"This is a problem," Twilight Sparkle said to herself, gazing out over the Equestrian Sea from the wide beach. She shifted a hoof in uncomfortable thought, the fine white sand making a quiet grinding sound. "A big problem."
She looked to her left. A short distance further down the beach, where it had come ashore hard, the jumbled wreck of her kitechaser lay, tatters of the parachute-like sail still blowing in the breeze among jumbled ropes. The hull of the small craft stood nearby, broken in half, a large hole under what would be the waterline clearly visible.
It was her own fault, she thought, cursing herself and her overconfidence. You let your over-enthusiasm carry you away without thinking of all the consequences, and now here you are, wrecked on an uncharted land with no rescue in sight. And to top it off your heat is coming. She'd felt the first twinges of it moments ago.
"Great!" she huffed, turning from the ocean to look into the forest behind her. The verdant carpet stretched from the beach for miles, until a dormant volcano broke through in the distance to push its bare slopes thousands of feet into the sky, nearly scraping the occasional clouds that drifted by.
She walked away from the ocean, to the edge of the forest,and into the shade of its overhanging canopy. She sat amongst the flotsam and jetsam she had gathered from the wreck. At least she had started stocking the kitechaser for her transoceanic voyage to the land of the griffins, before taking it out on what was supposed to be a test sailing of just a few hours. She planned the short trip so she would be in sight of Maretime Bay's lighthouse the entire time. Since she'd be in sight of land, why did she need to wait for the magic-amplifying radio that was late in arriving? She needed to get that test sailing done before the autumn winds arrived, shifting towards Equestria, making it impossible to cross to the griffin lands.
This prototype was the start of a project that would make trade between Equestria and the other lands much cheaper and more regularly scheduled than airships could accomplish. She would scale the test kitechasers up, one after the other, until the production versions could carry ten times the amount of any airship. It would be a huge leap forward in tying all the lands together in friendship.
So she'd jumped aboard and set out on the test, the kite filling with the off-shore breeze and quickly carrying her experimental craft up to speed and out of the harbor, ponies waving to her from the shore and the jetties, excited to see the Princesses’ favorite unicorn in their small fishing village. They didn't get royal visitors, or at least semi-royal visitors, very often. She'd need to speak to Celestia about that when she got back.
If she got back.
She banished that thought away as soon as she thought it, shoving it back into the little mind-box where she kept all her fears and feelings of inadequacy locked up and out of the way. She WOULD get back. Somehow. There were probably search pegasi and rescue airships out already, trying to find her.
The problem was that when she’d gotten a fair distance out of the harbor, the winds suddenly became incredibly heavy and fast off the shore. They took her by surprise, threw her back in the cockpit, and she smacked the back of her head on the combing around its edge hard, knocking her out. By the time she came around, she was sailing into the sunrise. Since she’d set out early in the morning, that meant she’d been sailing at least a day, and maybe more. In spite of her headache and nausea, she had gotten herself up and pulled out the charts, taken a sighting of the sun, did the calculations, and it was now apparent that she'd gone faster and farther, much much farther, than she ever had before. She’d been out for four days. She was lucky to be alive.
She was off the charts.
She couldn’t come around in the strong winds, and she didn’t relish bobbing in the ocean for who knew how long with the kite cut away, so she left it up and kept going. It looks like I’m taking the transoceanic voyage sooner than I thought! At least I’m making good time!
Then, a few nights later, as she was sleeping, a hard impact threw her from the bed, and before she could get her bearings she was drenched in seawater. Crying out in fear, her ears filled with the terrible, loud sounds of the hull breaking up around her, she managed to pull herself through the floating remnants of her belongings and up out of the hatch to the deck. She saw that she had come ashore hard on a sandy but firm beach, and she’d done it at speed, shattering her craft. She jumped into the shallow waves swirling around the hull and waded ashore, nearly getting tangled in the ropes and lines leading to the kite that was ripping itself apart on the beach. After flopping her aching body ashore, she rested, and waited a few hours for the tide to go out. It left the remains of the kitechaser stranded high and dry, letting her get back inside to salvage what she could.
She had been told by the griffins that there was wide open water between Equestria and their land, but as fast as she was going, she knew she hadn’t reached the home of the griffins - she was days and days from there. That meant these lands - islands? - were undiscovered.
So she had to hope the rescuers went way out of their usual range and discovered islands nobody in Equestria knew about which was highly unlikely and why was she carrying on this negative train of thought? She pushed them away again. That mind-box was getting pretty full.
She looked over what she'd salvaged from the kitechaser. Half a dozen big bottles of water, a couple of boxes of rations good for long term storage, her saddlebags, some basic tools and other utensils. It wasn't a lot. She would need to start foraging.
"The top of that old volcano would be a good place to set up a beacon of some sort, make it easier to find me," she said aloud to herself. "I can explore the island, forage on the way. Careful Twi, you could lose your mind being isolated and in heat and wind up talking to yourself." She chuckled with the dark humor. "Why did the heat have to come NOW??" she said ruefully, as if she could control when the heat happened.
With a glow of her horn, she floated the saddlebags onto her back, and the supplies into them, and set off inland, towards the peak in the distance. She hadn't seen any signs of other inhabitants, but it appeared that some sort of natural phenomenon cleared narrow paths in the vegetation. Perhaps it was some odd wind, or more likely some animals like deer. She refused to ponder that something more dangerous could have done it. Several hours in, however, she spotted something on a tree along the path, and stopped cold.
The trunk was wrapped several times around with a thin, beaded string. The unfathomable tokens and colored, polished beads were made of some sort of stone she was unfamiliar with. Hanging from the string was an object that sent chills into her.
It was a carving in the shape of a pony skull. More specifically, judging by the hole in its forehead, a unicorn skull.
Twi stared at it a few long moments, then gulped, her mind a swirl of consternation, confusion, and questions. And then her scientific curiosity reasserted itself and she examined the object closer. The skull carving had runes inscribed. Larger beads periodically spaced along the string also had runes on them. She'd seen something like these runes before, searching her memory until she recalled some fragments of documents from before the time of the Princesses, thousands of years before. That anything survived from those times was a miracle, but unfortunately it was an incomplete miracle. Nobody, not even the princesses, had been able to decipher them - there just wasn't any context to go by, no document that also had known pony writing on it to match them with. Yet even though she couldn't translate them, she thought she knew what they said: it was a warning. Probably a keep out sign. This means YOU, unicorn. It made her horn tingle.
She sat there on the path, pondering what to do. There were no crosspaths that she'd seen on her hike up to this point. If she wanted to try to go around, which she wasn't even sure she could, she'd have to go all the way back to the beach. Looking at the totem on the tree trunk, it looked primitive.
I've been on adventures before, she thought. I've encountered danger. Even the few times I was on my own, I handled it. I can handle some primitives. Her courage fortified, she got up and continued down the path.
She didn't see the totem sparkle briefly as she passed it by.
Author's Note
My first fic. I'm still pondering a mature companion anthology associated with it but the main story is going to stay safe to read for all.
Is it getting warm in here?
Twilight stopped and sat down on the path, shaking some sweat off her brow. She'd been hiking nearly a full day, and the dormant volcano seemed no closer than when she started. She resigned herself to spending this night, at least, sleeping outdoors. Her heat was beginning to really become an annoyance. She felt skittish and hot, hotter than it actually was outside.
She saw a large tree and its sheltering canopy some yards off the path, and she decided this was as good a place as any to rest. She left the path, picking her way through the underbrush. Before she got to the tree, she discovered a shrub along the way that had been encumbered with a vine growing up its side, and from this vine, large, long vegetables were growing. She sniffed at them - cucumbers! But they were at least twice the size of the biggest cucumbers she'd seen in Equestria proper. Equestria Incognita (as she had dubbed these lands) did have its pluses after all, she thought. she took two of the cucumbers with her and settled down under the canopy of the tree for the night. One cucumber became dinner. The second became... something else entirely.
The next morning, she tossed the well-used cucumber off into the woods (she couldn't bring herself to eat it), grabbed four more from the vine, and set off up the path again. She had traveled no more than fifteen minutes when she heard the distinct sounds of hoofsteps up the path. Since the path was bracken and dirt, the walker must be close. She would have run up elated to ask for help from the stranger, but the totem she found on the path the day before gave her pause to consider, so she dove off the path and under a large shrub whose low hanging branches and leaves would hide her.
Or so she thought. The branches on the side of the shrub facing away from the path lifted suddenly, and a pony's head appeared, nearly upside down as it looked under the branches she had lifted. The strange mare sniffed the air and smiled, and Twilight realized her heat had given her away. "By the Elements!", she swore to herself. The newcomer spoke a few words in a language Twilight didn't understand. She instinctively tried to bring her magic up to defend herself, her horn glowing, lighting up the entire area under the shrub, and the strangers eyes widened before yelling urgently in more of the strange language. Twilight closed her eyes and drew in the magic she needed to let her teleport away.
And nothing happened except for a few stray sparks that fell desultory from her horn. She couldn't reach out to the magic and pull it to her. Something was damping the magic down.
"What..." she spoke, alarmed and bewildered by the failure of her magic, but before she could get another word out, the branches lifted all around the shrub, the work of several sets of hooves. She let out a yelp as she was yanked out of her cover from behind, and set down abruptly on her feet, facing her assailant. She found herself looking at the largest stallion she had ever seen - even bigger than Big Mac. Her head barely reached up to the front of his roan-brown chest, leaving her straight ahead view momentarily pointing to the bottom of his body... broad chest... firm tummy... this guy was BUILT, and look at the size of..."CONCENTRATE TWI! NOT NOW!" she berated herself, realizing where she was staring, and snapped her head up to look at his face instead.
She found him looking down at her, a bemused look on his face. Her cheeks flushed a bit under her fur, realizing she had been caught looking. He turned his head to a saddlebag on his flank and, using his teeth, pulled out a necklace with more of the colored stones; its pendant was a semi-transparent crystal that seemed to shimmer inside through the entire spectrum of colors. He nodded down at her and made a grunted sound softly through his teeth. He wanted her to put the necklace on.
She considered for a few moments, her heart still racing inside her chest from the abrupt events of her discovery, being surrounded (as she now saw) by several huge stallions and mares, all a similar roan color, and all as fit as this stallion, with their well built, well endowed bodies... "I SAID NOT NOW TWI!" yelled that little voice of sanity in her head as she found her mind wandering down more intimate paths again. She shook the distraction from her head. "Great, now you're yelling at yourself in third person. You're going crazy, Twi!"
She returned her gaze to the necklace (and ONLY the necklace) and considered again what to do. If he was trying to capture her, this had to be the nicest abduction she had ever heard of, apart from getting ponyhandled from under the shrub. The giving of the necklace reminded her of being taken by her beau on a date. "Oh sure," she thought snarkily, "Buy a girl a beautiful piece of jewelry and she'll return the favor later, right?" She calmed herself, and used her horn to carefully hook the necklace, and he let it go. A flick back of her head let it fall down around her neck, the pendant landing on her chest.
"Thank you," said the big stallion before her. His voice came deeply from his chest, mellifluous and non-threatening. Startled for a moment, she then laughed to herself in relief. It was a translation crystal. "Didn't you see the warning on the tree down the trail?" he continued, sounding a bit exasperated. "This place can be deadly to you magical unicorns - you shouldn't be here!"
"I couldn't read the runes on the stones!" she protested. "Maybe you should have left this..." she nodded down to the translation stone, "...with the totem so I could!" Now that the initial fear and excitement had faded, her usual strong-willed manner was asserting itself again.
"I would have thought the carving of the skull was clear enough," the stallion huffed and stepped back before walking around in a small circle in apparent frustration. As he was circling, she was able to get a full appraisal of him... his roan-brown coat blended to a solid chestnut-brown coat on his rump and tail and rear legs. He had no cutie mark on his rump. That firm, perfectly-shaped rump and his big... "DAMMIT, TWI!" she shook her head again. She needed to get her heat under control. However, she didn't think they were going to let her whip out one of the cucumbers from her saddlebag right now, she thought with a stifled giggle.
She got the impression from his behavior that unicorns showing up here had happened before, and he was getting tired of it - which didn't make any sense, since she knew about all the lands in Equestria, and the world, thanks to her studies, and she didn't know this land was here - so who would, and why hadn't she heard about it? The big stallion stopped circling to face her again.
"I am Melbow," he told her. Apparently his name didn't translate into anything in particular in pony language. "I lead this scouting party with my sister, Elbow." He raised a hoof gesturing to the mare off to Twilight's right. Twilight recognized her as the one who first found Twilight under the shrub.
Elbow smiled, nodding and looking Twilight over speculatively. If she wasn't naked already, she'd feel naked under the gaze Elbow was giving her, and she twisted a rear hoof back and forth a bit on the ground nervously. Elbow's coat was also roan-brown, but there was a solid stripe down the front of her chest and under to her belly, and exotic stripes of brown ran from this down her flanks, tapering to a point on her rump. Like her brother, her rump was perfect, Twilight noticed, then got irritated at herself for noticing.
"My name is Twilight Sparkle," she replied.
"A pleasure to meet you," Elbow practically purred, and Twilight's tail swished of its own accord. Stupid tail. "What a pretty name," Elbow continued, smiling broader and fastening an even more direct gaze on Twilight. "We look forward to hearing why you are here and.. learning more about you." Looking back and forth between the siblings, one thought immediately surfaced in Twilight's mind.
"Uh-oh. I'm in biiiiiiig trouble!"
