“Hey, kids,” said Pinkie. “It’s me, your best friend Pinkie Pie with a special message from the psychic’s guild! While it’s true a near-death experience can awaken your psychic powers, it does not guarantee you’ll get superpowers. You’re generally ten times more likely to die than you are to become a psychic in any given situation. And most of the time the psychic abilities you do gain aren’t even that good. You might only get weak ESP. There’s only one Pinkie Pie, you know!

“So take it from the head psychic herself! Hurting yourself in hopes of becoming like me is the dumbest thing you can do on any given day!”

Lemon Zest held her headphones tight against her ears to listen to that PSA one last time. She’d heard similar announcements all through school. She’d read all the statistics. Everypony said this was a stupid idea and they were right.

Yet here she stood in front of the live wire of fate, just outside a small sub station, ready to electrocute herself until her heart stopped.

Yes, she had numbers on ponies who did this exact gambit. Ten in twenty died. Nine in twenty survived but walked away with nothing. One in twenty became psychic. Five percent! She just needed to get that lucky.

Of all the methods she could use, that was the highest chance. Zest just needed to get this one roll of the dice. One critical hit and she could escape this horrible life. She had to be overdue for some good luck.

Zest looked over her shoulder at the hospital right down the street. This was the best she could do.

“Sorry, Pinkie.” Zest took that recording out of her cylinder player. “I know I’m stupid, but some of us are too desperate to be smart. You know?”

Zest popped in her Equestria Girls cylinder and hit play. She bobbed her head to the first few beats. If she was going out, she’d go out listening to this song one last time.

“Equestria Girls, we’re kind of magical. Boots on hooves, bikinis on top!”

The song seemed to play so much slower this time. Zest glanced around nervously to see if anypony guessed what she was about to do. She saw a few ponies, but none of them read her mind.

No use delaying any longer! Zest psyched herself up!

“Fast, fine, fierce we trot till we–”

Zest bit down hard on the wire, tearing through the rubber. She felt the electricity surge through her body and her vision went white.

Her body didn’t thrash around, nor did it get blown back as she’d been expecting. Instead, Zest locked up. She couldn’t move an inch. The wire had some indomitable grip on her.

She’d read accounts of self-electrocution and getting stuck to the wire like this was the deadliest scenario! Her odds of survival just plummeted far below one percent!

Though on the plus side, if she did survive her psychic powers would probably be exceptional. Zest decided to focus on that one upside. Paralyzed, positive thoughts were the best she could manage.

Her body became unbearably hot, but through it all, she was surprised at how little this hurt and how long it took. Shouldn’t she have passed out or died by now?

Finally, something broke. She heard a burst and got sent flying through the air. Everything went numb. She couldn’t tell if she was breathing or if her heart had stopped. She barely even felt it when her body hit the ground a moment later.

Her vision returned from that white void for just a second. With great effort, she turned her eyes to the left. If that black, broken thing she saw was any part of her body… well, maybe it would be better if she died.

That can’t be good, were her final thoughts before that blackness overtook her world entirely.

---

---

---

---

And the craziest thing? Zest couldn’t even tell if that killed her.

She didn’t feel dead, but then she didn't feel anything. A moment ago, moving her ears felt like lifting a mountain but now she felt weightless like she was floating.

Zest opened her eyes easily enough, but what she saw was so odd that she couldn’t be sure if she’d gone blind.

Zest looked down at herself. She was floating, in some nightmarish white void. She could make out her form well enough. She still had her pink fur; her mane was the same green with yellowish stripes through it. Granted both were ruined beyond belief by the electricity. Her tail looked more suited for a raccoon at the moment. Not a single injury lingered, though

But everything else? It was all devoid of color. There were things in this white void with her, all around her even. They all clung low to the ground, universally the deepest black she’d ever seen. They came in all shapes, but Zest couldn’t make out a real form for either of them.

She looked up at the sky to find a massive ball of black and purple flames hanging in the sky. It gave off no light, but Zest could feel the uncomfortable heat of it. The flames frayed at the edges of everything in this world, including Zest.

“Wuh?” Zest stared up at it with her mouth hanging open.

Was this the afterlife or what? Zest wouldn’t blame any god that wanted to punish her, but this was weird.

A pony’s scream broke the silence of the world. Then came a great commotion and the sound of ponies clambering. Zest recoiled as she saw a number of them, each about the size of a pony, all scurrying about across the ground. They all converged on one shadow in the middle. Yes… that was what they looked like. Shadow creatures crawling across the ground on their bellies.

Every instinct told Zest to run away from them, that she didn’t belong in this place. She wanted to hide but couldn’t tell how to do even that much. Zest tricked kicking about and did spin around in the air. As she hung upside down, she saw some semblance of sanity.

There was a window! A window that led to a reasonably normal-looking room appeared before her. And oh did ‘reasonably normal’ sound like paradise right about now.

Zest did everything she could, flailing herself all around, attempting to get to that window. She did manage to ebb closer and closer to the window as the commotion continued behind her. With great pains, she managed to build up some momentum and soon floated towards it with no further effort.

Yet as she got near, Zest realized her aim was off. She wouldn’t go through the window but collide with a wall of darkness just next to it. She’d built up too much momentum to stop herself! Instinctively, she closed her eyes, but the collision never came.

Even without going through that window, she still ended up in that mysterious room. All in all, it looked like a pretty normal basement. The room was dark, and the colors greyed out, but she could at least tell what she was looking at.

Relief washed over her to be out of whatever that fever dream she just escaped was.

Of course, the terror outside couldn’t be ignored even now. The windows sucked the light and color out of the room. The world frayed apart in little strands as though it were sown together and getting pulled out into that void. Yet no matter how it tugged, the void didn’t spread. The room remained stable.

“What the heck is this?” Zest looked down at her hooves. “A dream?”

She’d never had a dream like this.

She could still hear voices outside. Zest couldn’t look outside this safe room, but she could listen to what those ponies were saying. She moved close to the window and swiveled her ears to listen.

“Does it look like she’s alive?” one pony asked another. “She’s been fried! The hospital can’t fix something like this.”

The voice sounded like it came from one of the skittering shadows. Squinting, she realized those shadows were vaguely pony-shaped.

“Then who do we call?”

“The police, I guess. Ugh! Does anypony have a tarp? We should cover it up until they get here.”

All the moving shadows were gathered around a single, immobile but pony-shaped shadow.

“Wait,” Zest said under her breath.

They were talking about her, weren’t they?

But if her body was still out there, then what was she?

That was when it finally clicked! She’d gone through a wall. She was floating in the air. She’d just died. Outside was a bright sunny day but all she could see were the shadows of ponies.

“Because ghosts only see shadows!” Zest gasped at the realization.

To test her theory, Zest waved her hoof across a tool cabinet. It went straight through! She soon found she couldn’t touch anything.

“I became a ghost?” Zest blinked a few times, unable to process this turn of events. “What the heck were the chances of this happening?”

The answer to that was obvious enough.

“That’s right,” Zest muttered under her breath, caught in her own pun. “A ghost of a chance.”

That’s where the saying came from. ‘A ghost of a chance’ was literally a one in ten thousand shot. You had about a one in ten thousand chance of becoming a ghost when you died.

But since when did Zest have the kind of luck to draw some crazy wildcard like this? This was like rolling two dice and somehow getting a royal flush! Nopony knew how to react to something like that. Was this even good luck or bad luck?

That’d take some thinking.

“I can think of one con.” Zest moved her hoof through a hammer sitting on a table a few times. “I can’t touch anything now.”

How was she supposed to grab anything without touching it? Well, as a unicorn the answer came readily enough.

Instinctively, she tried using her horn. Yet she couldn’t feel it. She couldn’t feel the flow of ambient magic or summon any of her own magical energy.

She reached for her horn – her most precious tool. She could touch it, but it felt lifeless.

Zest glanced back outside. Her horn was over there, potentially exploded, certainly fried, and undoubtedly useless. No bones meant no ability for her to use unicorn magic. Zest’s magic as a pony was gone along with her body.

She clutched her useless phantom horn, wondering if she could even cry. She wanted to shout that her life was over but couldn’t bear the pun! It wasn’t fair.

Zest shook her head.

No.

This was totally fair, wasn’t it? Losing her horn was all too fitting karmic justice. In fact, it was the perfect ironic punishment. She had no right to complain.

But she was certain ghosts could use some sort of telekinesis. She’d always read as much. They certainly had magic of their own to replace their lost pony magic.

Zest turned to the blinds. If closing those made it easier to see, there’d be no doubt left in her mind. Ghost saw easier in the dark, after all.

Zest tried simply focusing on the blinds as hard as she could. They shook slightly!

Okay! So this was more like using her skull and hooves than her horn, she realized, but it wasn’t completely different than the telekinesis she knew. Still, her lack of experience made it so difficult to grip anything. At least, she hoped it was merely inexperience.

Zest raised her hooves, put her focus square on the blinds, then lowered them swiftly. The blinds went down!

She did it! Zest bobbed her head left and right in celebration of the fact she wasn’t severely handicapped now! She could move stuff, and even that felt like a victory right now.

As a bonus, the room darkened considerably. This in turn meant her ability to see increased.

The greyness and haze vanished instantly, and vibrant color surrounded Zest. The room still looked dark, in a sense, but everything glowed with such magnificent color that the place felt bright and cheery.

If anything, her ability to see colors was even greater now, so long as it remained dark. Objects did look slightly different now. She even saw a color on the handle of a hammer that she decided wasn't a color the living could see.

She wasn’t exactly sure if she could call it blue, it’d be like saying purple was a shade of blue, but that was the closest her old mind could have gotten to it. It was such a deep, indescribably shade, like a blue that was even darker than black itself. But then again, every color was indescribable.

Zest looked herself over again. She was still pink-furred and green-maned. Of course, now she wondered if it all standing on end would be permanent. Giving her cause for concern was a small electrical arc that moved across her foreleg just then.

It caused her no pain, but those came at infrequent intervals. Sparks and electrical arcs would just come off of her out of nowhere. Really, she looked like she belonged in a cartoon right now.

Zest tried smoothing her tail out. She could still touch it and feel her own body, it seemed, but straightening it out proved impossible. That’s when she noticed something.

She still had her headphones? She could touch them, so they were ghost headphones, apparently.

Was that even a thing that could happen? She’d seen ghosts wearing clothes in a few movies, so maybe sometimes you got to keep an item or two. But did that mean clothing had a soul?

What were ghosts again? If they were souls dislodged from bodies, there wouldn’t be any dispute about souls existing, right? So they had to be something else only…

Zest really should have paid more attention in school!

She tried pulling the headphones off. It hurt! Taking them off made her feel like she was attempting to rip her ears off. Now she suspected that the electricity grafted them to her skull or something just before she died.

Her jack dangled off to the side, connecting to nothing. Her cylinder player was nowhere in sight. So her accessory was completely useless!

At least they made her look cool. In fact, Zest decided she was glad to be stuck with them. She looked way better with them on.

“Yeah.” Zest nodded to herself. “Just focus on the positives.”

Ghosts didn’t age so that was cool. No spine meant no back pain in her later years.

And what else?

“Wait!”

The best possible upside, at last, came to her. Already she could hardly contain her smile.

Zest moved back to the wall and swiveled her ears to listen. Nopony seemed to notice her becoming a ghost!

Nopony knew she was still alive! Zest had just effectively faked her own death!

“And if I’m dead I don’t owe anypony money.” Zest snicked and giggled, holding in a howl of laughter.

This was good luck! This was great luck! Hell, it was the best day of her life! Zest was finally free!

It wasn’t like the cartel would go on some insane marehunt, scouring the countryside for the literal ghost of a chance that this bizarre scenario happened. Zest didn’t warrant half that effort.

Zest spun around the room banging her head up and down to an invisible song! She had to hold in the urge to belt out the words to Equestria Girls! Oh, how she wanted to spend the rest of the day singing and dancing, but she couldn’t let anypony see her.

All she had to do was sneak out of town when the sun went down!

And then–!

And then what?

What did ghosts do all day again?

Hardly mattered! Zest would find wherever all the other ghosts hung out and copy whatever they were doing.

She just had to wait down here for the sun to go down and escape would be easy.

Waiting got boring fast. Zest amused herself by studying her new ‘body’ a little more.

Breathing caused air to swirl around her chest area, she found, then go out her mouth or nose. Not that she needed to breathe, but she could choose to. Interestingly, doing it like that gave her the ability to exhale non-stop for as long as she wanted.

Zest inhaled through her nose and then she smelled something.

At least, she believed it was a smell. The scent was so unlike anything she’d ever smelled before that she couldn’t even be sure. She could somehow pinpoint the location of whatever she ‘smelled’ now.

At any rate, it smelled delicious, better than anything she could remember. She couldn’t stop herself from sniffing now!

Without thinking, Zest floated back to the wall, to the source of her newfound pleasure. Her mouth watered. Her ears trembled with need. A terrible itch on the back of her head took hold.

Her new senses were all so strange but on some primal level she knew she wanted to devour whatever it was she smelled. Never in her life had she ever wanted to eat more than this. The only problem, this irresistible delight was outside in the sun.

What did ghosts even eat again?

Heat.

One thing Zest knew was that ghosts ate heat. Especially…

Zest shut her drooling mouth and she backed away from the wall.

“Oh wait.” Her eyes widened and her ears stopped twitching. She didn’t dare take another sniff. Already, she knew where the scent came from now.

She’d been smelling ponies. Specifically, she’d been smelling the body heat of the living ponies. She had an irresistible urge to suck their heat out and freeze them solid – potentially to death!

Yes, she remembered the biggest downside of being a ghost now. Ghosts – they often lost control around the living! The temptation to freeze their blood was too much for any normal ghost to handle for long. That was why they lived in such dark and lonely places where they wouldn’t be tempted to harm anypony.

How long could Zest hold out? She honestly wasn’t sure! That itching feeling slowly got worse.

Maybe she shouldn’t wait until sundown!

Zest shook her head. For now, she could keep her urges under control, it seemed. But she did need to leave before something bad happened.

Change of plans! She’d underground and keep floating south, towards the woods, for as long as she could.

Zest nodded to herself and darted beneath the floor. Nearly blind, seeing only the vaguest hints of shadows above, she pushed herself slowly forward, away from the world of the living.

---

Zest clawed her way through the underground for what felt like a day. In reality, she had little idea how long it took.

A few clues to her present location existed, though she couldn’t hear and could barely see. For one, she could smell the ponies she passed by. Her old sense of smell had been good enough, but this was on a different level. Zest could smell the exact number of ponies up above and tell how many paces away they were. In addition, she could sniff out where the most and least densely populated areas were.

Like this, she was able to tell when she passed a pony up above and could know which direction to go to reach the forest.

Perhaps a few hours into her expedition, Zest realized another helpful sense. It’d taken her a little bit to work out exactly what it was, but she could feel something pressing down on the surface of the earth. From this, she could tell how to stay below ground, but she soon realized she could tell the time with this sense too.

The direction from which the pressure came was slowly changing direction, going towards an angle and becoming ever weaker. With nothing better to do in such a dark and lonely place, Zest spent a long time trying to imagine what could be causing this mysterious force.

Then she thought of it. The sun!

Zest was certain now that she felt the rays of the sun pounding away. To make sure, she predicted that the force would eventually reach a heavily skewed angle then vanish. If that happened, it’d be her signal night had come and it was time to go above ground.

With these two discoveries, life became so much more bearable. Thus too did it grow shorter. The sun passed much more swiftly above after that, it seemed.

Zest soon cleared the town with no ponies above to make her mouth water. The itching feeling in her head stopped.

Some distance later, the sun, at last, began to set.

Zest poked her head up out of the ground and glanced about, finding herself in the forest. The familiar sight of pine trees surrounded her in every direction.

"I did it!" Zest grabbed her headphones and bobbed her head back and forth, humming a little victory tune.

She spent most of her life surrounded by pine trees. The province of Great Pines was named for its endless, sprawling, coniferous forests. By landmass, this was Equestria’s largest province, though the needles on any one of the bigger trees just might outnumber the ponies living here.

Growing up, she’d only ever seen pine trees, save when she’d gone down south to Sugar Loaf. Crystal Vale was the only province further north than Zest’s own. You didn’t get any trees at all up there.

Zest looked up. She’d hoped to confirm it was night, but only managed to muddle the question more.

The sky looked completely different now! Though she was sure it was night, the sky shone blue. Zest saw above her the deepest, richest blue she’d ever imagined. It was as though a massive, dark ocean was suspended above her now.

Tiny specks, glittering but black, filled the ‘waters’ above her. Each one acted as a tiny sinkhole in this metaphorical sea, causing the blue to swirl about them to create beautiful spiral patterns all around.

Were these stars?

If so, Zest quickly found the moon. It was by far the biggest ‘hole’ in the sky and created the dominant spiral pattern above her. But unlike the black stars, Zest could swear a light shone somewhere deep in the hole of the moon. The moon appeared an indescribable purple through that light, far away but intense.

“It’s so beautiful,” she whispered up at her new perception of the night sky.

She supposed, for a second, that she’d never see the stars as she had last night again. But this view was a fair trade.

And the strangest part was that she could swear the blue of the sky was darker than the black of the stars. Zest shook her head, certain that some of the colors she saw now were new.

“Focus!” Zest slammed her hooves down on her headphones. She’d marveled too long. “I got stuff to do! Stuff like – uh!”

Zest looked around at all the pine trees.

“Haunt the woods forever?” She shrugged. “I don’t even know how to properly haunt something!”

Okay!

She came up with a list of two priorities. One, don’t let any living ponies see her. Two, find some other ghosts to hang out with.

Great Pines had wilderness to spare, and ghosts liked lonely woods. As a filly, she’d been warned that wandering off might lead to her getting frozen. So hopefully her parents were right, and it wouldn’t be too hard to find some company.

Thankfully, she did have some familiarity with Great Pines. Navigation was as simple as moving to slightly higher ground. As soon as she spied a lone mountain, she knew which way was south.

Obviously, she didn’t know where any ghosts lived, so picking a general direction was her only option for now.

West made the most sense. The ocean waited to the east and the cartel was much more active in port cities. Plus, the thicker and more wild forests of Great Pines, where rumors and warnings of hauntings were more common, grew further inland. If she was going to find other ghosts, she’d be better off looking there.

And yet…

Zest turned back to the mountain, towards the south. Something in her gut told her to go south – towards more heavily populated areas.

It didn’t make much logical sense to go that way. If anything, going to dense cities meant being more likely to be spotted. It’d be harder to find ghosts that way, too. Yet, as the seconds ticked by, she became increasingly certain she should listen to whatever new instinct was urging her south.

“I guess I’ll go south then?” Zest said aloud. Part of her, oddly, expected an answer to come from the aether.

She set out in that direction. It only seemed like a strange decision a moment longer.

No, now she only thought of how annoyingly slow she moved. A small filly could outrun her!

Zest tried everything she could think of to try and speed up. Kicking her rear legs did nothing. Pretending to swim did nothing. Her inept levitation powers did nothing.

Eventually, she gave up. She turned her back to the ground, crossed her forelegs, and puttered along as she looked up at the sky. Here was her impression of the world’s slowest pegasus. Basic motor skills would seem like such a luxury at this point!

Zest didn’t even dare try to float up and over a tree. Who knew what would happen? Obviously, another ghost would know. She’d find one first.

As she went on, Zest did become increasingly aware of a sort of tug pulling her to the south. She imagined it more and more like a black wind blowing her down there. It didn’t exactly help her move. It felt like a sickly and cold wind. Yet at the same time, moving in any other direction seemed cumbersome enough for her to turn back to the south whenever she did deviate from the course.

Something about it frightened her a little, but that mattered little. Curiosity overcame her fear.

Surely, it’d lead her somewhere and that was better than being nowhere.

The thought got rid of all her doubts. Zest decided it was silly to be afraid when she didn’t even know what the thing was. She smiled. She’d just keep going south and see what happened!

Besides, she had to run into another ghost eventually.

As if to taunt her, a ball of white light phased through a tree overhead just then. She’d technically found another ghost, but not the right sort.

Orbs were a type of ‘lesser ghost’. Unlike high ghosts, such as Zest, these things had no semblance of their original personality. Philosophers held their fruitless debates as to whether high ghosts were truly the same pony as the one who died, or merely a new entity with all the relevant memories.

No such ambiguity existed around lesser ghosts. These were the remains of ponies, not the pony itself by any stretch of the imagination. Orbs were more akin to a lingering hoofprint, a few scattered bones, or an old feather.

Hours passed as that black wind blew her ever to the south.

She made a running count of the orbs she passed after that, getting to twenty once half the night had gone.

There used to be so many of these in the forests of Great Pines, but their numbers dropped so rapidly over the years. As a young foal, there were summer nights when Zest could look out her window to find ten orbs floating around.

So where had they all gone?

The explanation she’d gotten was that decreasing levels of super-radiation since the war meant fewer orbs. She accepted the suggestion without much thought before now.

Suddenly, the issue seemed so much more important. It seemed odd that they’d all vanish so quickly. And maybe she was simply impatient, but she’d yet to see any other high ghosts either.

There existed a chance that it affected other ghosts, like her, in some way. She wondered if something more sinister was gobbling up all the orbs.

Perhaps whatever pulled Zest south pulled all of them as well. Perhaps it already got all the high ghosts too.

For a brief moment, that idea chilled her, and considered perhaps going west until she knew more. Then she shook her head.

No.

That was a silly idea. She had no reason to assume something bad was to the south. Right?

She’d just keep going south and see what happened.

Though she wondered how far south she was being led. To the Everfree forest perhaps?

Ghosts haunted those woods like all get-out. Zest doubted she could go a single day without bumping into another ghost there.

Or perhaps it would lead her even further south to the Festering Scar. Silently, Zest decided to abandon the road if it brought her to the edge of that swamp. Not one thing lived in that place that could be trusted.

Sadly that meant no tropical paradise adventure for Lemon Zest. Or maybe she could go around the swamp. She still had thousands of kilometers to decide.

Zest closed her eyes and winced in pain.

If she even got that far. She felt herself growing weaker as time went on.

In her heart, she could feel a hole slowly growing. The emptiness was of the most literal variety like she was slowly dissolving into this void from the inside out. She felt lighter and thinner but in a bad way. Zest was wasting and fading away!

She could tell that was the ghost version of hunger. Her urge to fill that hole was simply too strong to be anything else.

This had to be hunger, right? Zest hadn’t eaten any heat today and was getting hungry.

Zest sniffed and pinpointed plenty of things to eat. She knew exactly where every animal in a one-kilometer radius slept.

Yes, ghosts froze animals (and sometimes ponies) to death to ‘eat’ them. Her new body (or whatever you called it) wanted her to freeze these animals too. She was famished and surrounded by delicious morsels!

“No way!” Zest grabbed her headphones and shook her head. “I’m an herbivore!”

She could resist the urge for at least another day, surely. It wasn’t like squirrels and moose were the only sources of heat in the universe. No giant moose-ball floated through the sky giving life to the planet!

She looked up at her horn. That’d be her solution to most problems previously. Sadly, that thing wasn’t going to be starting any fires ever again.

Hypothetically, she did have ice magic. Making fire from ice didn’t sound overly plausible, though, so she gave up on that without trying.

Only her ghost version of telekinesis remained. The problem was that she remained clumsy and weak with it.

Zest picked up a dry stick from the ground. She’d made friction fires before, but that involved using her hooves. She held little hope she could spin a stick fast enough in her current state.

Before wasting her time gathering tinder, Zest tested her ability. She put the stick against the ground and tried to rotate it in place as fast as she could. She obtained the speed of ‘no’.

Effectively, she couldn’t make the thing rotate. She put all of her efforts into the task for what felt like a solid half-hour. Eventually, she got to a point where she could spin it by twirling around in the air herself. She never obtained a tenth of the speed she’d need, however.

“If I throw this hard enough, the friction against the air will cause it to ignite!” Zest hurled the stick.

It got about two meters.

“Why am I so weak?!” Zest moaned. “Aren’t high ghosts supposed to be dangerous and powerful and stuff? If we’re so pathetic why is everypony so scared of us?!”

Well, complaining never got her anywhere before.

Her only other option now was to ‘borrow’ somepony else’s fire. It wasn’t stealing to simply put out another pony’s fire, right? She didn’t like the idea of immediately turning to theft just after she escaped from the cartel.

“Well this time it’s temporary,” Zest assured herself. “Just till I can find another ghost! And it’s not as bad as my old job, either.”

She sniffed the air and scanned the horizon.

At least finding towns was easier now. Besides each city being a clawing hole of black, Zest became increasingly convinced she could sniff them out from afar.

The air above a city smelled warmer, no doubt all the heat rising up. Nowhere else did she get this sense, at least not nearby.

She had all sorts of little things she’d never noticed before. Having different senses nearly put one in a new world, she decided. So many things she’d taken for granted were lost. Yet each one got replaced by some invisible truth revealing itself to her.

So she moved that way, hoping it would be safe.

Soon she found a road.

Then, as the town came into sight beyond the furthest layer of trees in her perception, Zest noticed the sign welcoming her. ‘Maple Hill’, it called itself.

“Maple Hill?” Zest looked around. She’d spent her whole life in Great Pines and never once saw a maple tree. Today was no exception. “I could forgive that name if there was even one maple here. Or a hill.”

She inched towards the poorly named city and sniffed once more.

Zest was hungrier now. She didn’t even need to be inside the town for that itching hunger to return worse than ever. If Zest went in there, she just knew she’d give in!

She pulled back. That was no good either. But she had to eat eventually, didn’t she?

Zest turned back towards the forest and frowned. Would she have to freeze some poor animal after all? She resolved to at least hold off until tomorrow. No way she could starve to death in one day.

As she turned around, Zest noticed something on the back of the sign she hadn’t seen the first time. Something was written there, with glowing green ink. Something about it screamed ‘ghost’ to her!

Still, the way that color glowed gave the impression that the light of it was far away, deep inside the tree, coming out cracks carved into it. She briefly believed the letters were carved into the sign but, a close inspection confirmed it was simply a strange paint.

The message contained two parts.

Written on top were strange runes that Zest couldn’t even guess the origins of. She counted three symbols in all. A half-circle to the far left. Three progressively smaller circles each within the last. Then finally two upside-down triangles stacked on top of one another. The second two were smaller and placed one on top of the other to the right.

Zest scratched her head wondering if even a single pony now living could beat any meaning out of that.

Thankfully, somepony wrote a second, more sensible message beneath that. Perhaps it was simply the same thing written twice in different ways.

The ominous message read, ‘Don’t go south. Danger.’

Zest silently glanced off to the south, then back at the sign.

“Oops?” She shrugged. “But then which way should I go, mystery pony?”

She never got an answer. The warning left her with more questions than she’d started with.

How far south could she safely go? They had to be talking about what pulled her in and that seemed a vast distance away. Or was there a second danger lurking around, far closer than she realized?

But at any rate, perhaps she should take a hard right and head west as her logical brain told her to.

They could be lying.

That thought just sort of blew into her head.

“Yeah.” Zest nodded in agreement with that stray thought. “The sign could be a trick. It could be written by somepony who doesn’t want me to get to the safety of whatever’s south of here. It’s not like graffiti is the most reliable source of information, right?”

Zest looked around, but nopony was there, even if it didn’t feel like it.

“Boy am I lonely.” Zest hung her head. “You know what? I’m just gonna keep going south and see what happens! I say that a lot, don’t I?”

Leading to the south, Zest found a third road. This one promised no civilization beyond it. Vines cracked the pavement as grass and weeds slowly reclaimed the land.

So Zest decided to follow that road for a while.

She went deeper into the woods until she could no longer smell the temptation of ponies. Then the black wind stopped.

Zest froze in place herself. So far, nothing had slowed it for even a moment, yet now it ceased completely.

But why? Something about this place?

Curious, she floated back a few feet. Sure enough, she felt the pull to the south once again, just as strongly as ever. Moving forward, it ceased once again.

Zest went back and forth like this a few times to confirm the results. She found the exact line in the ground where the wind ended. She could even stick her head inside and feel the wind only on her hindquarters. Though nothing she saw gave any hint this line was there. She couldn’t find a single landmark of any kind.

She moved left several meters before repeating the experiment. Eventually, she discovered that this line was in fact a wide circle. The center had to be a few kilometers away at the least, but something was clearly there in the center.

Once again, she wondered if whatever she felt was good or bad. She sat at the border for a long time, hooves on her headphones, deciding what to do.

“I might as well go in, right?” she asked herself.

As if in reply to her question, the tug stopped yet again. Yet now she wasn’t on the other side of that line she’d spent almost an hour establishing.

So much for science!

Zest pulled back and felt the wind return, only to be vanquished again a moment later. That’s when she figured out what was happening.

The line was moving! The thing in the center of the circle was coming right for her!

She scrambled to get away as fast as she could. That puttering speed she’d always had wasn’t enough to escape now. No matter how far back she went, the black wind no longer returned. The thing could move faster than her! Zest was trapped now!

“Oh no!” Zest flailed her forelegs trying to move faster, despite knowing full well that’d do nothing. “No! No! I’m leaving! Sorry!”

Her panicking ceased and Zest found herself taking deep breaths. Calmness washed over Zest, soothing her to the point she no longer felt the need to run.

What had she been worried about again?

The thing headed toward her no longer felt even potentially intimidating. She caught herself smiling wide like she’d just seen an old friend after years of separation.

Yeah! The thing in the center was great!

Now Zest wanted to get there as soon as possible, so she began floating towards where she assumed it was. All the while she hummed a happy tune, bopping her head side to side with a big smile. Everything was fine now!

“Let the Rainbow remind you!” Zest sang to herself happily.

In the back of her mind, she thought it strange her mood flipped on a dime like that. Somehow, she just couldn’t find a crap to give about that.

She got to a spot that wasn’t quite a clearing but was less grown than the rest of the forest. It was as though the place had been cleared out only to be retaken by the woods.

Zest noticed a few buildings in the distance, but no light came from the windows, and she couldn’t smell any living ponies down there. Some sort of abandoned building perhaps? But what?

An influx of orbs came towards her like a wave. Zest looked left and right as they passed, then surrounded her.

And then, a single ghost rose from the ground, seven orbs orbiting around her.

It was the ghost of an earth pony, albeit one of unusually slight build that made Zest briefly mistake her for a unicorn. Her fur was grey and her mane white. Both were neatly combed, the latter styled into long twin-tails.

Glasses rested on her muzzle, and she looked down at Zest with a serious, borderline stern expression with those eyes glowing a faint blue.

Zest bobbed up and down, feeling so much affection for this mysterious mare! She wanted to rush over and hug her and–!

And then that affection popped. Whatever she’d been drunk on a moment ago sobered away. Her reason came back and that’s when Zest realized it.

She was looking up at a specter for they alone had eyes like that. Zest had little confidence in her ability to identify ghosts outside the most famous kinds, but she found herself in the presence of the most feared of them all.

Specters were born of massive disasters that killed tens of thousands of ponies at the least. They could create natural disasters themselves, were all but living weapons of mass destruction, among a host of other powers. They were the top of the ghost food chain, often with a small legion of other ghosts at their command.

If this specter was at all territorial, or simply decided she didn't like Zest for whatever reason, then Zest's afterlife would be over before it even began!

“No! No! I’m one of you! I’m one of you!” Zest stuck her foreleg through a tree, waving it around to show how ethereal she was. “Wooo! WoooOOOooo!”

The specter watched her display with no emotion beyond her small frown.

“You realize you’re being incredibly racist right now,” said the specter.

“Uh!” Zest stumbled over her words. “Yeah! But it’s okay for me to do it because I’m a ghost, right? That’s what I was going for! You see?”

Zest laughed. The specter’s expression didn’t soften.

“I’m going to assume you only died a few days ago.”

“Yes.” Zest bowed her head. “Sorry.”

“Come closer and turn around once.” The specter flicked her hoof upwards. “I need to see something.”

Zest had no idea where this was going but decided it best not to challenge her.

“You’re good.” She shook her head. The specter came down to Zest’s level. “My name is Sugarcoat. Who are you?”

“Thanks?” Zest tapped her headphones. “You can call me Lemon Zest. But I’m ‘good’ in terms of what again?”

“I’ll give you some free advice,” she said. “If you ever see a ghost covered in chains, then that pony is your enemy. Don’t trust them, don’t talk to them, don’t get near them or even let them see you if you can.”

“I see.” Zest sighed. That implied Sugarcoat here wasn’t her enemy.

“I noticed you poking your head in and out of my territory,” Sugarcoat said, “and I figured you were either an idiot or a worm friend. Either way, I thought it’d be bad to leave you to your own devices.”

Zest wasn’t about to accept the title of ‘idiot’, so she instead reached for the mystery label.

“You got me. I love worms.”

Sugarcoat cringed slightly at whatever the implications of that were.

“Clearly.”

“But in all seriousness, you’re right. I have no idea what I’m doing and cannot be left to my own devices.” Zest clasped her forehooves together. “Please help?”

Sugarcoat watched her with a hum before nodding.

“Very well. Follow me.”

Six orbs floated up from the ground beneath Sugarcoat, surrounding her. The specter and her orb collection all floated off toward the buildings in the distance. Zest flew after them as fast as she could, which meant slowly.

Next Chapter: 2. Undying Loyalty Estimated time remaining: 9 Hours, 30 Minutes