The Mare Out Of Space

The old farmhouse creaks under the weight of years of neglect. Moonlight filters through dusty windows, casting strange shadows across worn floorboards. The previous owners had long since abandoned this place, the final sale price had been low for a reason, but for a first-time farmer like yourself, it was perfect.

Luna's brilliant moon shines down on the empty fields as you sit on your porch, dreaming. The night air carries the sweet scent of summer wheat from neighboring farms. A chorus of crickets fills the darkness with their nightly song. It's getting late and you stand, preparing to head inside and get a good nights sleep.

You make your way up the stairs to the bedroom, and just before you crawl into the bed, a sudden ominous feeling overtakes you. Frowning, you head to the window and look outside for anything amiss.

The cricket song has stopped abruptly. An unnatural silence descends, heavy and oppressive. The air becomes thick, charged with something that makes your skin crawl. Through the bedroom window, the night sky suddenly illuminates with an impossible color.

A blinding streak of light tears through the heavens, descending at terrifying speed. The impact sends tremors through the earth, rattling the old house's foundations. Windows vibrate in their frames, threatening to shatter.

You immediately rush down the stairs of the farmhouse, out the door, and into the sallow fields, eager to see what has just fallen from the sky. There near the old well is now a crater that glows with the strange color that illuminated the sky moments ago.

As you near the crater, a sickly sweet smell of ozone and citrus fruit begins to permeate the air. Peering inside you see a metallic mass in the center pulsing with an internal light, its surface writhing like liquid mercury. Then seemingly from nowhere an unscheduled rain begins, fat drops that seem to glow from within, each one hitting the strange object with an audible hiss.

As the rain falls, the mass begins to change. It stretches and reforms, taking on a new shape before your eyes, until finally the eerie lump of metal has resolved into the shape of a mare. Her coat is the same color as the metal, her mane and tail the impossible color of the meteorite.

The strange mare's eyes slowly open, revealing pools of swirling teal light that seem to pierce through you. Her body shivers as the glowing rain continues to fall, each drop sizzling against her metallic coat. Steam rises from her form, carrying that peculiar scent of ozone and citrus fruit.

Her mane and tail float as if suspended in an invisible liquid, casting that impossible turquoise light across the crater's walls. Where her cutie mark should be, there's only a writhing mass of shapes and colors that hurt to look at directly.

The mare's head tilts slightly, those pools of teal light focusing intently on you and suddenly you feel it, a questioning sensation pressed directly into your mind. Not words, but pure feeling, curiosity mixed with fascination. She wants to know what you are.

The old farmhouse stands proud against the setting sun, though weeks of strange occurrences have begun to take their toll on you. Your farmland, once filled with a multitude of wholesome fruits and vegetables, now sprouts a stranger harvest, plants that twist unnaturally, bearing alien fruit that gleams with an internal light.

The old well, that ancient stone structure at the edge of your property, pulses with an otherworldly glow each night. Strange colors dance above its mouth, colors that shouldn't exist in nature, accompanied by a sickly-sweet scent of ozone and citrus that now seems to permeate the entire property.

Your neighbors have started to avoid the area. The farm ponies won't let their foals play near your home, nor will any of the villagers buy your 'crops'. Even the local wildlife seems to have started changing, you've seen birds with too many wings, rabbits whose eyes glow with that same impossible light, and the local animal whisperer can't seem to understand the critters anymore.

And sometimes, in the corner of your eye, you catch glimpses of her, a dark figure with a glowing mane, watching you from the shadows. Always just out of sight, but always, always there. Nopony else can see her, but you know she is watching you, even now.

But phantom mares, mutant animals, and alien produce aside, you still have a farm to manage. It's now morning, and it's time for you to get to work.