My Little Pony: Forever Stranger

The less said about my first expedition, the better. I wasted six months sailing a winding path towards Saddle Arabia, tracing somepony else's hoofsteps the entire way. Everything I 'discovered' from ponies en route I could have looked up back in Canterlot. But at least they were civilized. The griffins were spiteful dodos who slammed their doors in my face. And the one time I saw a dragon, the vile thing was solely interested in turning my boat into a bonfire...

I came back different, alright. Disillusioned, defeated, and an unspoken laughing stock among my 'peers' who'd chosen safe, paltry pursuits: potion-making, fertility spells, machinery for factories. I left that sort of work behind with my wide-ruled notebooks. But the others clung to it like a security blanket. Children playing scientist, all of them. And they had the gall to turn their noses at my work, just because I wasn't churning out discoveries like bit candy...

It wasn't all bad, though. There were students that heard of me and actually paid attention to what I was doing. I was still in Canterlot at the time, planning my next moves, and on the way home a couple of them came up to me. More on them later. At some point in the conversation, one joked that being smart must make science easy for me.

I told them, humorlessly, that I could be twice as brilliant as I am now, and my days would still be chock-full of frustration, boredom, and failure. Being smart isn't important; it's being obsessive.

Ivory Slate, The Scientific Mind

A buried pine forest was his only clue he'd escaped to the land. He left behind the glacier, the invisible beach, and another hour of day. In return the land gave him more of the same powdered ground, the same soot sky, the same sleet-polluted air which jabbed his eardrums and sandpapered his coat.

Then there were the trees, black and skinny antlers propped up at the base by frozen anthills. White jellyfish with clear stingers swung from the charcoal-brittle branches, and for the next hour Gale knocked off dozens as he bent and snapped his way through. His sled caught more than once, and it seemed the fog would spew out these husks forever. But like the glacier the grove ended, abruptly yet seamlessly, into a flat and empty tundra.

He raised his mask. Not a blade of grass rose above the plain's sterile scab, only mourning stones and skeletal shrubs. Beyond lie the foothills, a herd of jagged dough mounds trying to eat each other. Even further stood the peaks of the Stone Heart, still stalking the countryside from their cloud hunting blind, looking no closer than when he first saw them.

It fell like rain now. The fog thickened. He lowered his mask, containing the world in two grey rectangles filled with tumbling spider webs. The wind refused to be ignored so easily, however, and dragged glass teeth across his forehead. He clenched his jaw, tightened his sled straps, then broke into a heavy-stepped trot.

***

Clouds had banished the sun, so night only became clear when the sky's went from ash to asphalt, the ground from plaster to concrete. The tiniest breaths spurted vapor across his flaking nostrils as he squeezed between the foothills. The chalky dunes offered no refuge from what was falling, and their runoff flooded the twisting path to his knees.

The sailors were corrupt cowards. They could have detoured him to another shore, followed the coast inward, anything. But they lacked either the decency or the discipline to do the job they were paid for. The day was over, and all he had to show for it was a near case of frostbite and twelve miles of desolate wilderness. He cursed the sailors once more, then checked the dowsing spell on his forehead. The ghostly compass still pointed north, but its weak pulse claimed he wasn't any closer to the source, despite his straight path.

Gale shut his eyes and tried counting to ten. He made it to the first even prime number, then slammed his hoof down. The day was over.

Ten minutes later he happened upon a small cave. The wagon-sized hole was tucked beneath the overhang of a small cliff, which guarded a small quarry and pond. Had the water been wet and the earth green, it would've been someplace from a foal's storybook. A secret hideout and swimming hole.

He stripped five shrubs before ducking inside. Before long a little orange diamond danced was dancing on the stone floor, swaddled in a pile of skinny twigs. It flickered and flinched from the wind's pawing, but warmed and dried him nonetheless. He smiled as the white blisters disappeared from his coat. It would take more than that to stop an agent of the Royal Sisters.

Still nothing useful from Slate's book. After filling his stomach and lightening his sled, Gale fell asleep sitting up. The hard dirt and dried food he could handle- if only he could have rubbed the crackling wood on himself as black took the slopes outside, then the cave walls, then him as he closed his eyes.