Growin’ up, the long days of summer were my favorite. Sure, there was always more than plenty work to be done on the farm, it being the lead up to our big fall harvest and all, but there was always something so rare and special about those days — dusty earth filling your nose, warm hay baking in the dry heat, and the neverending afternoons spread out hazy, thick, and golden as honey on toast. Even with so much to be done, ponies couldn’t help but move slower in the heat; it always reminded me of winter, in a way, every pony slowing down because the whole world outside said so.

I’d live for those lazy days, my buckin’ trees and resting in the shade, watching my shadow grow and grow and grow all while the summer sun never seemed to set. Every inch it sank towards the horizon felt smaller than the last. I’d listen to the cicadas and know that this day, this stretching summer, would last forever.

Unfortunately, much as I personally like the heat, my body wasn’t always so keen on it in those days. Granny’d give me the stink eye and scold me something fierce if I didn’t rest properly, and you best believe she’s always watching.

“A snack and a full canteen every hour on the hour or so help me, Applejack,” she’d scowl, surly and bristling.

“Yes, ma’am,” I’d cower, knowing full well that if there’s a single thing I couldn’t do on my favorite days, it was have an appetite.

In retrospect, I think that’s when the whole thing started going wrong.

---

“Yer sick,” Mac says gruffly.

“The hay I am,” I grouse back, shoving his hoof off my forehead. The movement is weaker than I like, my usual strength sapped away to nothing like an overtapped maple tree. “Why in tarnation is your hoof so dang cold?”

“ ‘S not cold, AJ, you’ve got a fever.” He draws back a step from the bed, but from the wary glare he’s pinning me with, I know he’ll step right back up and hold me in the bed if I make so much as an attempt to put a single hoof out of it.

“Nope,” I disagree.

“Eeyup,” he counters.

“Nope.”

“Eeyup.”

“Nope.”

“Eey—”

“Mac, I don’t even remember the last time I was ill! And isn’t that a winter thing, anyway?” I lift my hooves in exasperation and let them fall onto the sticky sheets as a squirm beneath them. “ ‘Sides, I can’t be. That doesn’t happen to Apples. And there’s too much work to do.”

“Shoulda thought of that before you got sick then, shouldn’t you?”

My face burns, glowingly hot enough that I imagine you could read by it — not that anypony would need it now; Sweet Apple Acres is awash in light, beautiful and golden and bright beneath where the sun is perched high in the sky with hours yet left to go before it sleeps. I can feel each second thrumming in my veins, trickling away like water down the drain.

I stare out the window, at all my cousins and aunts and uncles meandering through the fields, watering and fertilizing and bucking trees with a no-nonsense precision that only the Apple family can speak to. “Weak,” I mutter, too quiet for anyone but me to hear, gripping the sheets in my hooves.

Lazy, my brain whispers, even worse. I tuck my lips between my teeth and clamp down around the frustrated scream that I want nothing more than to let free. Mac must see the conflict playing across my face, or otherwise he just feels sorry for me, because in the next moment

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he says, more softly this time. “I just don’t like seein’ you hurtin’.”

“I’m not hurtin’,” I insist stubbornly, loosing the crumpled sheets from my grip in favor of crossing my arms.

“Don’t be like that, AJ,” Mac cajoles me.

I ignore him, staring resolutely at the end of the bed.

“You can ignore me all you want, Applejack, but you’re not leavin’ this room ‘til you’re well.” He sighs, placing his hoof on my shoulder; I shrug it off before my shiver gives me away. Not that I’m succeeding at hiding much today, I know that, deep down. I always know what’s true, deep down.

“At least try to eat something,” Mac says quietly. There’s a soft thunk as he sets something on the bedside table.

I just cross my arms tighter.

“I’ll come check on you at supper time.” I don’t watch him leave. Once the door clicks shut, I sag back against my pillows, my head meeting the wall with an equally soft thunk. I sit there for a time, maybe minutes or maybe hours, just floating in my own dizziness. I really do feel quite unwell.

Lazily, I peel my eyes open and roll my head to the side. A shiny red apple gleams at me from the table beside me. My stomach growls and churns with nausea all at once, and I scowl as I yank the sheets up to my chin and shiver into the corner where my bed meets the wall. Tears sting my eyes, but I shove them away.

“This sucks.”

I don’t know how long I lay there quavering with cold in the endless baking heat, but after long enough, wakefulness escapes me and I fall into nothingness.

---

When I wake, it’s much later than supper time.

My body protests as I achingly pull myself upright, flailing my hooves until the sheets are flung off of me. It does little to help my sweat-soaked coat and mane, but at least the air is cooler now. My head is heavy and thick as molasses and at least twice as dizzy, but someone has been by: my hat is hanging by the door, the apple at my bedside has been joined by a bowl of applesauce and a glass of water, and a candle has been left lit beside them.

It’s dark. My candle burns cheerily, blurring the darkness around it, but being a farm pony who rises with the sun, I know it’s very late. Given how quiet the house is, I imagine it to be several hours past dusk. It doesn’t much matter, to be honest, but my brain won’t let go of the thought.

I lean my head back against the wall and listen to the sounds of night outside my open window. Cicadas have given way to crickets. A lot of ponies think they’re annoying, but I’ve always found cricket song to be very… soothing, I s’pose. Like a lullaby.

The way I spoke to Mac pings in my mind, and I frown. I’ll have to apologize to him when I see him in the morning. I wasn’t being very fair, earlier.

When my stomach gurgles, nausea rises up to meet it once again, and once again, I ignore it. I’m not hungry, not really. Or… I am? It’s so hard to tell when I feel so miserable.

Again and again, I cycle through the same thought, a constant undercurrent that I can’t seem to shake. I lose time to it, but also myself, as I turn into a miasma of misery, shivering feverishly on my bed. My limbs feel so unsteady, so weak — I’m used to them being unsteady and gangly, being in the middle of a growth spurt and all, but this…

“Eat your apple, dearies,” Granny’s voice warns.

“I know, Granny, I know,” I whine.

“I said, eat it!” The window slams shut, cutting off the night outside my window.

“Ah!”

I come to with a start, whipping my head to stare at the definitely now closed window with a speed that sends my head spinning.

“When did I fall asleep?” I yank my head to the left, heart thrumming in my chest, but sure enough, the candle has burned down to hardly an ember. The night, dark and moonless, presses in on me from all sides as I try to catch my breath. Shadowy shapes that I know are furniture loom around me, suddenly foreign and fearsome with their edges bleeding into the darkness all around. The sweat caking my fur has dried, and I shiver, chilled to the bone.

Run, my mind says.

Stay, my body insists.

The only thing I can see clearly is the apple on the table, its red flesh vaguely luminous in gloom.

In an instant, the air is sucked from my lungs. I spin back to the window, scooting forward in my mussed sheets to reach it. I have to open it, I have to let the air in, I don’t know why or how but something deep inside me knows. My trembling limbs scrabble frenetically at the sash at the sash, and for what feels like a small eternity, I think I won’t do it, I won’t make it, I’ve become too weak.

And then with an almighty screech, I shove it up, hard enough that the pane cracks — I pay it no mind as I thrust my head out the window. In great, gulping gasps I guzzle down the cool night air even as it freezes me to my very soul.

I pant over the window ledge, trying very hard not to throw up. It’s a near thing, but slowly, ever so slowly, my heart slows from a gallop back down to something resembling a normal beat.

Trembling, I resist the urge to freeze in place, strong as the instinct is. I force myself to look up, up, out across the dark farm.

Like the furniture in my room, the hills are… wrong. I know their rolling curves, their trees and the paths that curve between them. These are supposed to be my hills, but they are not. My ear flicks. The crickets are gone.

A tingle runs down my spine.

And then a pair of lights flickers on in the darkness. My breath catches as I squint out at it.

It’s down in the direction of what should be west field. As soon as my eye catches it, another blinks to life in the corner of my eye, out on the north hill, and then another, and another and another, and another. In an instant, I am mired in a luminous sea: the sky above is only void, and the ground below is speckled with gently glowing white stars.

All at once, the hair on my neck prickles.

I am being watched.

Those are not lights.

Those are eyes.

An entire swarming mob of them, bobbing across the fields, all zeroed in on me.

Every instinct is screaming at me, to run, to freeze, to flee, to fight, but one is louder than all the rest. I nearly fall out of the window in my flurry to extract myself from it as the deathly silence outside turns into churning cloud of chitters and chirps and oh my god I am going to die–-

Finally, I yank myself free, tumbling right over the edge of my bed and onto the floor with bruising force, my shoulder knocking into the bedside table. The water glass shatters and the apple rolls as I lunge for it, grabbing it in one hoof even as I shred the other in glass.

I rip my teeth into the apple’s red flesh and scream. Everything around me turns to light.

---

“What was it, Granny?” I whisper.

Granny is quiet and thoughtful in her rocker, contemplating my whole tale. We sit on the porch, awash in the golden evening sunlight. I try not to let my eyes settle on the stretching shadows

“I don’t suppose we really know, sugarcube,” she finally says. “Another world? Some kinda wild realm? Tartarus?” She snorts.

“Granny...”

“All that’s clear is that Apples who get sick can see it. Access it. Con sarn it, I don’t know.” Granny shakes her head, but her eyes are haunted. I can feel that mine look the same.

“Apples?”

Granny nods

“And there’s… nothing we can do?”

She fixes me with a piercing glare. “Apples that eat apples don’t get sick,” she reminds me.

“Wh— you mean, what, ever?” I sputter.

“Ever,” she confirms.

I swallow hard, but don’t make it far past the lump in my throat.

“So don’t you go forgetting it again. No matter how hot it gets.”

“Never,” I promise.