foreground? A coward? A hero attempting to preserve his life? Hell, even labeling him a hero afterwards would be far too generous. But the way he saw it, what choice did he truly have?

The male challenged the sickening vermillion smirk gleaming down from feet above his swirling head with a coarse scowl and lip crinkled in stern defiance. It all came clear now. The doubtful grime and soot cleansed from the panoptic windows in his tardily pacifying psyche. Those options, the nigh-answerless plight of either a penniless inequitable clash, where the victor stands over the corpse of the other, or shameless cowardice, were unmendably nullified. Those choices were the machinations of Levi Cronell being granted a say in the council of his brain. The Man in Blue, however, had a vastly differing decision. One that kept the gaping door to conjecture and scalding debate shut and chained. 

The Man in Blue fights. 

The tree chuckled as Levi gritted his teeth and ejected off his feet once more. Off to the races again, hopefully for the final time during chaos’ vitriolic tenure in Ponyville. Only the odds were the writing on the wall that this tree wouldn’t be the final foe in this vile sojourn. The tree halted its labored sorry-excuse for movement and swept his left arm through the air, the razor-like knot of thorns at the end of each fingertip hungering for slaughter. Levi ducked and the mammoth comber of wind flapped his collar and raced down his sodden back.

“Elbmin.” Spoke the tree. 

The beast flattened his hand and cocked his arm far behind his frame. Moments before he could divebomb the spearhead of thorns, Levi committed an Augean swing of his own. He glowered at the beast’s arm hanging low and static near its base, clutching his hilt with two stringent palms and shot his arms to the sky. Iridescent avid blade raised high above his indignant head and slamming down the whetted utensil of devastation. 

With embittered muscles saturated with raw, unbitted might, every modicum writhing in a hell-roaring fire pit of undiminished wrath, he powered the blade through the air. And the fruits of his toil was the crystal burrowing barely a scant six-inches into the tree’s forearm. The beast guffawed in minatory, mirthful amusement. A jetstream of the fiend’s

breath billowing onto the right side of the male’s being, its dictatorial scent enigmatically redolent of sap and old sodden wood. 

“Namuh, suoirallih era ouy.” Another indiscriminate onslaught of byzantine jargon plagued the discordant airscape. “Hsirep ouy hctaw ot levram a eb lliw it.”

Levi wrenched the gladius from its fruitless cage of sable wood and swung again.

Once. 

Twice.

Thrice.

No dice. 

Each undertaking burying the blade an otiose handful of centimeters deeper into the wood, and all that much more arduous wrest from its grasp. The branch like an effectual beam of unalloyed, irrefragable tungsten.

The tree refracted its left arm from Levi’s bootless equation of unnumbered abortive swings that equaled a spartan dearth of progress. Its raised its left arm high above the disorienting complex of roots budding from its scalp with an open hand while its right dive bombed. 

Levi cowered in the grim face of the speary extremity, whipping backwards posthaste and diving into the sanctuary of unsullied open dirt. The arrowhead of injurious thorns and barbs harpooned into the soil at Levi’s previous location. The virulent hand and its entirety submerged beneath the trodden plain and shambolic chunks of earth erupted towards every notch on the compass. Every gimped lump spanning across a broad spectrum of size and rough-grained shape. A clod catapulted from its wasted providence and crashed down upon Levi’s back, deflowering the expanse of cobalt with a grotesque tan patch. 

He scrambled to his feet as the conductor of this volatile onslaught spoke again. 

“Kcul.” He growled. 

The tree swung his left arm with spread fingers and hooked tips and Levi bounced off his heels. Eluding the barbarity aimed at his torso by a whopping two inches. Another potent gale assailed him and the flaccid flaps of his shirt and bangs flapped wildly like storm-tossed sails. The tree balled his fists and raised his right arm several feet in the sky. His melon-sized fist stationed in front of the sun’s refulgent image like Icarus challenging the golden behemoth. 

Levi flew off his soles and shot the starting gun for an unequaled marathon with stakes higher than the domain of a demiurge in the cosmos. The vexed vessel of boundless chaos refused to take the abasement of forfeited prey as an answer. He brought down a predominant vigorous hand like a judge’s colossal gavel and bashed the ground at Levi’s scurrying heels. A meteoric boom and the stentorian cataract of sound as its acolyte rattled his bones and hastened his feet. Socks akin to scuttles of scorching coals boiling his feet. Heart a frantic dinner bell rung by a starving patriarch. If the male was told that a reneging spaceship became unmoored from its path and spear-dived back to Earth behind him, not for a second would he consider any mistruth behind it.

The male bounded across the barren road like a frightened rabbit and shoved his crimsoned sword back into its weather-worn scabbard, its informal weight battering his thigh with each elongated stride. The tree’s scarlet glunch scalding his back with an untold ire that threatened to blanket the town in vivid, tempestuous flames. At his back came that thunderous moan of the beast’s laggard waddling. 

“Drawoc!” The tree exclaimed. “Desiprus I ma yhw?”

Levi couldn’t be bothered to entertain to picaroon. All that dwelled in the pastures of his psyche was running. And running was exactly what he did. 

“Namuh, sdneirf drawoc rouy gnirb! Lla meht gnirb! Devrats m’i.”

Running. 

Running.

Running. 

Was this abandonment?

Did this warrant the detrimental torrent of guilt his action sanctioned?

Did he desert the people he swore to the overlord of these lands that he’d protect?

What would that tree do? What plans did he reel into the limelight in that garbled muddled battery of words and sounds. That auditory ossuary housing the mangled corpses of sentences. A cipher with no answer. One crypt he couldn’t solve even if he was sanctioned a dozen decades zealously dedicated to it. 

He could only wonder what the tree saw and intuited from his posthaste escape. As he ran down the remaining leg of that tamped road, what suppositions blighted his ruby-red envenomed vision? Did he merely see a potential victim, ripe for a five-course platter of his wrath? Gazing like a dejected grizzly staring at salmon frolicking and leaping down an impetuous dale? Or did he…nothing at all? Just a man with a sword who made three puny incisions that abysmally failed at crossing the line of being superficial. Mere runty tokens of his piddling presence. 

He sprinted down empty streets with his adhered to his scabbard and flinched at the fulminatory moan of the tree’s trundled coggling. The sonorous, stalwart din galloping over roofs both sloped and clad in pastel shingles and those that are most eccentric. Shaped like upside-down bowls and wire-haired with flaxen hay. 

Levi ran.

And he ran. 

And he ran. 

Past appalling heart-stinging craters and locked placid houses, wreathed in an unsung yet all-too-blatant tension, he ran. 

His lungs begged him to cease. Each breath a bucket-load of slag funneled into his drudging chest. Every bone inhabiting his frame echoing that selfsame statement. 

But all of those complaints and ailments were the machinations cowered as they stared down the barrel of the picture far more mastodonic and ineffable than they ever could’ve conceived. The oracular marrow of that picture lie in that hellacious Museum. 

The one that Levi ran to.

Running. 

Running.

Running.