Teros

The more Scootaloo tried to sleep, the louder the world became. Every time she leaned her head against the window, a bump in the rails would cause the entire train to jolt her awake. If she closed her eyes and rested her head behind her, she could hear every word of whatever conversation was taking place in the next car. Every noise piled onto her irritation, until she threw her hooves up with a groan and gave up.

There wasn’t much to do on this ride, and she’d only boarded about an hour ago. A two hour scooter trip from Ponyville to Whinnypeg, and Scootaloo found herself sleeping on a bench in the train station. Or rather, staring at the ceiling until the ticket booth opened. It was still dark, and the gravity of what she was doing had already set in. Every pony she’d seen while ordering her ticket and boarding the train had reminded her of somepony she’d known in Ponyville. Faces and voices bounced around her mind, each one leaving her a little more remorseful.

Still, it was a little late for guilt now. With a sigh, Scootaloo opened the blinds of the train car window, filling the tiny space with blinding sunlight. She winced as the brilliance of the morning forced her eyes shut once more, the darkness of her eyelids permeated by dots of color.

After a few seconds she was able to squint, and through her lashes she saw shimmering pink bands of dawn stretch out across the early morning clouds. The sun peaked halfway out from behind the horizon, wide and shining. As her vision adjusted, she saw that the tracks had led the train up and along the side of a mountain, so high up that most of what she saw out the window was sky. It was only by standing on her seat that Scootaloo could make out a valley below, carved by a thin, white river. A range of gray, sloping mountains stretched far into the east, only the very tips coated in snow. Half way down the sierras was the border of a forest of pine trees, which covered the interior of the valley like moss. The further away she looked, the less pines there were, and the gaps between mountains were instead filled with emerald green grasses and patches of stone and ice.

The mountains closer to the train were much more jagged, their peaks sharp and split with the aftermath of rockslides. The faces were nearly flat, as if something had grabbed half the rock and torn it clean off, leaving the remainder broken and scarred. Where the distant mountains were lined with pines and fields of grass, these were half-buried in what Scootaloo could only guess was gravel. If she squinted, she could follow the trail of the valley’s river up and into a space between the rocky summits.

Scootaloo gazed out her window as the valley came alive with sunlight. The morning star rose a bit higher above the horizon, so that sunbeams stretched down between the mountains, and the sun shined like a golden flower. Dark pines became greener, gray stone grew textured and white, and whatever small patches of ice dotted the mountain range sparkled in the dawn like diamonds. The few clouds that lined the horizon had shrunk into thin bands, leaving the rest of the sky an unblemished ocean of cerulean.

She’d never taken the time the time to appreciate something like this before. Maybe it was the ever-similar scenery of Ponyville that had trained her to ignore natural backgrounds. There wasn’t much beauty to be found in clay cottages covered in dirt and hay. Some of the newer buildings were brick or wood, like the apartment building Sunny—

Scootaloo shook her head, her expression lowering. Sunny always woke up with the dawn so she could catch the morning shift at the weather factory in Cloudsdale. If her aunt was waking up, there was a good chance she’d check Scootaloo’s room.

The more she thought about Sunny Shower, the worse she envisioned her aunt’s reaction. First it was a gasp, then a scream, then flying through the streets of Ponyville, slamming on every door and forming a massive search party to hunt her down. It was less than half a day ago that Scootaloo was certain her aunt either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care, but as the train rattled its way through the mountains, the more she wished she’d left a note.

Letting out a long sigh, she reached down to the floor and picked up her saddlebag. That was all behind her, and there was no changing it—now she needed to think about what was ahead.

The map container opened with its familiar pop, and Scootaloo unrolled the scroll within. The symbol she’d selected earlier, northwest of Canterlot, would likely be a few days’ scooter trip from where she planned to get off the train. If she was lucky, the train station would have maps of the surrounding area, and there would be a town near the symbol she was headed for.

Scootaloo studied the symbol closely.

It looked like a venn diagram of two horseshoes. There were two words, one on each side: Caldrath on the left, and Chorus on the right. She knew one of them and could pronounce the other, so they likely weren’t from the same dead language as Rujejm. But Caldrath? What did that even mean? Was it the name of a town next to the symbol? Was it something the symbol represented? Or maybe each word corresponded to one of the two horseshoe shapes. Two parts of the same whole, maybe objects she’s need to collect.

“Why couldn’t they just write, ‘Hey you, here’s what you’re looking for and here’s where to find it.’” Scootaloo groaned. She stole a glance out the window and saw the train was taking a corner. Miles and miles of mountains and valleys seemed to rotate around her as the tracks wound around the side of a peak. As the train hit another bump in the tracks, Scootaloo envisioned what it must be like to stand atop one of those summits, to touch the sky and see everything else beneath you.

Her gaze drifted back from the window and back to the map. Once again, she stared blankly at the horseshoes, the strange words, and then the wheel of symbols. Across the map, each symbol on the wheel decorated some distant location, each one paired with words she either couldn’t read or didn’t understand. And beneath the wheel, in the oceans, and just about every other part of the map, the word Rujejm was written out and circled, half of them paired with the number nine.

Nine of something? Was a Rujejm some special object that she needed nine of? Or maybe it was just another riddle, and Rujejm meant nothing at all.

As much as Scootaloo hated to admit to herself, there was no way she would figure it out now. A grumble, and she rolled up the map and put it away. She closed the blinds to the train car, shutting out the dawn, and propped up her saddlebag on the empty seat next to her. In the past twelve hours, she’d maybe slept one, and it had been on an old bench in a train station. Rolling onto her side, Scootaloo let out a yawn and lay her head down on the saddlebag. There would be time for maps and riddles later.