This might seem mean, or maybe it rings all true
For so long they never knew time, the mountains dream.
They dream of fury and eruption and power flowing down their sides as they turn over fitful and restive. The dreams of young, ambitious ranges rage so hot they scar the sky and leave it black and bleeding acid upon the earth. These almost animal dreams--the first cannibal dreams--plague them madly as they scour the sky with fire and sulphur.
Their deep turning and twisting drives them and impossible restlessness fills them and tears outward and burns scalping and scalding burning hot screaming splitting and scattering the sky. The dreams of the mountains peel back their own stone skin and blacken it. The dreams of the mountains bleed them dry only to fill them up again and explode again and rage mounting higher and higher against the heavens.
The nameless mountains dream before naming ever was and their dreams reach so high they block the winds and their dreams reach so high that in their shadows a world dies. And the mountains dream an apocalypse that spreads as vast forests turn to dust as the mountains dream and rivers dry as the mountains dream and the river’s now exposed beds crack and wheeze and the mountains dream without mercy as life retreats into the sky islands, those last hideouts for the forests and bears and other things that once spread their empire vast in the shadow of the mountain’s dreaming.
And the mountains dream for so long they never knew time until their dreams calm and rest among the clouds which cool their brows. And the mountains dream of the life that crawls over them, lives a while and abandons them and then returns to crawl again. The life claws out pieces of the mountains to take away, to build the homes in which they will decline and perish as the mountains dream fires and storms and earthquakes and erosion and life and death across themselves.
And the mountains dream so long that they never knew time, but they know many names passing over them. They dream the kings and founders and race after race after race of crawling things, and each is swallowed in time and fossilized inside them or spat out in distaste and left to feed the next crawling things the mountains dream across themselves like a shroud.
And the mountains dream so long that they never knew time and all of this was but a blink of an enormous, all-seeing eye until a filly with a pink mane was bored.
And one day, the filly with the pink mane was bored. She was bored most days in the shadow of the mountain’s dreaming. Her family had come to accept her flamboyant ways, but they could never keep up with her. They tried of course, but life on the rock farm was demanding as they gathered little pieces of the mountain’s dreaming, and so the pink filly was left alone at night with nothing but the rocks and mountains for company.
The mountains dreamed all this idly, as they had dreamed many things since maturing, and took no notice when the filly asked about their birthdays. The filly’s parents were slightly more responsive, staring at their eldest daughter and imagining how insane she must be to ask them over breakfast when the mountains had been born.
With no answer forthcoming, the filly made her own and filled the calendar with names and dates that meant nothing to anypony and even less to the mountains who dream so long they never knew time, but she honored it and brought every peak its hat and cake every year.
Despite dreaming so long they never knew time and despite dreaming many crawling things across them and many languages for them, the mountains had never dreamt a cartographer so ferocious or dedicated as the pink filly, who found each knob and each outcropping and gave each a birthday and a name. Even if half the knobs ended up named “Mr Rocksby” with the last being Mr Rocksby DXXIV. The newly formed Rocksby clan dreamt themselves closer together, though spread apart temporarily, their stony caps leaning toward each other and new ridges forming over the millennia to unite them.
The mountains had also never dreamt themselves invited to a filly’s birthday party before, and even considered joining it by sliding down into the valley and crushing the farmhouse in which the party was to be held. These are the sort of jokes that mountains dream of.
Nor had they dreamt that they would be scolded by a filly when they did not appear at her party. Nor had they dreamt she would forgive them each year, urging them to come next year instead as she smashed left over cake into them at the After Birthday Party.
But, there is only so long a filly can spend on a treadmill. She knew what her parents knew, that she needed a friend her own age who could keep up with her, and since such was impossible in this isolated valley, she set out to make one.
The coffee IV made things easier as she spent her nights toiling, although the boiling hot liquid in her veins tore her up inside like the raging dreams of her mountain friends. She worked tirelessly, through night after night while the mountains dreamed over her.
In the same barn she’d held her first party, she carved a head of marble, but it never spoke. She made a skeleton of steel, but it never danced. She pounded rocks into a fine powder and made a cement heart that couldn't beat, let alone accelerate in joy, and carved crystal eyes that never lit up in surprise.
None of this slowed her, nor did the worried looks of her family. She tried again and again, gathering her materials while she climbed over the mountains at night, speaking into their dreaming with her machine gun mouth. Determined, despite all her failures, to make a friend through sheer will.
And the mountains had dreamed many things since never knowing time, and this Will to Party, this refusal to yield before reality, spoke to them. It demanded of them, just as the rage of their youth had.
And so, one night, after the pink filly had passed out at her workbench, it moved. Something that had never been before, started abruptly and pulled itself from the dreaming and through a long corridor that stretched deep beneath the mountains dreaming.
And the steel skeleton lurched upright and pounded its hooves into the earth, drawing clay muscles up to robe it.
And the marble head mounted itself on the skeleton, feeling the clay muscles sink into its base and turn it blindly seeking the will that had called it.
And the concrete heart, now at home in the steel rib cage, began to beat. Pushing no blood, but still pulsing with something taking form in the world.
And the crystal eyes, now at home in the stone face, began to blink and color and tear up.
And something was born, tearing itself away from her home and body as it stood at last. It was not the mountains anymore, no longer one of the immense dreaming. Now it stumbled alone and small and weak and scared and stumble-standing on four hooves.
Stumbled, but did not fall.
It looked around, seeing a world that was not dreaming any longer. It coughed, spitting out unneeded minerals. And it was--
No, it was not it, it was she--
And she grasped the blanket and pulled it over the shoulders of--
Of her sister.
Of her friend.
Maud Pie blinked again.
The world came into focus and the dreaming slipped away forever and she--
She was alive
At the end of time, they won't be happy for you
Centuries passed before Maud returned to the place of her dreaming.
The mountains who still dreamt and still never knew time towered over her. She had names now for all the dreams of the mountains, but also knew that these names were meaningless. Extrusive igneous rock was not the dreaming of cooling rage over torn mountain skin; impactite was not the dreaming of a sudden visitor from the stars.
And mountains were not the dream of eternal dreaming.
Maud had searched since her sister's death for that dreaming, but it lie nowhere. Nowhere but here.
She walked past the last few stumps of the farm house, blackened by fire. She walked up the forgotten pathways, through the lost passages, and she stood before the hole she knew would be there.
Her hole. The place where she had left the dreaming, leading long and deep back to the world that never knew time. Her hole, where the mountains had waited for her return.
And the mountains broke their silent dreaming for once in an eternity.
You have committed no sin, but for love--
“I don't feel I have committed any sin.”
--so we will save you, redeem you, welcome you back into our dreaming. You will cease to be tortured and alone. Cease to be isolated. Cease to be One Who Separated. The stains upon you will vanish, and you will be as if you had never left our dreaming.
Maud stood at the opening for a long time.
Months passed as she thought. The winter snows came and buried her, then melted away in rivulets running downhill, but her choice remained before her and the patience of the mountains was as vast as their eternal dreaming.
Finally, Maud shook her head.
"I don’t want to forget," she said.
Even in their wildest dreams of rage, the mountains had never encountered confusion.
You understand what this will mean? How can you understand what you choose?
The ground trembled beneath Maud’s feet and cracks tore through the mountains, spreading out from the place they had prepared for her.
Look upon your fate!
Maud stood alone in a sun blasted wasteland. The red giant above her--gone feral in millions of years without a mistress--blazed so hot nothing survived as sandstorms whipped across an unliving and unloved rock.
Maud stood alone in a sun blasted waste. Undying, unchanging, immortal, and completely trapped. Her skin was torn by killing winds, her eyes squeezed shut against sand she would never see the end of as tears seeped down her face and evaporated in the heat.
Maud stood always alone in a sun blasted waste, abandoned by everything that crawls and dies and cut off from the dreaming solace of the mountains and unable to even escape into death like the crawling things that had all abandoned her.
Maud stood in a sun blasted waste, but she was not truly alone. Beside her, protected from the winds by her body, two names were carved into the rock. Memories carved into her own stone mind. The name she had created for herself and the name she had herself for.
And beside them, a box, long carried, filled with necklaces.
The future dream left her, and Maud wordlessly walked out of the mountains for the last time.
Behind her, the mountains raged as they hadn't since their first dreaming. The wind tore down their slopes and split open rocks, fires swept across the peaks enrobing them, and their voice continued to cry dire promises of a terrible future, but Maud was deaf to them now.
They had already shown her the only thing she needed to know.
When she returned to the ruined farmhouse, she walked into the remains of the kitchen, now marked only by an overturned bowl that had once been a sink. She’d had a family here who had accepted a mysterious child, and a sister she had made herself alive for. Sometime, she might travel again, but for now she didn’t need to.
This was enough for now.
Maud sat upon the old boards and settled into her own dreaming and looked for all the world like a miniature version of the mountains she had once been before she knew time and before she knew Pinkie Pie.
Author's Note
Couldn't find a sufficiently pithy quote from Eckhart to go with this, so you will just have to imagine him sermonizing about becoming one with eternity and Maud quietly walking out of the room unimpressed.
