For the second time that night, Apple Bloom shot up in bed, her breath racing and her heart pounding, and with her stomach in her mouth. “Applejack,” she cried. “Sis, where are ya, where are ya?”

No answer, so she called again. “Applejack!”

Her ears perked as something tapped against the window. Apple Bloom faced the glass: moonlight, bright and ghostly, was pouring into the bedroom, casting stark shadows and making everything seem strange, unfamiliar; her half open wardrobe was a dark gateway into another world; and all around she imagined a hundred sets of eyes staring at her, beady red eyes which glowed in the darkness. Whimpering, Apple Bloom pulled the sheets over herself a little more. She turned her bedside lantern on.

At once, everything changed.  

Shadows fled. The eyes vanished into nothing—of course, not that they had ever existed in the first place—and in the yellow lamplight, the buckles on her hoof boots gleamed from inside the open wardrobe. Apple Bloom gulped. She was shaking. “Just a bad dream,” she whispered to herself. “Just a nightmare. Go back to sleep.”

She forced herself to take deep breaths, the cool air making her feel calmer, more secure.

What a dream! What a terrible, awful, horrible dream. Against her better judgement, she tried her best to remember it: she’d been chasing something, her... her hair bow, had it been? And then...

She would’ve had better luck trying to hold buckets of sand in her hooves. The details slid out of mind, out of memory, and the harder she tried to hold onto them the more difficult it became; then they were gone. All that remained was the unease lingering in her belly.  

She sighed. She laid her head on the pillow, but falling asleep was easier said than done. “Go to sleep,” she mouthed. “There ain’t nothin’ to be scared of, ya hear?”

The wind howled through the branches of dead trees and whipped flakes of loose snow against her window. Tap. Tap. Tap. Apple Bloom shivered. She didn’t like that sound.

“Go. To. Sleep. What ya scared of? You’re eight years old! Ya got no excuse to act chicken.”

She huffed, for a moment wishing that she could be somewhere, anywhere else, a nice new house with a proper heating system that actually worked. And thoughts of gloomy corridors and bare wooden rooms filled her head. Her house was old. It was the sort of place where the floorboards creaked in the dead of night even when nopony was around to hear; and it hadn’t just seen better days, but every type of day imaginable, from bright mornings and lazy afternoons, to bitter evenings where ferocious storms battered the windows and threatened to blow tiles from the roof. Apple Bloom loved her house. She loved how busy it was, how ponies were always coming and going or else were hard at work making apple jam, apple juice, apple cider, apple everything. But there was no denying it: sometimes—right then, for instance—it could be plain creepy.

Tap. Creak. Rattle.

Something that Apple Bloom prayed was the water pipes let out a long, low moan, and quick as a flash, she opened her eyes and flicked the lamp on once more, staring, staring at the clock. One in the morning, it said. Her heart sank.

It was going to be a long, long night.

As far as Apple Bloom was concerned, she’d been sent to bed at nine, had drifted off by ten, and then nothing had happened save for troubled dreams of bows and darkness. In fact, what had actually happened was this: two hours previously—though she had no memory of this—she’d woken up screaming, and somepony had heard her.

“What’s in tarnation’s going on in here?” her sister Applejack asked, poking her head through the door. But Apple Bloom was in no fit state to answer. She was stood upright on her bed, her eyes full to bursting with terror, and she pointed at the window whilst babbling incessantly about... something, something about “shadows” and “monsters, monsters”. Yet before Applejack could ask what she meant by any of this, the fright in Apple Bloom’s eyes suddenly vanished. Her breathing grew softer.

Applejack placed a hoof over her own heart in an effort to calm it. What, in all Equestria, what in the name of Celestia and Luna, had her sister been dreaming about?

Foals have nightmares, Applejack told herself in an effort to believe that everything was alright; but there was no fooling the chill in her guts. Not my li’l Apple Bloom. Why, she can sleep sounder than Granny Smith on a Sunday afternoon, and she don’t ever wake up screaming like this.

Gulping, the mare stepped hoof into her little sister’s bedroom, all the while keeping half an eye on the shadows built up in the corners, under the windowsill, and lurking underneath the bed. “Shush there, li’l cowgirl you,” she said, sitting down next to Apple Bloom. The poor filly! Every hair on her yellow coat of fur standing on end, and her cheeks were so hot that it was possible to feel the heat radiating off of them. Applejack tucked her under the sheets before giving her a kiss on the forehead. “What’s gotten y’all shaken up like this, Apple Bloom?”

Apple Bloom blinked. A few moments later she was so deeply asleep that Applejack doubted that even thunder and lightning would’ve been enough to wake her.

And just then, Applejack knew exactly what her sister had been dreaming about.

“It’ll turn up,” she said, leaning in close to her precious little sister and stroking her mane, where her bow ought to have been. The beloved pink bow: a present from their mother. “You’ll see. It’s like what Granny Smith says. Nothin’ that’s lost stays lost forever...” Next Chapter: 2. Out of Time Estimated time remaining: 9 Minutes