Chapter Text
She knew she was not alone in the world, but she had never seen anyone else. Then again, she also never left her garden in the woods. She loved her garden, and the plants within loved her as much. She could tell their feelings as if it were her own feelings. She always had a connection with plants, even as a child. It could have something to do with never knowing her parents, or even knowing where she came from. Or it could be that her earliest memories were of being left alone in the dark woods by an unknown entity.
The elder tree at the center of the garden taught her what she needed to know. The Elder, as it preferred being referred to, taught her to not only speak to all manner of plant life, but to speak to other inhabitants of the world her garden existed in.
Not that she has ever seen anyone else before. She only knew she was not alone because the Elder told her there were others outside of the dark woods.
She is an alicorn; a pony that is a compilation of the three pony types inhabiting Equestria. She has a unicorn’s horn and magic, Pegasus wings that allow her to fly, and Earth pony strength that allows her to run around her garden. She learned about these ponies in the same way that she learned about anything: The Elder taught her.
The Elder Tree; the only parental figure she has ever known, her teacher, and her oldest friend. He, for the Elder represented a male persona, was the one that found her as a filly. He told her the story of how he found her often or whenever she asked it of him.
Neither of them knew if she was alone or following someone else when the Elder found her. She was curled up at the base of a tree at the edge of what is now her garden. He gathered her up in his boughs and hid her from the evil of the woods around them, keeping her safe from predators that would harm her.
To this day, she has a place of refuge hidden away in his many branches. He is a willow tree after all; the oldest in the forest and the only tree that remained untouched by the surrounding darkness. It was being raised by this Ancient Willow tree that she discovered her talents in helping plants grow pure in the heart of the Everfree Forest.
She does not so much as just talk to the plants around her, as it is more often likely that she will use magic to help something grow. Under her guidance, a natural spring was brought up from under the surface of the earth and flowed through the clearing and out of the woods.
When she was not tending to her friends, the plants in the garden, she was learning about the world beyond the dark woods. The Elder had root systems that reached to the outside world. These roots told him things that were happening beyond the dark trees and he passed these happenings on to the pony he rescued from the darkness.
Based on what he learned from the outside world, he knew that everypony had a name, not just a type. Because of this, she asked him what her name was, as she had no recollection of being called anything. His answer was to call her “Cryallie”. This was something he said to her often as she grew from a filly to a fine young pony.
“Don’t cry, Alicorn.” He would say this to her in the magical way they communicated.
“I’m not crying, Elder.” was always her response, even as the tears fell from her eyes and landed on his leaves and branches. She did not cry for herself, for she had nothing she didn’t need or want. She cried for the plants beyond the borders of her garden, for they were lost to the darkness. That knowledge pained her, to hear their tortured souls cry in the night.
Over the years, she strived to bring more plants into her little garden, or to stretch the borders to encompass more of the plants lost in the darkness. Every attempt failed every time the dark forest shifted. Every time a timber wolf or some other creature made of the same dark magic that kept the forest evil, came sniffing around, she lost another plant to the darkness.
Even the night aided in the loss of more ground in her garden.
The Everfree Forest, the dark woods, charged its evil power in the night, while the day charged the energy in her little garden. Which she always found somewhat sad, since she could relate most to the lonesome Mare in the Moon, rather than anypony she has ever learned about that roams the daytime. She could not relate to the Mare’s actions a thousand years ago, but she could almost relate to what the Mare has gone through for the thousand years since her banishment in the moon. How lonely she must have been with no pony else to talk to and only the stars to keep her company.
Cryallie was not lonely in the sense that she had her plant friends to talk to, but she still had never seen another pony with her own two eyes. And that made her a little lonely. Not that she had ever been able to tell the Elder tree about this loneliness. All it would do is to cause him to worry. She didn’t want him to worry about her.
Therefore, she learned all that he could teach her about the world during the day and looked up at the moon from the boughs of the Elder tree at night. Some nights, she would try sending a little friendship to the Mare, in hopes of getting an answer back from her.
She lived this way for many years, her entire life in her own secret little garden, from filly to pony, until that fateful morning when the sun did not rise for the day and the Mare in the Moon came out to play.