Teros

Tiny stones clattered beneath the scooter’s wheels as Scootaloo buzzed down the gravel path. Her windswept mane fluttered about, as she had undone the ponytail before setting out on her ride.

As the path turned left and down a hill, Scootaloo’s ears perked up. Her wings slowed and the scooter came to a stop, the gravel beneath her silent as the mountains above. Somewhere in the distance, she heard the bubbling flow of water.

Immediately her pace quickened. She sped down the hill, pebbles and dust kicking up behind her. Licking her lips, Scootaloo squinted into the wind, eyes peeled for a creek or pond or anything drinkable.

Finally, she saw it, off the path and about fifty feet down a hill of trees and grass. Letting her scooter flop to the ground, she made her way through the rising pines until the green beneath her hooves gave way to white stone. Flowing steadily before her, in a clearing nearly a hundred feet across, was a wide creek lined with fallen logs and flowers. Smooth rocks lined the bottom, easily visible through the crystal clear water, which flowed left and right around small boulders.

Her face was in the water before she took a breath, and her first drink in over a day was spit out with a gasp. Scootaloo sputtered for a moment, before laughing into the cool breeze and taking a large gulp of water. It was ice cold, likely melted from one of the increasingly common snowbanks she saw further up the mountains. Finding a particularly deep section of the creek, she dunked her entire head underwater for less than a second, before rising again and swinging her mane about wildly. It was frigid, but refreshing.

Looking up from the water, Scootaloo saw the first mountain beyond the two flanking her path. Unlike the gray giants behind her, the rock of this peak was a light orange, almost the color of copper. Although with the sun lowering behind her, she surmised that the mountain may be more the color of rust. The tips of the valley walls behind her cast a V-shaped shadow over the lower half of the stone face, shrouding the fine details of its base from her eyes. Still, she could make out a pine forest similar to the one she was in that carpeted the lower half of the prominence.

Above the shadow line, the features were very distinct. The one summit had two sharp peaks, dipping low into each other with a deep split at the center, filled with ice. The right half of the mountain continued flat for a few hundred feet before dropping nearly vertically to the earth. The left side stumbled up and down for as far as Scootaloo could see, until the mountaintops were hidden behind the pines on the other side of the clearing. And all across the tops, great smooth patches of clay and dirt marked the scars of rock and mudslides from ages past.

How much of Equestria’s history could be found in this range, she wondered? In school, Scootaloo had been taught that the battles between the Royal Sisters and ancient foes had torn landscapes apart, reshaping the mountain range around Canterlot into flat plains. Later, after alicorns battled for the fate of day and night, Nightmare Moon’s followers had waged a bloody civil war, where unicorn magic burned down forests and sliced deep canyons into the earth to mark off territories. Had such battles been thought here? How many scars on these mountains were natural, and how many were the result of ponies fighting monsters, or each other?

It didn’t take much contemplation on the subject for Scootaloo to remember why she’d always fallen asleep in history class. With one last long drink from the creek, Scootaloo turned and made her way back up the hill to the path.

Her scooter and saddlebag lay waiting for her. As she picked them up and continued down the road, she noted the lack of towns, or even signs. She’d expected to reach her destination by nightfall, and the sun was nearly down. Perhaps she wasn’t quite as good at reading maps as she once thought.

Scootaloo shrugged, a small motion next to her speeding scooter. If she didn’t find anything at the map’s location, it was entirely possible she was just reading the map wrong. Regardless, this road existed, and roads had to lead somewhere. So long as there was a path in front of her, Scootaloo resolved to see what was at its end.