Prompt: Deep Greenery

Just Passing Through

It used to be that a river ran along the side of the road, a wide, clear river, the kind in whose water you’d be able to pick out the individual pebbles which gleamed like fish scales in the noonday sun. Next to the river would grow tall swaying trees: acacias or junipers, sycamore or willow. Both the river and the road followed a winding trail through the forest and you’d hear in the branches above chattering birds chipmunks. Now Daring didn’t see any of that. The river had dried up and all that was left was the road, a broken shattered slab of tar, and the trees had been cut down to be replaced with concrete walls which went along the side to mark where a highway had once been commissioned but which was abandoned after all the money ran out.
She crossed the road anyway, passing dry grass that ran loose fingers up her legs. The dried husk of some kind of fruit lay under the desiccated husk of what might have been a wild apple tree. She kicked it, saw it disappear somewhere in the dry dark, heard it land on something not quite wood and not quite dirt. Harder than both. She squinted into the loam. Something resembling a polished white boulder seemed to be leaning against a tree, but from this angle it was impossible to make out what it was.
She went on. Ahead was a stone building with a rust-colored roof sloping off the side and a dirty red-and-white awning that had some holes in it. A window obscured by scratches and dust kept her from seeing inside. Vines grew along the side of the building. She looked at them, surprised to find anything growing with any kind of vehemence here, but there they were: like a cluster of green sinewy webs, they cluttered around the shaded wall, grew down into the brown grass, where they met and mingled with wild mint.
A portly unicorn mare came out of the wooden door. There was a slight hunch to her shape. She was carrying a broom and used it to knock away some wayward brown leaves. She glanced up as Daring approached but did not stop her task. Daring went ahead of her for three or four paces. She stopped. The road grew darker and curved around a sloping hill. She looked behind her. Just as dark and curving there. Her ears flickered, listening. No birds. No bugs. Just herself and her heavy breathing.
She turned back to the mare, who now was looking at her with something resembling curiosity—or perhaps suspicion. Daring smiled at her. “This an inn or something?”
The mare grunted. “Or something.” She propped the broom up against the wall. A rumpled apron billowed out in front of her, like a carpet unfurling. She had a clay-orange coat and brown hair, a round face, black eyes. Her Cutie Mark resembled a pie pan. “Right now it’s just me, my husband, and Caramel tending to it.”
Daring glanced at the vines. The mare noticed. Her face scrunched up slightly, like a dried-up pumpkin. “Shears is supposed to have gotten to that but he’s run off,” she said.
Daring nodded. The mare grabbed the broom, finished cleaning up the area. She reached into the doorway and came out with a chalkboard angled sign with the words OPEN FOR BUSINESS written in elegant cursive. There were some drawings around the writing, too: some ponies, but also butterflies. Daring looked up at the wooden sign creaking above their heads. THE FOREST MONARCH, it said, right next to a depiction of a butterfly.
“Mind if I come in for a bit?” Daring said. “I could use a drink. And something to eat.”
The mare grunted, but seemed a little more accepting of her this time around. She stepped to the side to let Daring enter.
Inside was cooler. Round tables with white tops had been set up and a pillar in the middle of the eating area had paintings clustered around it. Daring recognized some of them. Depictions of Classical Roam. Generals and soldiers. A midwife tending to a mother and child in what looked like a farmer’s mill. None of them authentic. All of them replicas. The mare stepped around her and nodded towards any of the empty seats. Daring took the table next to the window. Though it was dark, she could see through it, all the way down the road she’d come from.
The mare went away. Daring straightened her back. She took a deep breath, feeling her heart start to settle. She reached up to her parka and unzipped the shoulder. Dirty bandages ran the length of it, dark-red and nasty. She touched the area, winced in response.
Steps came from a staircase off in another part of the building. She shrugged the parka back on, looked in that direction. Another unicorn mare came out, balancing a flat tray with a glass of water on it. Younger this time, yet also a similar shade of orange. Her mane was the color of freshly baked bread and she’d tied it up in what Daring knew was called the countryside bun. She smiled at Daring. Her eyes were crisp and blue.
“Hello,” she chirped, putting the glass down. “So happy to have you stopping with us. You must have come far, practically brought the dust in with you!”
“It’s a good guess,” Daring admitted. “You Caramel?”
She nodded. “You met Momma. Daddy’s in the back—he does all of our cooking.” From the black apron around her waist she levitated out a menu and set it down in front of Daring. “What can I get you started out with? Anything to drink?”
“Just an iced tea. Unsweetened.”
Caramel recited the order, smiled again, and left. She didn’t go too far. Daring spotted her through an opening near the far end, which she took to be some kind of register. Past there was the kitchen. From there Daring heard her say something. Maretalion maybe; she wasn’t as well-versed in it as she would have liked. Momma came out from another door, glanced at her, nodded. Daring nodded back. Momma went back into the kitchen.
Through the window again. More vines growing along the concrete barriers. The road nothing but still dust and dry air. Again eyes trailing down the path she’d come, searching for anything else there that was not otherwise shadow. Nothing of that sort. Nothing had passed through here recently except for herself—or so it seemed.
Caramel bounced back, the iced tea balanced expertly in her magic. She put it down and said, “And what can I get you today?”
Daring scanned the menu for the first time. There were too many options and not enough time to enjoy them, so she went with the one that vaguely reminded her of something she’d had back in Dodge Junction once. Caramel ooh’d and ahh’d like the decision was a wise one. “You’ll love that,” she said. “It’s Daddy’s specialty.”
“I’m sure. You folks ever think about cutting the vines around here?”
“The vines?”
Daring pointed to the ones clawing the concrete barriers. “Also the ones along the side of the house. They’re probably also on the other side. And all the mint, too. I’m surprised it grows even in someplace this dark, but then again, mint’s supposed to be stubborn like that. The cockroach of the natural world.”
Caramel scrunched up her nose. “Wouldn’t the cockroach be the cockroach of the natural world?”
“You got a keen mind. Why not set it to cleaning the shrubbery?”
Caramel made her eyes go wide and shook her head. “Oh, I wouldn’t know the first thing about that. I’m pretty sure I’d end up cutting some plant that we want to keep around.”
“That was Shears’ job.”
“Shears?” Her voice lost the brightness. Something resembling desperation hung at the end of the name. “Do you know him, miss?”
“No. Your mother mentioned him.”
“Oh…”
Caramel looked deflated. Daring put her menu down, waited a second, then slid it over. Caramel looked at it like she didn’t recognize it, then gasped and took it. “R-Right, sorry. Your food will be out shortly.”
She walked away. Or rather stumbled. Daring knew that stumble. Certain names could do that when they came out of the dark for you. Names of the dead, or the forgotten, or usually both.
She folded her hooves together, leaned forward, went back to watching the road.

---

“You’re not from here.”
Daring glanced up. Caramel’s mother sat down on a chair at a table nearby. She had a rag and a bucket of water with her and using the bucket to wet the rag and drag it over the tabletop.
“No, ma’am, I’m not,” Daring said.
“I can tell.” Momma snorted. “Why do you keep looking at the road?”
“It’s a nice road.”
Momma glanced at her. Daring knew she found her words to be full of it, and she hid her self-effacing grin by looking at the window. Her reflection—and that of the other mare—stared back.
“If you think that, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you,” Momma’s reflection said. She leaned over the table and wiped the rag in a circle. Water sloshed over the sides. “It used to be nice.”
“Before Shears left?”
“Shears leaving is a separate thing. Not that he left. He ran away, that’s what he did.” Momma’s lip twitched. Her rag dragged along the table, dragged like the nets police used to dredge up bodies found in lakes. “Ran away and took with him everything my daughter gave him.”
“They were together.”
It wasn’t a question, and for some reason Momma seemed to appreciate that. Her reflection nodded. “He started working for us three months ago, and they got together after the first. He’d been hired to help trim the sides, make this place look a little more presentable. Also to make it safer.”
“Safer?”
“You saw the vines, of course. There’s other stuff in them. Some kind of mutant plant that likes to snatch unsuspecting ponies. They like to rip off the wings of pegasi and separate the joints. I call them Snatchers because of that. I thought Shears would be able to get rid of them, cut them out easily. You’d expect that from his name, of course. Ain’t that the oddest thing? Us ponies and our names, they make you think you got a good sense of who we are once you know them. Then somepony comes around, makes you think one thing, and before you know it, they’ve swindled you.”
“How’d he swindle you?”
“First by getting my daughter interested.” Momma paused for a moment. She was listening for Caramel, Daring realized. When the daughter didn’t present herself, she said, “I’ll give him this—he made us all believe he felt something for her. It was probably his accent, if I’m being honest. He was from Mexicolt or somewhere thereabouts. Whatever it was, it made even the most flowery and cliched statements seem genuine. Anypony who speaks like that is a bad egg, not somepony to be trusted. And my daughter fell for him like a sack of rocks.”
Her cleaning rag stopped ripping the linoleum off of the tables long enough for her to readjust the chair under her. “He convinced her—and then she convinced us—that he wanted to marry her. But he said he couldn’t because he was poor, that he needed money for a proper suit, and to pay a judge, and set up something in the next town over.”
“You believed him?”
“I didn’t believe nothing.” Her nostrils flared. “But my daughter did, and so powerful was her belief that she convinced my husband that it must be true. So much so that when the Shears colt went to him and asked for help, my husband decided that the kind and proper thing to do was hand over our savings—to help with the wedding, was his reasoning.”
“And then Shears ran.”
Momma nodded fiercely. “Without saying goodbye. Left sometime in the early morning with all the money we’d saved up. That was, as I told you, four months ago. And the money had been saved up for almost twenty years. Ironically it was meant to be a wedding gift.”
She sighed and went back to cleaning. Daring circled a hoof in her table. Her iced tea was half drained.
Momma went on. Her voice was softer now. “I blame my husband, really. He always told Caramel about how he’d courted me. It was even shorter than this stint with Shears. He’s told her that story so many times as she grew up. It made her into a romantic. Another word for a fool, really.”
“You never stopped him?”
She shook her head. “He loved telling that story. She loved hearing it. And… I suppose I loved being reminded of it.” She stared at the paintings on the column. “When you live out here in the countryside, far from most other ponies, I wonder if being a romantic is just something you are expected to become, in some way.”
“There are worst things to be.”
“Such as?”
Daring didn’t answer. She turned away from the window, finished her iced tea, stared at the ice cubes that remained.
Momma got up, having finished cleaning. Before she left, she said, “You never answered my question. Why do you keep looking at the road? Really.”
Daring shrugged. “Looking out for bad eggs, I suppose.”
Momma grunted. “You see any that resemble a pasty-white pegasus named Shears, you holler, and I’ll come running.”

---

When Caramel returned with the food, she didn’t immediately leave. Instead she took the seat right in front of Daring.
Daring raised her eyebrows but said nothing. Presented in front of her was a pie dish—shepherd’s pie, the item had been labeled as. She picked up a fork and dug in. It was warm and oozy, but quickly she realized it’d be too filling for her. If she ate too much, she’d get sleepy. She couldn’t afford to sleep.
“Momma told you about Shears?” Caramel asked softly.
Daring swallowed before answering: “She told me something. I didn’t ask her to.”
Caramel sighed. “That’s Momma. She likes to air bad laundry to anypony who isn’t family. It doesn’t have to be just Shears. It’s also about me, or Daddy, or anything that bothers her.”
From the kitchen they heard voices going off in rapid Maretalion. Husband and wife. Punch and Judy. The husband was losing. The wife wasn’t. Caramel’s ears flopped. “I think that’s why we don’t get many repeat customers. Nopony likes to come someplace and then be told all the sordid, sad details of the ponies who run it, right?”
“Not unless they’re therapists or a lawyer.”
Caramel smiled a little at that. Only a little. “We don’t have much in the way of those around here.”
“You’re not missing out. Nopony’s come this way for a while, though?”
“That’s right. You’re the first in a few days.”
“Who came before me?”
Caramel described them. Daring’s shoulders relaxed at each unfamiliar description. “Well,” she said, “at least you get some foot traffic.”
“It’d be nice if we could get more. I thought doing art might help—like the stuff I drew on the chalk sign—but the nearest village is a twenty-mile trek to the north. Who’d want to advertise for a place that far away, you know? And then the highway—”
“If it hadn’t been abandoned.”
“If it hadn’t been abandoned,” Caramel agreed, “we might have had more ponies seeing us, turning down the road, stopping by. But things fell apart, I think, long before we did.”
She paused at the end of those words, like she’d only just then become aware of them after they’d exited her mouth. She glanced back towards the kitchen. The argument had ended, and now a gray, white-mustached earth pony stallion wandered out and to a small side room. Behind him came Momma. She threw a rag in his direction, missed him, followed anyway. A door closed; they couldn’t be heard anymore.
“I’m sorry about her,” Caramel said. “That wasn’t an appropriate thing for her to share.”
“I’m in no position to judge,” Daring said, taking another bite. “I’m just passing through.”
“I guess you are. Would you do me a favor?”
“Depends on the favor.”
“Doesn’t it always? Would you—wherever you’re going—would you tell ponies about us?” Caramel had a wide smile, the kind which Daring could tell would attract just the sorts of ponies who’d want to take advantage of the naivete found in it. “Just to drive the traffic up a little. I know money isn’t the answer to everything, but if we had a little more business, maybe Momma and Daddy wouldn’t fight so much, especially after…”
“After Shears.”
Caramel winced but nodded. She looked expectantly at Daring.
“Sure,” Daring said, but as soon as she said it, she knew she never would. THE FOREST MONARCH would never be something she shared with anypony outside of herself. It would have no mention in her books. She would never think of it fondly in a moment of respite. It would be left to the forest and to the shadows, not out of malice, but out of necessity. No one could know she came here, that this place even existed. And she would never be able to tell these ponies this. She would have to lie to them and assure them and do nothing further with them.
But Caramel smiled anyway. She reached out and patted Daring’s hoof. “Thank you.”
She seemed to say more. Her lips had parted to do so. But her eyes trailed down. Daring followed them slightly and realized that her parka had slipped again. Her bandages stuck out. Quickly she pulled the cloth back over, averting her gaze. Caramel looked at her, face warped with concern, with worry.
“I’d like to finish this,” Daring said, pointing to her food with a fork. “If that’s all right.”
“If that’s all…” Caramel looked the plate. “Oh, yes. Of course. Let me know if… if there’s anything else you need.”
She got up. The chair skidded against the floor. She hesitated. Made a slight shake of her head. Turned. Walked the way her parents went, to the door that was closed. Opened it, vanished within.
Daring finished her shepherd’s pie and looked out once more time. The shadows had started to angle differently.

---

She left before anypony stopped her. She closed the door, went back across the road, and kicked a few leaves onto the path. Enough to feed the idea that nothing had gone through recently—at least, that was what she was counting on. She looked back at the building, again seeing the dark window and nothing through it.
She turned up the road. Something pricked her—a thought. She hesitated, turned around, the road again coming into focus.
She went back the way she came. Only a few steps, though—Dr. Caballeron and his goons could still be on their way. She followed the dried river back to where she’d kicked the fruit and looked into the forest. The dried trunk again, the branches. She jumped across the dried riverbed and peered around that trunk.
Surrounded by so much plants as to be its own ecosystem, a skeleton leered back. Vines climbed over its barrel, reached deep into its ribs like the arms of a lover. Another plant was growing along its back, a dark, almost vein-like thing that pulsed with something that could not be blood. Roots or shoots sprouted from there and wrapped around the skeleton’s legs and propped it up against the trunk like some form of crucifixion.
The skeleton had wings. Or used to have wings. Currently they were splayed against the tree.
Daring walked backwards, keeping her eye on the skeleton and the plants that had devoured it. She only broke her gaze when she felt the road touch the back of her hoof. She stumbled for a moment, righted herself, forced herself to breathe again.
Another glance down the road. The shadows were dancing, as was the dust. That could be the wind or the changing of the hour. Or it could be any number of things.
She didn’t stay to find out what.