An hour or so later, I was sitting in Applejack's barn, making myself more or less comfortable on a hay bale. The sun was already starting to set, but there was no sign of this Twilight. With a wait as long as this, and with nothing to keep me busy, my thoughts were drifting back to dark places. I tried to occupy myself, and thankfully found something else to consider.

It was small, but a thought was gnawing at me. Something was wrong, and I wasn't sure what. Besides the obvious, of course. Something smelled... off. Or maybe the waiting was just starting to get on my nerves. I certainly wasn't the only one feeling it.

"Land sakes, where is that girl?" Applejack huffed as she walked slowly into the barn, balancing a steaming bowl on her hat. "You'd'a though some strange new creature woulda been enough to bring her runnin', no offense."

"None taken," I replied, taking the bowl as she offered it to me. How long had it been since my last hot meal? About as long as I'd been in that damn dungeon- No, don't think about that!

I loosened my grip on the bowl, which had started shaking gently in my hand. Just take a deep breath, and eat your food.

"What's for dinner, then?" I asked. I took it as a point of pride that my voice barely shook.

"Apple an' cabbage stew. Family recipe, most everything in it grown right here."

"I take it you grow more than apples, then."

"Yup. We got a little of most crops round here."

I started on the stew with the spoon resting against the side of the bowl. It was good. Damn good, compared to the kind of food you eat on the road. But now something else was bothering me, even as I tried to enjoy the meal. The spoon, something about the spoon...

"Applejack?"

"Hmm?"

"Why do you have a spoon?"

A look of confusion crossed her face. "Um, to eat with? Why else would you keep spoons?"

"But you've got hooves."

"...yup?"

I took a breath and held it for a second.

"How do you hold a spoon if you have hooves?"

"Like this."

Applejack sat down beside me, reached out with one foreleg, and plucked the spoon from my hand.

To this day, I'm not sure how she did it. No fingers, just a fairly ordinary hoof, but the spoon stuck to it regardless.

"Y'all just hold it. Ain't much complicated 'bout it. O' course, a unicorn'd just..."

She trailed off to the sound of hoofbeats from outside. "Welp, guess who felt her ears burnin'."

"Wait," I tried to say, "did you just say-"

I was cut off by a great crash as the barn doors flew open to reveal Big Mac standing sheepishly next to the strangest thing I'd seen so far. A light purple mare, her dark mane cut so it flopped like a fringe above hers eyes. But the strangest thing was the short, purple horn that poked through the fringe.

She trotted forward, bulging saddlebags shifting on her back.

"I'm sorry, Applejack, I as came as fast as I could, but I wasn't sure what books to bring, so I thought I'd bring all of them, but they wouldn't all fit in my bags so I..."

Her eyes found me, and her voice trailed off to a quiet squeak. All was still. She looked at me, I looked at her, and Applejack's eyes went between the two of us. Finally, the mare cleared her throat and tore her gaze from me.

"I take it this is what you wanted me to see, Applejack."

"Uh, less 'what' an' more 'who', sugarcube. This here is Ranger. Ranger, this is Twilight Sparkle."

I said the only thing that came to mind:

"A unicorn?"

"You've never seen a unicorn before?" she said, hovering nervously by the doors.

I smiled slightly. "Have you ever seen anything like me before?"

She shrank back a little, but whether out of fear or not, I couldn't tell.

"Well, not really... What exactly are you, anyway?"

"I'm a man. From the North."

Twilight raised a sceptical eyebrow at me.

"I'm pretty sure we'd have noticed if there were 'mans' like you running around in the north."

"I'm sorry, I'm not used to this place," I said, trying not to wince at the sound of her saying 'mans'. Not because of the obvious, but because it was a word that her Equestrian language didn't know, so it sounded wrong somehow. Like a splinter digging into my mind. "I'm not from this land. I came from somewhere else. I should have said I'm from the North where I come from. Not your north. If that makes any sense."

"I...I think so. So you're saying that you're from another world?"

She stepped into the barn proper, curiosity outweighing caution and fear.

"Aye," I replied quietly, "I think that might be it."

"Ahem."

Both Twilight and I turned to face at Applejack, who was looking on impatiently. "Not to rush y'all, but can you talk while you're lookin' him over, sugarcube? Don't worry 'bout gettin' close; Big Mac an' I'll buck him into next Tuesday if he tries anythin'."

"Right, sorry AJ," Twilight said with a sheepish grin. Gingerly, she trotted over to me, and lifted her over-laden saddlebags to the floor. Surprisingly, she never touched them; instead, she gave a flick of her horn, and they lifted themselves from her back and settled down neatly. For a moment, I thought I saw a faint glow about them.

"You're a mage," I said in surprise.

"Magus," she corrected. "At least, I'm studying to be one."

She took a deep breath and levitated a book from her saddlebag. Intrigued, I watched closely to see if I had been imagining the glow. Sure enough, there it was; a vague, almost invisible aura a few shades lighter than her improbable coat.

"If it's alright with you, I need to do a few tests. Just to be on the safe side."

"Testing for what?" I asked, watching her carefully. In the meantime, Applejack handed me back the spoon, which I reunited with the bowl and set both on the floor.

"Just to make sure you're not dangerous. I thought I'd start off with a simple changeling detection spell. This shouldn't hurt. In fact, it shouldn't do anything, unless you happen to be a changeling."

Well, technically... But no. The elf might have used a name like that, but I doubted his meaning and Twilight's were the same.

"Go ahead," I said, waving her on.

Twilight fixed me with a determined, frowning in concentration. There was a flash and a soft clap, and when I blinked away the afterimage, Twilight nodded to herself.

"Well, we can safely say you're not a changeling."

She glanced towards a quill and scroll that were hovering by her head, and scribbled something down. This was magic like I'd never seen it; fine enough for this mare to make notes as easily as a scholar would with his own hands.

"I suppose that's good news. What exactly is a changeling, anyway?"

"Oh, of course, you wouldn't know. Well, a changeling is a creature that can take the form of another pony. Any other pony, which is what makes them so dangerous. They replace loved ones, like wives or husbands, then feed off the love of their victims. You see, they need love in order to survive."

Well. Despite my initial impression, it seemed Equestria might be even more dangerous than home, in its own way. Dragons were bad enough, but at least you knew when one showed up. These changelings, though? They'd be perfect assassins, undetectable spies. "Are there many of them around here?" I asked.

Twilight shared a glanced with Applejack.

"Not usually. In fact, normally I wouldn't even have thought of using that spell, but there was an invasion a few weeks ago. I'm pretty sure we got rid of them all, but there are reports every few days of somepony claiming their wife or husband has been acting funny."

She took another look at her scroll. "I had a list of possible tests I could run on you, but there doesn't seem much point. They're only useful for creatures we know about, and I've never heard of mans before."

It might have been rude, but I chuckled a little.

"It's 'men'. Not 'mans'. One man, two men."

"Oh. Well that's stupid. Who came up with that idea?"

"I don't know," I said with another half-hearted chuckle. "It was like that long before I was born."

Before she could ask any questions about language, I gestured to her scroll. "So, are there any tests on there that you can actually do?"

She frowned at me from over the list. "A few. But I think I'd rather just talk."

I rolled my eyes. Of course you do... "Go ahead, then. I'm not doing anything else."

"Um, okay. So, what happened to your eye?"

I caught Applejack dropping her face onto one hoof at the edge of my vision.

"...you could've been a little more subtle there, sugarcube."

Twilight smiled nervously and shrank back into herself, obviously about to apologise for offending me. Instead, I held up a hand to cut her off.

"It's fine," I said. I'd been waiting for someone to ask. It was an old but obvious wound; a long, jagged scar crossing a cloudy yellow eye. The sort of thing people tend to very pointedly avoid looking at. "People ask all the time. I lost it in a fight. It was a while ago. I'm used to it by now."

"Can you... I mean, is it...

I bit back a chuckle as her awkward question tailed off. At least she was making the effort to rein in her curiosity.

"It's dead. Can't see a damn thing out of it."

It was probably the answer she was expecting, but she had the good grace to look sympathetic. "Oh. So you get into a lot of fights...?"

For the first time, she seemed see more than just a curiosity sitting in front of her. Her eyes wandered across my body. I tracked her gaze, mentally ticking off the scars as she passed over them: straight slash down left side of mouth; ring of bite marks around my throat; spear jab on right shoulder; burn scar on left arm; cut across back of right hand; claw marks on chest...

I think she had her answer.

"I've seen my fair share, maybe more than. I'm a... I was a mercenary. It tends to come with the job."

"A mercenary?" echoed Twilight.

"Aye, a mercenary."

She was looking at me strangely, as though she were confused. "A soldier of fortune," I continued, trying to clear the issue. "You know, someone who fights for money. Plenty of wars on the Drijian, so it pays well enough."

Silence greeted my words. Both Twilight and Applejack were looking at me with shock in their eyes, while Big Mac had tilted his head over, eyes narrowed and wary.

"I feel like I've said something wrong," I muttered slowly. Then awareness dawned. "You...you don't fight much here, do you?"

Twilight shook her head. "Ranger," she breathed, "besides the Changeling attack, there hasn't been a war in Equestria for hundreds of years."

"Oh."

That was new.

In hindsight, it explained a lot. A peaceful land like this, I doubted they even had a standing army. A model specimen like Big Mac could get away with life on a farm because they simply didn't need him. And if the subjects here were so used to a peaceful way of life, then I knew I should make a mental promise not to mention the assassinations. I think I'd already half-way destroyed my reputation with Applejack. If they could see the work I'd done in the dark, I'd be bucked right over the border.

"So, um, you said there were wars where you come from?" Twilight asked hesitantly.

I nodded. "Aye. There's a part of the world, right in the middle, called the Drijian Plains. Used to be one country, but it fell apart hundreds of years ago. Ever since, all the pieces left over have been trying to take over all the other pieces."

"And you lived there?"

"More or less." More than that, I also d- NO! Later! "Most of my life I lived north of there, with my own people. It was simpler."

"Then why did y'all leave?" asked Applejack, cocking her head over in confusion.

"I'd rather not talk about it, if it's all the same to you."

"Ah."

I could practically see the wheels turning in her head, as she started to wonder just what it had been that I was running from. Leaving her to think, I looked over at Twilight, who had gone from curiously hovering at the edge of my personal space, back to hovering nervously at a safe distance.

"You're scared of me," I observed.

"I'm just, uh, cautious," she protested. "After all, you're a strange new species, you're previously unknown..."

"And I killed people for a living?"

"Yeah, that too," was her quiet response.

Right. I heaved a quiet sigh, rubbing my brow.

"You don't have to be worry about that. As long as I'm here, that's something I'm not interested in doing anymore.

"Besides," I said, smiling, "what's the use in being a mercenary in a land without wars?"

It occurred as soon as I had spoken that this might be just what they were worried of in the first place. That a man without employment might try to make some.

Or maybe it was just a bad joke made in poor taste. Either way, none of them shared my amusement, though I was starting to think Big Mac was incapable of displaying any emotion besides irritated disapproval.

I coughed, breaking the silence descending upon the barn before it could get uncomfortable. "You had more questions for me?"

She did. She asked a lot of questions that I wouldn't answer; what my parents were like, where I grew up, all things I was trying to forget myself. I told her a little of the other races of the Plains, which seemed to distract her from my reluctance. She was especially eager to hear more about the elfs.

"I can't tell you much, because I don't know much about them. No one does. They stay in their cities and don't trouble us. In return, we don't bother troubling them.

"They look like us. Men, I mean. But there's something wrong with them. Their arms and legs are too long, and their faces are just not right. I doubt I could explain it any better, but as much as they look like men, they're not. They're different. They live too long, some say. All that time, makes them funny, makes them not care about normal folk."

Again, Twilight looked like she was shying back.

"You don't like them, then?" she asked. There was something strange in her eyes, as though she were trying to make some kind of judgement. My next words had to be chosen carefully.

"They've never given us any reason to like them. But I'm just saying what others tell me. And what they tell me is a rumour that's been passed through ten bloody sets of ears before it reaches mine. Besides, I know they aren't all so bad. I travelled with one for a while, though I'd rather not talk about that any more."

Twilight huffed out something between a sigh and a snort.

"There's a lot you don't want to talk about."

"What I want to talk about is my own business," I shot back shortly. Then I sighed, running a hand back through my hair. "Look, there are things I'd rather not be reminded of right now. They aren't that important anyhow. Just bad memories."

"Oh. Okay." With a look of disappointment, Twilight nodded her head. "Maybe we can talk about it later?"

"Maybe," I muttered. Not very likely, but maybe. "I had a few questions myself, though, seeing as I'm likely to be here a while."

"Oh, okay! What did you want to know?"

"Well, it'd be nice to know what you plan to do with me, now that you've had a chance to test me."

She shifted a little on her hooves. "It's not really my decision to make. Really, it's Princess Celestia who should decide if you should stay."

With a raised eyebrow I replied:

"And who exactly is Princess Celestia?"

"She's ruler of Equestria, of course!"

"Of course..." I muttered under my breath. In a clearer voice I said, "No king or queen?"

Her head shook slowly from side to side. "No. Some of the other nations have them, but we've never had a king or queen, not for millenia."

Not so unusual to lack a king; the little nations of the Drijian were all ruled by dukes and earls. A princess, though? And something told me this wasn't a principality, like some of the smaller southern lands. Putting aside their strange form of leadership, though... "So then, I have to meet the Princess?"

That didn't seem like a happy turn of events. One thing the Drijian teaches you is that the people in power are almost always arses, with no regard for the common man besides the consideration of how the common man can best serve him.

"That shouldn't be too tricky. I can send her a letter, letting her know about you, and she'll probably come to meet you in person."

"You can do that? Just send letters to the Princess?"

"Of course! I'm her personal student, after all!"

Well then. Things were already that much different here; why should the people - or ponies, for that matter - in power be the same as home? Home...

"That... That would be very helpful," I said, not sure what else I could say. "One more question, though. About the ponies here. Are there just unicorns and..." I hesitated, waving vaguely at Applejack."

"Earth ponies," said Twilight helpfully.

"...earth ponies, thank you. Are there just ponies like you two?" Unicorns had already caught me off guard, and I wanted to be prepared.

"There's also pegasi. Um, ponies with wings, if you don't know."

"I've never heard of pegasi, but we've legends of horses with wings."

"Those are all the ponies, but there are also griffons, dragons, diamond dogs, buffalo, the changelings... Most of them have countries of their own, but quite a few live in Equestria regardless."

My head was nodding along as I put each name into a category. Griffons were legends; dragons, however, were very real; diamond dogs were finally something new; and buffalo, as far as I knew, were some kind of strange cow that lived far to the south-west. They didn't talk, but then again in my world, ponies didn't talk either.

As I was finishing with that short list, I noticed Twilight was still talking. I caught "cows and chickens" in the middle of her rant, started wondering if they talked as well, and decided that, if I was seriously considering that, then enough was enough.

"Twilight?" I called. "I think we should go over this another time. It's getting late."

She craned her head around to look through the barn door. It was already dark, and Big Mac, though still upright and focussed on me, was starting to look more sleepy than suspicious, for a change.

"Maybe you're right. We can get you settled in some other time."

She backed slowly towards the door. "I'll have Spike send a letter to Celestia as soon as I get home."

I nodded shortly. "I appreciate it."

"Well, it was...interesting to meet you, Ranger."

'Interesting'? "Likewise, Twilight."

"Well, goodbye. I'll talk to you in the morning, AJ."

With a quick wave, she was through the door and gone. I wasn't entirely sure if she was going to run home in excitement and write a book about me, or run home in terror and try to forget ever meeting me. It was an effect, it seemed, I should get used to having on people. Ponies. Either or.

In the meantime, Applejack turned to her brother.

"Big Macintosh, run inside and grab a couple'a spare blankets, then you should hit the hay yourself."

He seemed about to protest when Applejack spoke over him.

"Look, you're practically dead on your feet already. Don't argue, an' don't worry. I trust him, so should you."

He gave her a sideways glare, but left anyway. Once he had gone, and I was sure he was out of earshot, I spoke.

"He still doesn't like me."

"Well, to be fair, goin' by your job I don't think he's all that wrong to be wary around you. Heck, I'm a mite worried myself."

"Can't blame you for it."

All the same, I wasn't happy about it. But they were giving me the benefit of the doubt, and that was worth a lot.

"Look, I'll be turnin' in myself, soon as Big Mac gets those sheets in here. You should do the same; hopefully Celestia'll have written Twilight back by the mornin', so we can figure out what to do with you next."

There was a clatter and Big Mac pushed his way back into the barn, blankets over his withers. I took them myself, nodding my thanks, and he plodded away. As I busied myself turning a pile of hay into something resembling a bed, Applejack turned to go as well. I cleared my throat, and she paused and turned at the threshold.

"Applejack?"

"Hm?"

"Thank you. Again."

She gave me a small, but genuine smile. "Ain't no trouble."

Then her face took on a more serious tone. "Just don't go causin' no trouble, else y'all be answerin' to me."

And straight back to a smile. "G'night."

She gave me one last nod, then backed out of the door and let it swing shut behind her. I listened to her hoofbeats grow quieter, until finally she was gone.

I waited for another few minutes to make sure I was truly alone. Not a sound around me.

Gasping mouthfuls of air down a choking, burning throat, I fell back onto the makeshift bed. After standing strong for hours, the barriers surrounding my shock and sorrow crumbled. I let my head flop forward into my hands, and wept.