Heart of the Forest is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Alternate Universe Fic by Krickis, based on art by Pasu-Chan. It's the first entry in the Harmony's Chosen series. It can be found on Fimfiction
, AO3, and Offprint.
Applejack is a deer who's been content with her life in the Everfree Forest for centuries. However, her lover Fluttershy, the forest's guardian spirit, has become interested in the outside world ever since she met a pair of travelling griffons. When Fluttershy goes to a pony city to watch a race, Applejack decides to venture into the deer's abandoned city of Sungrove to retrieve an ancient artefact and prove that there's plenty of adventures to be had in the forests.
A prequel, Call of the Mountain, was published in 2022.
This fanfic contains examples of:
- Don't Call Me "Sir": The vision of the late Queen Hawthorn insists that Applejack shouldn't call her "queen".
- Entertainingly Wrong: Applejack knows what ponies look like, but hadn't seen one before, so she assumes Discord is a pony when she meets him. She's half-right: he's a hinny.note
- Eternal Recurrence: Hawthorn reveals that an ancient being called Nightmare keeps returning to wreak havoc, but the bearers of the Elements of Harmony will always be able to banish her.
- Giant Spider: After their abandonment, the White Tail Woods became home to colonies of spiders the size of deer.
- Green Thumb: Deer can use elixirs to speed up plant growth and ask them to temporarily move in certain ways.
- Half-Breed Discrimination: Discord says that nowadays, most people don't take issue with ponies of different tribes falling in love, but interspecies romance is still frowned upon.
- Kill the Host Body: Hawthorn tells Applejack that Nightmare has the power to possess people, and can only be stopped by killing her hosts; when she possessed Princess Luna, Princess Celestia banished them to the moon because she couldn't bring herself to kill her sister.
- Long-Lived: Deer can live for millennia. Applejack is over 400 years old and still in the prime of her life.
- Man-Eating Plant: While exploring White Tail Woods, Applejack and Discord come across bushes that use prehensile vines to grab passing creatures, pull them into their branches, and eat them.
- The Phoenix: After Fluttershy kills the Shadow by expending all her magic, it bursts into flames and comes back to life, which rocs aren't normally supposed to do. Hawthorn later reveals that the Shadow, or Anqa, became the guardian spirit of the White-Tail Woods, and its magic brought him back to life.
- Pun: The word "dear" is almost always substituted with "deer".
- Ragnarök Proofing: Applejack and Discord notice that the palace in Sungrove is in remarkably good condition for a place that's been abandoned for 800 years; even though parts of it have been ripped off, it shows no sign of age. They conclude that some kind of magic is preserving it. At the end, Applejack's vision of Hawthorn confirms this; the Emblem of Anqa is an element, and they'll do anything to preserve themselves.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: After King Aspen says that it's not worth risking anyone's life to save Applejack, Fluttershy rears up to her full height and tells him very firmly that he doesn't have the right to decide who lives or dies.
- Roc Birds: The Shadow that attacked Sungrove turns out to be a roc. They usually live in mountains in the far north, and few have met one and lived to tell the tale. They have the power to summon strong winds without even flapping their wings.
- Soul Jar: The Emblem of Anqa is one of six magical artefacts that an ancient being known as Harmony placed a piece of her soul into.
