The train jerked and the wheels screeched as the train slowed. The conductor said as he walked by, "Little Rock. This is your stop, Mister."
I studied my red face in the window's reflection, scarred from a few malevolent farm implements and shaggy from a bit of beard, then pushed my blond mane back into place. Beyond, I saw the fieldstone train depot, lit orange by the impending dawn with its snow-covered thatched roof. I'd left before midnight, slept on the bench I now vacated, and with any luck would be catching the next train returning to Ponyville in three hours. I knew Applejack and Apple Bloom would be doing my chores, and that just wasn't right.
I sighed. Granny Smith had asked me to see the "choos'n thing-a-ma-whatzit stone them Pies were jaw'n about" to tell her if I thought it were real. She wasn't saying how long ago she lost our grandpaw, but she was saying it was too long.
I had a bite from a cheap bale at the station, because I wasn't spending any of the farm's cash if I needn't, and began the half-hour hike to the Pie Family homestead. With exposed red-layered mesas, erratic boulders, and isolated skeletal trees scattered across the landscape, it looked a'might desolate in these parts. As I slogged through the snow studying the signs and the stone and stick fences, my breath fogged before my face. I realized ponies ran a lot of mining operations here'bouts, but farms—not so many. I thought running an apple farm made us a stern and resolute folk, but the Pies made us look as random as Pinkie by comparison. I suspected Pinkie's personality in part came as a reaction to her family.
'cepting for her twin sister. Miss Marble wasn't that colorful, and a'might quiet for my tastes, but she seemed the most tolerant—and most intelligently observant of the lot, always peering from under the cover of her bangs and saying the one word that made the point. When you have a sharp-like-a-razor sister and an on-again off-again filly-friend like Cheerilee, you get to appreciate the benefits of intelligent. A lot.
Especially when you weren't so smart yourself.
Approaching the farmhouse, I saw their crystal prism lights were still aglow. Kind of like how I kept our holiday lights up for the week following Hearthswarming for Apple Bloom's sake. I knew Marble was Pinkie's age, but it was hard not to think of the shy mare as being Bloom's age, with similar delicate romantic sensibilities.
Limestone slammed the door open and dashed down the stone steps. Multicolor rock candy specks, her breakfast cereal, decorated her lips. As she stalked closer, Maud appeared and sedately followed her sister. Shadows moved in the kitchen window.
"Hope you weren't expecting hospitality showing up unannounced." She glared through narrowed eyes as vapor seethed from her nostrils. Average-rude for her.
Before I could more than inhale cold air to speak, Maud said, "Boulder saw you coming." To her sister, she said, "When too much lava vents from a volcano, it explodes."
The purple-coated sister looked at the purple-maned one, blinked, rolled her eyes, then said, "Fine. Macintosh Apple, I have a farm to run. Would you kindly say why you're visiting?"
"Eyup," I started, lengthening the vowel. I could think whole volumes of words to discuss soil moisture, weather forecasts, or the caterpillars attacking a tree, or to discuss the rhyme or intonation of a new Ponytones song, but saying the words was another matter altogether. For the longest time, I just couldn't get the words out in the right order as a colt, and I still instinctually feared sounding like a backwards playing record. Sure, I could sing as purty as all get out, or let Orchard Blossom speak eloquently for me, or sometimes even get so wound up I forgot myself and could blather, but that ain't conversing genteel-like. For me anyway. I took another breath, and, like crushing an apple for juice, forced out, "I'm here to see the choosing stone—"
The words for Granny Smith got lost in my throat as I noticed Marble peering out from the doorway. The golden light of the early sun warmed her gray fur to a faint auburn and turned the stripe in her mane and tail a toasty brown. A glint of sunlight flashed off her violet eyes. I could swear a hint of red blushed her cheek as she noticed I noticed her and flicked her head, causing her mane to cascade over her face.
Despite myself, I stared, any ability to speak lost. Marble had become an enigma to me: at times completely invisible; suddenly radiant; instantly shy. Limestone and Maud looked at one another in my peripheral vision, looked at the house, then stepped between me and their sister.
I began chuckling. They thought I—? I blinked at my own thought. What did I think?
Maud tapped her sister on the shoulder, just as Limestone inhaled to launch into another verbal barrage. We all looked at the house, but Marble had disappeared without a sound.
"Well! I have a rock farm to run and the bills aren't going to pay themselves. I won't show you the Pairing Stone until the work is done. On my farm, all hooves work. Do chores or catch the next train. Your choice."
"A rolling stone gathers no moss," Maud observed.
I did not know how not to work, which made holidays like Hearthswarming rather difficult, though of course there was the peeling of the apples, the decorating, the cooking, the cleaning. I had slept well, rocked asleep by the swaying of the train carriage. Work would do me good, and I never wanted to disappoint the ponies I loved. "Eyup," I said, nodding.
I had no idea what a pony did on a rock farm, but Limestone swiftly found me work in the quarry into which Holder's Boulder had rolled. She showed me a pile of rocks and gave me a hammer. When I found speckles on the inside, I tossed them in the ore pile; crystals got placed in the geode pile. With Limestone's puny hammer, I found it slow going. My neck began to hurt after an hour, and my jaw followed suit. I suspected Limestone wanted to make me quit and go home, especially when the sun crested the walls of the quarry and, despite the snow, I began to sweat. I felt unwelcome.
And then I turned and stumbled over a sizable sledgehammer I had somehow missed.
Almost immediately, Maud sauntered down the quarry road. As each great swing of the sledge cracked another rock open, she sorted the piles. She began a lengthy dissertation on the qualities of the rocks and crystals, and then began quizzing me, first about what she sorted. Quartz. Tourmaline. Amethyst. Then about their qualities. Inclusions. Matrix. Relative hardness. Fractures. Xenoliths. Somehow, despite the work—and despite, as I mentioned previously about not being smart—I did memorize it all and could identify stuff I broke open. At least Maud seemed satisfied I could.
Near noon, lunch appeared: mineral soup in which rolled various colorful soft crystals akin to rock candy, but insipid, with the texture of undercooked oatmeal. Maud's pile of amethyst disappeared. She looked vaguely unhappy about the food and the amethyst.
Together, Maud and I hauled our sortings up to the house in an ancient wagon-and-two with rusty steel-rimmed wheels. By mid-afternoon we'd cleared the quarry of ore and tailings. Limestone left her parents tending the fields of rock, arranged—or planted—eerily like cabbages, and approached with an irritated look on her face, her light gray mane blowing in the chill breeze. Marble raked gravel between rock rows in the distance.
"No lazying around," she said as we unhitched. "Marble harvested rock candy in the mine all morning. Now I need you to haul it to the surface. You look at least half as strong as Marble. The task should be easy enough even for a newbie. Use the sling hoist to load the rail car where you find her harvest, fill the car, bring it to the surface and unload with the sling hoist. Got that? You know where the mine shaft is?"
"Eyup."
"Take a lamp. Swirl it to mix the lantern potion. Wear a hard-hat."
I glanced toward where I'd seen Marble, but saw only an abandoned rake beside a pile of green and blue gravel.
I'd seen the entrance to the mine, but had only heard tell by Applejack about its amazing interior. Lighting a lantern revealed a world so unlike my own that my jaw dropped. I had to jerk forward to catch the lantern. Great towering prisms sprouted from the floor, like teeth in Granny's denture, but gem-like, and all slightly different in size, in colors that spanned the entire spectrum, manifesting as foggy translucent pastels that were more often reddish than bluish. Rock candy filled every flat space. The lamp's light reflected brilliantly, causing glimmers to move across the ceiling and walls as I trotted reverently to the rail car. Sparkles, light echoes of reflected reflected light, made it feel like I was surrounded by a magic field.
I hitched up facing the rail car such that I pushed it. As I traveled down the rail, the air warmed. I wondered why the Pies hadn't harvested all the closest prisms. The caverns closest the main shaft ought to have been emptied by now. The farm had been in the Pie family for generations.
Did the crystals grow? Were they really plants?
After I used the sling hoist—and mastered loading without clacking crystals together, which burst them into saccharine-smelling piles of fine dust—I noticed clearings where prisms had been cleaved from their root. If growing crops was horticulture and growing trees was sylviculture, was growing rock, what, crystal-culture, crystallization?
After a few hours, rolling up and down the track, listening to the wheels clack as they transitioned between rusty rails, the whole thing became mundane. I began to think about family, especially since the Pie family challenged my preconceptions. I sensed the love and caring, albeit expressed differently than I was used to. Soon I thought about Apple Bloom and her confession about my place in her life, and how she had taken me for granted in the excitement that Applejack often brought to the family. And how, to her credit, she now spent time laboring with me, telling me about her adventures with her new cutie mark and the happenings at school.
Soon, my mind wandered. I thought about the Ponytones and that we would be meeting in a month to discuss the new music and lyrics Toe Tapper and Torch Song had been collaborating upon for the spring concert season. I thought about Fluttershy and how she thought she might join the group at least for local shows. Marble was another like Fluttershy, but Fluttershy was fierce, fierce, when she forgot her shyness. She was even more protective than Applejack.
I found myself scatting, "bum bum bum-be-da, be-da," then doing the background bass, then finally singing Find the Music in You as I pulled down the track. The shafts and caverns all boasted different acoustics, sometimes mimicking massive reverb, sometimes throwing off oddly pleasing harmonics. Perhaps it was the exertion combined with needing to breathe deeply to sing that made me lightheaded, but I was really having fun. Time passed and I delved deeper and deeper down the shaft, singing for all I was worth.
The crystals thrummed faintly with the beat. And, at times, and increasingly so, it almost seemed as if someone accompanied me.
It struck me as so strange, suddenly, that I cut off mid-sentence. "Something's in the air—"
"—today!" continued another voice. I might have considered it an echo, were it not a different word.
The silence felt like a vacuum, and instantly, felt very very sad. Just a couple of heartbeats later, compelled by the sense that I had broken something precious, I continued "—clear and you're feeling so fine." I'd succeeded in making it sound like an obstruction had muffled the song and I hadn't really stopped.
As I continued pulling toward the surface, I nevertheless continued to sing solo. I tried not to let my sense of loss slip into my voice, but as I repeated the song twice, and then three times alone, loneliness seeped into my delivery. Not long after, a stereo dimension began to fill in, keening with a loss to mirror my emotion, but with the edge of someone near tears—despite the lyrics. But the sadness swiftly vanished like a fog bank warmed by the rising sun. I kept the duet going as I pulled; me and the playful mystery voice, a voice neither low nor high, but rich as a stew in timbre. Then suddenly, as I pulled, the rock candy started to thrum to our beat as if living creatures awakened from slumber by our song. I peered into the roving shadows and the rays of light thrown by the forest of prisms along my path, looking, searching for my mystery accompanist.
I came closest, literally and figuratively, when I passed through shafts that connected the caves. Though the voice would sound closer, becoming distorted by the close-in walls, I saw nopony. I concluded it must be some sort of cave dwelling wraith, but I decided not to worry over much. How could something that sounded so beautiful be bad? (Twilight would correct me another day with the story of the exiled sirens.)
Without warning, I sung solo again. I turned a bend and came to the mouth of the mine shaft. The winter sun had already set and I looked into the glare of the light of another lamp. Limestone shook her head, swaying the lantern in her teeth, brightening it. Maud finished her appraisal of the heaps of intact, undamaged rock crystal I'd hauled and nodded. "Rock solid. Time to visit the Pairing Stone."
I grabbed my lantern in my teeth and followed the pair. Only the faintest of red and a slightly lighter blue painted the western horizon. Mesas and jagged hills formed a silhouette under a thus far moonless, starry night. The twinkling lights looked glorious in a total darkness you could only experience this far outside a town like Ponyville. Even with the lantern below my face, and Limestone's, the beauty left me more than usually speechless.
Ma and Pa Pie joined out of the darkness. They studied me for a long time, but I didn't really care. The brisk air, the snow-painted surroundings, and the magnificent sky were enough to allow me to ignore any Pie eccentricity.
I felt myself being watched. When I looked, the elder Pies and the elder sisters slogged forward, staring straight ahead, their breath condensing in tiny clouds around their faces. It seemed like there were too many hooves on the rocky path, and it wasn't my imagination.
I began to hum Find the Music in You.
Though the phantom deigned not to join my chorus, the rhythm of a sixth set of hooves differentiated from the group. It sounded like dancing.
Limestone dropped her lamp with a clank in a snow drift and yelled, "Stop that!"
I stopped in my hoof prints, silent.
Limestone continued, "We're almost there." She picked up the lamp in her teeth. I followed mutely another half-mile, kicking occasional stones down a twisty path that could roughly be called a road only because of the whittled poles that marked the way.
By and by, a mushroom-like shadow loomed ahead, eventually resolving into what looked like a horse-sized smooth river shingle on a pedestal, surrounded by a rock-fence corral. Limestone directed me to put down my lamp. She put hers down on the opposite side of the monument.
"The Pairing Stone," Igneous Rock Pie said gruffly.
"Eyup." Figured as much.
When I stepped forward to examine it further for Granny Smith, Igneous said, "Stay where you are."
Crazy folk, I thought, but only said, "Eyup."
I found Limestone at my side, giving me a look of pure vitriol. I stepped back, wondering what I had done to offend her even as she said, "Ok. Let's take a closer look."
Yeah, crazy folk. I accompanied her to the center of the corral. The shadows we cast and the general darkness, together with an icy wind that was picking up, made it difficult to really examine the thing. I'd read enough comic books together with Spike to expect to see petroglyphs or runes or something carved into the surface, but I found nothing.
"Enough," said Limestone in a cooler, less annoyed voice. I looked up from peering under the flattened stone at the pedestal mount. I shrugged and followed her back unbidden.
Maud met us halfway to the lamp and pointed her nose back at the rock. With the collar of her belted green tunic turned up, she appeared arguably the most intelligent, or at least prepared, of us all. I shrugged and accompanied her back. I was beginning to wonder what force the Pies felt from the "stone" that I certainly didn't. But then again, Holder's Boulder looked like a dragon egg but wasn't, but they still revered the thing. This, who knew?
I got about halfway around this time, and had still found nothing special about the Pairing Stone, when Maud said, "Sandstone is easily carved by water."
I sighed. "Eyup." And I followed her back to the gate. What now? Would Cloudy Quartz accompany me to the rock so I could finish examining it? Honestly, there was nothing special I could see about the Pie-family-colored river shingle. No need for Granny to aggravate her rheumatism by another long train ride in winter.
I waited.
I waited some more. I felt a patch of skin over my ribs shiver and tick as the cold started getting to me.
"No," asserted a voice in less than a whisper. I looked. Outside the fence, to the right of the gate, sat Miss Marble. She set her head on the stone as if exhausted. She looked forlornly at her sisters then looked at me.
She didn't hide behind her bangs.
"Nope?"
"Mm-mmm," she returned.
When I glanced away and back, she'd disappeared but for her last misty exhalation, which swiftly dissipated as it drifted away.
A tiny voice off to my left—Marble's—said, "You really didn't have to come to see the Pairing Stone."
I didn't jump, despite my body and my quickly beating heart wanting to. She looked up at me, the one eye I could see because of her bangs glistening, her eyebrow curved. She looked sad. Neither a yes nor a no answer could express what I had to say. "You sing beautifully."
Limestone piped in. "Only a sweet voice will make rock candy grow."
Marble breathed, barely audibly for the whistle of the wind, "My family needs me. Pinkie left. Maud is leaving. I do like my home, but I feel the pull, too. I would not want to leave forever. You didn't need to see the Pairing Stone!" Her bangs covered her eyes. I heard what sounded like a muted sob.
I tried channeling Orchard Blossom, without the accent, because I needed to ask, "What do you want?"
When she didn't answer, I reached over and pushed her silky bangs aside. She looked down, flooding her eyes with lamp light that made her irises flare and resemble amethyst from a geode—purple beauty hidden until revealed to the light. I asked again, "What do you want? I'd like to know."
She looked up in shock, her eyes darting about as she thought furiously until.... A devilish smile spread across her lips. Her mouth reached toward me, but she didn't speak until I leaned close so she could whisper, "I like spy novels." It was like she was confessing her sins. "I read them in the library, all they can get for me. Observing but not being seen so fits with my special talent. Given a chance to hide, I can disappear even in plain sight."
She stood up and squared her shoulders, becoming another mare—perhaps, like Orchard Blossom, from her imagination—to say her peace. "I want to meet Princess Celestia." Her voice became harder. "I think I can help her by joining the royal guard."
Her family gasped. Limestone started, "You can't—"
Marble continued, facing away from me, facing her family. "It's what my cutie mark is telling me. I-I promise to visit the farm to sing to the rock candy, but I— I have to do this!"
She turned and faced me. Her voice went breathy and quiet again. "What I really need is a friend—"
"Ey—"
"—You watched me all during your visit at Hearthswarming. Today, I realized when you showed up that you sought a way to free me from my life stuck here on the farm." Her voice became firm—determined. "But, I really didn't need you to see the Pairing Stone. I didn't—" Her voice faded away, as if stolen by the wind.
"Marble," I prompted because I knew if I were saying what she was saying, she certainly wasn't done.
She sighed, then whispered, "I didn't want you to see the Pairing Stone, because— Because if we saw it together, I might..." The faint wind howled disconsolately while she breathed unable to speak. Her lips quivered, fighting against the words that she wanted to say, until they surrendered, "I would choose you, Macintosh Apple."
Those six words hit me like the roof collapsing on a barn. I began to blink. Oh, Sweet Celestia, what had I done? Applejack occasionally joked about me being more acquainted with my feminine side than her, and between the feelings Twilight's doll Smarty Pants awakened and the Orchard Blossom incident with Apple Bloom, I had lost any use for the derision colts might throw my way about being overly sensitive. I felt a tear roll down my cheek, cooling in the winter air. From Apple Bloom, I had learned enough to know that saying why I was really here wasn't what Marble needed right now. What she needed was, "Being your friend would be enough."
"Really?" she said, surprised. She flipped her duotone gray mane, revealing both eyes. She saw the tear on my face and burst into tears herself.
We found ourselves hugging as we held one another.
The rest of the Pie family stood aghast, except for Maud whose stunned expression was still deadpan. Perhaps they thought that the magic of the Pairing Stone had worked, when it actually hadn't. And I was so going to thank Apple Bloom when I returned home. She'd freed me.
But I had a little more to say, while the verbosity was still in me. I leaned over, her hug warming me more than any simple heat alone could have, and spoke into her ear. My breath, made visible by the cold, ruffled Marble's mane as I said, "I know a few friends who speak to the princess all the time."
She shuddered for a while in my arms, then began to sing. I could tell she had finally found the music in her soul.
And knew that "everything was gonna to be a-okay."
.
Author's Note
Marble Pie's special talent is mentioned in the My Little Pony mobile game. Wanting to be a spy? What might you think to do with a talent for "lov[ing] to play hide-and-seek among the boulders... That is, until no pony can find her!"? And, well, it makes for a futures story where Celestia and Big Mac try to disabuse her of that avocation. (No promises, though.)
Again, a big thank you to Docontra for finding some of the little "mistaekes" in my speed-written manuscript. Anything remaining you may find in my published story, however, is solely my stumble and responsibility. Critiques that include what you thought I wrote so I can see how it differs from what I thought I wrote are always appreciated.
