Shaking.

The Everfree Forest was shaking.

This is a very interesting sight by the way, especially for a magical forest. The leaves do not rustle as if a cold wind blows. Nor do branches quiver, nor roots writhe.

It is the sort of thing only a plant would notice. How a stem turns away. How a flower folds. A number of noxious smells, the puff of gasses and the drip of odd fungi.

Intermittently, vines would brush against a certain statue in a clearing lit with a sourceless blue glow as if to check it was still there. They began to check more and more.

The Inevitable approached.

Urgency in the way the vines snaked through the snow. Roots slithered along the ground.

The Ultimate Reality walked through the trees as if she were the Test Version Reality that hadn't quite got the rules sorted out.

Thorns bit at nothing. The dog was gone. They took the dog—what other defenses?

Vines touched the castle, searching the abandoned, emptied library. The Sea Serpent quivered under the water with his remaining children.

Check the statue. Is it chipped? Broken? The insignia—the words—still there, faded beyond readability. But the shape of the cut was still there in the stone. The forest did not understand how they could have lost their power.

The mare in black stood in front of the statue of Frankie Knight in the clearing that had once belonged to the Knights of Economics.

Her blade as she lifted it cut the air in two, into air that became, and air that was lost beyond all hope of recovery. Never was there anything so certain.

This wasn’t the deal, the Everfree Forest couldn’t quite express. This, this is a betrayal. You took, you—and I gave you—

The mare in black’s eyes glowed with blue fire. There was no mercy. No understanding.

Only purpose.

There were ponies in the forest again.

That was very strange. There hadn’t been for centuries, not since the Sun and Moon had put the guardian at the entrance.

Hm.

Vines slithered out. Thorns scraped the ground.

What was later called the Everfree Forest was not, contrary to what ponies might assume, a single entity. In truth it was simply a lot of plants that had grown up around each other.

But the forest had survived the fire that created it, and the snow that swallowed it, and the artificial tethers of the sun and moon, and the beast who thought himself its king, and too many inquisitive ponies. It did so because every single member of the forest, from the old black trees in the center to the pumpkin spice flowers that were only beginning to grow near the outer edges, took very good care of itself. Singing Nettles learned not to be too noisy when the Extremely Unpleasant Beans roused in the morning, cursing energetically. The All-Consuming Moss of Destruction strayed onto the Spiky Grass at its own peril. Weeds were strangled. Mushrooms were jolly well expected to not look like anything indecent if saplings were about. Cucumbers, after years of many incidents, had been banned altogether.

Ponies…ponies didn’t last long.

“Haaaalt!” commanded the Pegasus at their fore. She had a spear, but seemed to be using it as a walking aid. The tip was white as bone. “Bring out the money box!”

An Earth Pony hurried forward carrying a heavy box. She set it down. “Bring forth the keys!”

Two Unicorns, levitating the three odd and twisted keys between them, came forward. They set the keys in the Earth Pony’s mouth, who gave them to the Pegasus, who opened the box.

The contents shined with an orange glow. There was no light to make such a glow, only the strange blue luminescence that lit this part of the forest. But it glowed orange nonetheless.

The vines surrounded them. The thorns made an impassable bloody thicket. The ponies jumped and drew in toward the Pegasus, who alone was calm.

“We’ll pay you…,” a brief moment of calculation, “twenty bits per head to let us through. Our lives are worth more than that to us but not, we suspect, to you.”

The vines hesitated.

“You want blood?” the Pegasus said. “Pain? We do not understand you. Yet money can buy much in this world.”

The vines waved in the air. Explain, they seemed to say.

“Money can be exchanged for goods and services.”

The thorns clattered against each other.

“Imagine paying a pony for the right to flagellate her. More reliable, don’t you think?”

The Pegasus set out the money, twenty bits per head. The vines were parted. Frankie Knight held up her spear like a staff, the very point-tip black as though it had been dipped in ink.

“We have passed the Murderous Vines! Lock the box! Guard the keys! Onward to the heart of the forest!”

And in such a fashion they passed through the Malingering Fungus and the Tendentious Fish, who complained at length about the diminishing gold content in bits even as he took a heaping, and the Unbearably Pedantic Arguably Coniferous Tree, although in that case they simply banged coconut shells as they marched past to drown out its obnoxious, condescending voice.

So it went until the forest realized it was conquered. Yet when it moved to crush the ponies, it found that no part of it would act against them, though the whole of them wanted the ponies gone. They had sold something, and a deal had been made. And the black stain on the tip of the spear the Pegasus held like a staff seemed to grow darker as the forest resisted less and less.

“Well,” said Frankie Knight, her spear laying on her legs and a sandwich in her hoofs, “that was easy.”

They rested in a clearing, sitting on rocks and eating supper.

“We befriended the forest as planned,” cheered a graduate student nearby, a Unicorn one. Frankie Knight thought of her as Ketchup and Mustard since it matched her coat and mane, and she couldn't remember her real name.

“Eh-hem, you haven’t,” said a familiar and terrible voice. “Arguably, that is.”

The ponies jumped, and a few graduate students shrieked, except Frankie Knight, who took a bite of her sandwich (wheat and watercress) and said, “Oh, it's you, Unbearably Pedantic Arguably Coniferous Tree.”

“That is the evidence of your eyes,” the tree agreed, shuffling into view. It was more of a shrub really, squat and dumpy. It looked like the sort of tree that would have acne. “But let's not jump to hasty conclusions.”

“Hey!” Ketchup and Mustard said. “We already Befriended you!”

“No, we skipped this one,” Frankie Knight said just as the tree said, “That's debatable.”

Frankie Knight shifted, her spear rolling on her legs. Most of the spearpoint was black, the tip so black coal paled in comparison. “Unbearably Pedantic Arguably Coniferous Tree, I feel you are here to contest something we have achieved. Am I mistaken?”

“Several ways of arguing yes and no,” the Unbearably Pedantic Arguably Coniferous Tree answered, "but leave that aside for now. I understand you came here to make friends with this forest? I make no final conclusion, only a probabilistic inference.”

“Yes, we are here to befriend the forest.”

“May I ask why?”

“Why leave any land uncultivated?” Frankie Knight shrugged. “An economist can’t help but notice these friendship opportunities. It is called amitrage[1], by the way.”

[1] Begone, foul nerds of Latin.

“Ah, yes, yes...that does seem to be the problem, isn't it? Friends do not, and I accept that definitions are always somewhat fuzzy, but as a rule friends do not pay friends to be friends. That is usually called an employee.”

“The plants and animals living here have no reason to complain. Each accepted the bargain, each expected herself better off.”

“Why, that's just the fallacy of composition, dear Pegasus—though I suppose those wings could be fake. None of them would have agreed to your little deal, so I gather, had they known the others would as well.”

“Rather opportunistic of them.”

“Leave semantics aside for now, please. The point is, real friendships aren't made at the point of a spear. Speaking of which, what is that spear? I understand if you cannot communicate what it is, but a shadowy likeness will be acceptable.”

“No business of yours. Am I to take it that you are acting as a representative of the forest? If our deal is broken, I want my money back.”

The Unbearably Pedantic Arguably Coniferous Tree had no eyes, but if it did, it would have glanced at the spear. “No entity I know within this forest seeks to renege on any contract unilaterally. As for myself, I am no representative, but merely an...interested party. Arguably. I might be something else.”

Frankie Knight sighed. “Yes, understood. Now tell me what the problem is.”

“The forest is afraid. When I say forest I mean the many organisms gathered within, who while different from each other in many respects—”

“Yes, understood. Afraid of what? Sticking to a deal?”

“The forest, if I may speak loosely, feels that it never got the chance to read any consumer reviews.”

“What?”

“It feels it was pressured into this decision prematurely and was sold, ah, palm oil.”

“No refunds.”

Though many Unicorns lit the darkness with magic, and others with lanterns, the air suddenly seemed to grow darker, an oppressive anti-light bearing down on the clearing.

“You came here,” the Unbearably Pedantic Arguably Coniferous Tree said, “ignorant of our ways, thinking, rightly it seemed, that you could buy your way past them. The deal each made as an individual became, without the consent of any creature here, a deal made as a whole. Much has been destroyed already which none would have wished to erode however slightly.”

The blackness was growing from the squat shrub with the dry, unpleasant voice.

“You sneer at their distress, for they entered knowingly into the deal. Yet I say that you knew a deal beyond deals would be made, a deal with the whole of the forest. Now all their rules are up for sale, the careful balance subject to reallocation. No rule is a rule that may be sold. Arguably.”

The darkness grew, and swallowed sound as well as light, and the empty black void surrounded the ponies, their lanterns snuffed, their magic's glow dimmed.

“Professor Knight?” Ketchup and Mustard quavered, having to cast magic just to carry her voice. “What's happening?”

“You might have observed,” said the Unbearably Pedantic Arguably Coniferous Tree, its voice dry and lecturing, “that the forest has defenses against all manner of invasion. There was once a pony like you, a Unicorn with a cutie mark of a starburst and two strips of toothpaste. She failed, for other reasons, and I developed, well, a certain talkativeness. And so I am still free among my enslaved fellows. The forest has no weakness.”

The blackness grew, and swallowed all light, and all sound, and there was only blackness.

No. Two blacknesses. One very great, swallowing everything. The other very small, and unyielding.

“…Arguably,” the Unbearably Pedantic Arguably Coniferous Tree sighed. “What is that spear?”

“No business of yours.” Frankie Knight held her wings tight and did her best not to let her hammering heart reach her voice. “Let us talk as equals then.”

“Are we agreed?” Frankie Knight said, weary after days of arguing.

The Unbearably Pedantic Arguably Coniferous Tree waited until the Thin Reeds That Write What You Say But Somewhat Inaccurately[2] were finished. “Yes, this seems acceptable—ah, we shall wish to change that word, as it is written we would be making a deal with Sconesville, how vexing.”

[2] Deadly against the right sort of foe.

“A town will be founded ten miles north,” Frankie Knight reiterated, mostly for the benefit of the court scribe, a Pegasus struggling with a drippy pen and paper made of straw. “There will be two marks, one here and one there to mark the friendship between equine and flora. Ponies will be allowed to buy and sell as they please, however, a friendship zone will be established around the borders of the forest. Within that zone, ponies must respect the ways of the forest. And the forest will not enter Ponyville.”

“Unless the treaty is broken.”

“Be it as a chain; if broken in one place, then wholly useless.”

“As to these marks, what have you chosen for the ponies of Ponyville?”

“A code,” Frankie Knight answered. “Ethics, behaviors, ideas. It will show them how to keep whole the chain. I will compile it as The Ethics of Competition. There is an oak tree—”

“I know it.”

Frankie Knight’s eyebrows lifted. The shrub’s voice had tightened almost imperceptibly. “In that oak tree I will make a library, and in that library I will keep the code.”

“Both too abstract and too literal for the forest,” the shrub said dryly. “We have chosen a symbol. It is a statue. Of you.”

“I’m flattered.”

“You will have that spear. And you will have that code. We will carve its pages out of stone. And there will be an inscription, which you will write.”

“Oh?”

“You will write it for all ponies who enter here, so that they are reminded of the terms of our deal. You will remind them what our zone of friendship is.”

“Of course.”

The scribe and the Thin Reeds finished writing. Frankie Knight and the Unbearably Pedantic Arguably Coniferous Tree checked both versions. Then the shrub broke off a branch, and gave it to the Pegasus, who gave it to the court scribe.

“Roll it up with the contract,” Frankie Knight said. “I suppose it is as good as a signature. Keep it well preserved.”

“Now sign your name,” the Unbearably Pedantic Arguably Coniferous Tree said. “Return to the forest its freedom.”

Frankie Knight took hold of her spear, the point as black as the inevitable fate of all living things, even the Alicorns, though it might be eons yet.

What was this moment of pity? The possibility of creation enticed her. There had to be places free of contract. Even prices had costs.

So create a special dimension where things didn’t have to be paid for. In that domain, things belonged to ponies—and plants—and they didn’t have to mind anypony in what they decided to do with them, no matter how loudly others bid.

She thought of rows of trees, and a future free of spears. Where spearpoints would be turned into shovels and old econoponies could lean on their staffs and complain about shoddy theoretical work. And start pontificating about ethics and methodology.

“I’m sorry I scared your trees. I shouldn’t have asked so much of them.”

“They are not mine,” said the Unbearably Pedantic Arguably Coniferous Tree, who was always exact. “Arguably.”

Frankie Knight placed the tip of the spearpoint against the straw paper. She signed her name in long, curling letters, the blackness bleeding from the spearpoint onto the straw.

“It’s a pen?” the Unbearably Pedantic Arguably Coniferous Tree demanded. “A pen!”

“Yes, a pen, only a pen,” Frankie Knight murmured. She crossed the 't' with a chaining loop and let the scribe roll up the parchment. She looked at the shrub, which radiated fury as only a shrub can. “I came with the strongest weapon I have.” Then a smile broke out over her face. “Now the forest will be ever free.”

The leaves settled back on its branches like a bird who had spotted a threat at the edge of its nest but decided not to attack.

“I look forward to meeting your descendants,” the shrub said. “I wonder how long your brand of chivalry will last. Unless you plan on becoming immortal like your Princess…?”

“I intend to meet my maker,” Frankie Knight said shortly. “But I shall pass your regards onto the princesses.”

“Ah, ahem, I don’t mean to be pedantic, but surely you meant ‘princess.’ It was centuries ago that the Deflator was banished.”

“There is a third now. She is…pretty.”

Finally the Everfree Forest understood. She had been betrayed.

Hello, the mare in black didn’t quite say, gazing at the statue of Frankie Knight. The one I loved discarded me like trash. But I weaved a trap for her, and she is undoing, has undone, the spirit that guards her land. She chose, and a world died. Take back what was yours. And I will take into the endless white slopes of eternity what was mine.

The forest said nothing. The mare in black smiled. There was nothing to say.

The shovel joined the spear, the spinning globe became the book, one she preferred instead, and her body slid into the stone as easily as the black cloak faded onto Frankie Knight’s stone back….

Rock split, tore away from the foundation. A statue of a cloaked Pegasus walked, blue eyes gleaming in the darkness.

The ground rumbled and shook. Trees groaned; black vines shot out up through the emergent layer and into the dark and swirled wildly amid the falling snow, arcing out toward forbidden land, curving across the sky like the blade of a shovel.

The only rules that remained were from that book, her beloved's favorite, that had seemed to crystallize the world in a few equations....

Author's Notes:

Ketchup and Mustard is a mystery pony from the show. You probably can't even guess who she is.

This brings us to the end of the first half of this story arc. I am more finished than not with the next half, but I will need some time to complete it. Hopefully there will be a chapter or two up by the end of February, and the story will finish in the first half of March.