The Highlands were a wild place, harsh and inhospitable. Life trembled to venture here; bushes barely clinging to life in the windswept soil, fragile bird nests maintaining a tremulous hold on sheer black cliffs. Only the hardiest of creatures could survive out here. Only the strongest could make it.
That was as true for the equine Highlanders as for anything else. Out in the islands where the air grew so chill a pegasus could tumble frozen from the sky mid-flight, there was nopony but us. We were of tough northern stock, earth ponies one and all. We were the strongest there was — we prided ourselves on it — but the Highland winter is a vicious beast, hungry like a wolf, and she never left without claiming a few lives from the village.
Each year when the snows came and those creatures that could fled south over the seas to winter in sweeter climes, the village fractured back into splintered segments. No more shared harvests or ploughing side by side. The heady summer months where everypony came together in one glorious outpouring of song and feasting were long gone. In winter it was every pony for himself. All you could do was hunker down and try to keep your own family alive. Better to pretend that the world beyond your roundhouse door did not exist: that the ponies illuminated by the light of your own fire were all the ponies on the island. To consider the others and their fate was too much. Too painful.
My family did the same as any other, but we were fewer. A fever took my father before I could even walk, and my thin-faced older sister not long after. I can count the memories I have of her on my hooves. Just a few scattered glimpses of her face in the firelight, wan and pale.
Ma did her best for me, but I was different from the other foals in the village. I wasn’t hale and hearty like them, no matter how many meals my mother gave her share to me. I stayed resolutely scrawny and sickly, and my skin never seemed to hang right on my bones. I can remember Ma sighing and saying to me, “We’ll make a stallion of tha’ yet, my lad. Tha’ just need one more good summer to put some meat on thy bones, that’s all.”
We spent the winters huddled in the dim light of our dying fire, eking out our oat broth and waiting, waiting, waiting for summer. Those days of warmth seemed to pass in a heartbeat, every year — just a flash of hope and sunshine before we were plunged back again into endless shadow and gloom.
And then one year, the worst year I can remember, I suppose Ma just pressed one too many of her meals on me. She was fine, the same as she always was, but then all of a sudden the flesh seemed to slough off her frame, and before I knew it my once-hefty Ma was as thin and sallow as I was.
She melted away from me before the snows did, and I buried her for the first time in a snowdrift, and for the second time in the fresh-thawed soil, her face wrinkled and frozen in a twisted parody of a smile after months in her white tomb.
I tried to go on as we always had, working our rock farm, tilling the soil and digging up the fresh stones ready to trim and trade for oats at the market. But my hooves were too shaky to hold my chisel, and the plough seemed to stick in the soil as persistently as the food I tried to eat caught in my throat.
I was losing hope and losing faith, even in the height of that painfully brief summer, when he finally arrived.
He was impossibly tall and his chestnut hide shone bright as a bronze shield. His long, strong legs were tightly corded with ropes of muscle, and he carried a greataxe that must have been heavier than I was. He was every inch the warrior, but his eyes were bluer than the ocean and a thousand times as soft.
I think I loved him the moment I saw him.
It had been nearly three months since I had laid eyes on another pony, after all, and seven or more since I saw a pony that was not poor Ma.
His face lit up when he saw me, and he raised a hoof in greeting. “Ye made it then?” he called over the field to me, and his voice was deep and it rolled like thunder. “We were feared tha’ had perished.”
“N-no,” I squeaked, and my voice cracked in just the wrong place. I felt my cheeks colouring, and prayed to the sun princess that my scraggly beard would provide camouflage enough.
“T’headman sent me to check on ye,” he explained, trotting lightly over the furrows that I had worked so hard to carve in the poor soil of our fields. They had seemed so deep to me, like little canyons in the ground, but he walked over them like they were nothing. “How fared tha’ family through the snow?”
A lump rose in my craw, and I looked away. How to tell this beautiful stranger that the stone cairns behind my house now numbered three?
“Ye say the headman sent ye?” I asked instead, trying to make my voice as gruff as his.
His expression filled with compassion, and I was struck anew by the way the white blaze on his face made the blue of his eyes shine brighter. “Aye,” he answered. His chest puffed out with pride. “I’m a member o’ the Mighty Helm, now.”
My ears tilted back with surprise. “Are tha’ no’ new in the village?” Only those of families with long good standing could hope to make it into the Mighty Helm.
He laughed then, despite the news I had just told him, and to my surprise I found I did not resent it. His laughter seemed a beautiful thing, strangely fragile and out of place, but still the first real spark of sunshine in my bleak summer.
“Do tha’ not know me, Rockhoof?” he asked. His smile revealed two slightly crooked front teeth, and it was then that I finally recognised him.
“Ironshod?” Surely it could not be him. The colt with whom I had played in years gone past had been almost as weedy and undersized as I was. The laughter of the other foals had been what first bought it together. But while I had kept my familiar shape, Ironshod was almost unrecognisable. Only now I looked again at those blue eyes and that splash of white down the centre of his face could I find the resemblance.
The blood pooled in my cheeks again, and now I was blushing in earnest. I looked at him, my old friend and playmate, with new eyes, and to my bewilderment I liked what I saw. I liked it more…more than I could say.
“Come back to town wi’ me, Rockhoof,” he said now, gentle as could be. “Tha’ cannot stay alone out here all summer. Ye must see other folk, or ye’ll go mad.”
I wanted to say yes. Stars, how I wanted to spend a day walking at his side, a month galloping beside him, a lifetime with him—
—But my eyes went in the direction of the roundhouse, and the three stone cairns that were concealed behind it. On two the grass grew high, but on one the turf was still raw-edged.
How could I leave?
“I cannae go wi’ you,” I said, regretfully. “I mun’…I mun’ abide here.”
“Come, Rockhoof!” He slung a foreleg over my shoulders, the cold steel of his greataxe caught between our hides, and his touch was like lightning. “Come wi’ me. We’ll feed ye up, this summer. My Da willnae mind. No cost, no need to trade, not wi’ what tha' have lost this winter. We’ll get some meat on your bones, see if we don’t. Who knows, by next year ye might even be fightin’ beside me in the Mighty Helm!”
It was those words that did it. Not just the promise of his company, as much as I craved it. But the other words, my Ma’s words, coming from this stallion’s mouth, like a message from her. Like a sign.
“Aye,” I said, at last. “Aye, I’ll go wi’ ye.”
I daresay you know the rest of my story. The volcano, the plumes of smoke it belched skywards, like a dragon breathing fire. The lava that flowed like a flood towards my village. How the earth poured her strength into me, made me her champion and marked me out with strength and power of my own. When the villagers cheered for me, I looked not into their eyes, but into his. Ironshod smiled back at me — not down at me, not anymore — and the blue of his irises was like the blue of the sea, fathoms upon fathoms deep and true.
And when the strangers came to our shore, and their leader asked me to leave, told me my destiny lay far from the Highlands and my home, I believed him. Somehow, I knew that he was speaking truth, this unicorn with the beard that was already white, though he was barely older than me. And I looked over his shoulder, over his silly hat, and into the eyes of my comrade, my Ironshod, and he let out one long exhalation and nodded to me, I knew that he knew, as well.
I left, as I had to.
And Ironshod stayed, as he had to. His father and his sisters needed him. Too many hungry mouths and the winter coming closer with every week. There was no way he could leave.
I thought I’d be home before the year was out. But the duties of a Pillar are not easily shrugged off once the mantle is taken up.
I never returned to my village again.
Last year, I finally found a mare with a hot air balloon who could take me. We flew for three days over the northern seas, and I saw the shores of the Highlands once more. The black cliffs were the same, like towering behemoths with little scraggly nests clinging to their scales. The soil was the same, blowing like sand into my eyes. The volcano was there still, sleeping like a predator well-fed. But the village was gone. The roundhouses were gone. And he…was gone.
I knew that it would be that way, of course. I knew it. A thousand years and more have passed since he and his kin walked this earth. But deep down, I think a part of me still believed he would be there to greet me, his blue eyes shining and his mane mussed by the wind.
I didn’t even ask the pink mare piloting the balloon to land. She protested, but I paid her twice the promised fee to just take me back again. Back to Equestria. The closest thing to a homeland I have now.
I wandered. I searched for…something. I’m not a Pillar, not anymore. Not a clansman or a member of the Mighty Helm. Not even a teacher, though Celestia knows I tried hard enough.
I wound up here instead, in a backwater desert town, a place as far removed from the land Ironshod and I called home as can be imagined. A place more alien to me than all of this modern world. And yet…somehow, it’s here I find a stallion that reminds me strangely of the one I lost. A white blaze on his nose just the same. And hooves strong and sure like his were. A voice full of gravel and dust. And most of all, with eyes like his were. Green, instead of blue, but still kind.
“Hello, stranger,” I say to you. “I’m Rockhoof.”
“Mighty pleased to meet ye,” you rumble in response, and just like before, my breath catches in my throat. “Ah’m Troubleshoes.”
