“I’m going to be honest with you two,” Twilight said, squinting at the Cutie Map. “I’m not sure if this really counts as a friendship problem?”
Three apples and a single large rock were shimmering above the map’s surface, orbiting around what Applejack would have called a mountain at first glance—until she noticed it was smoking. “Don’t tell me the map’s sending us to deal with an active volcano?” she asked.
Next to her, Maud was standing as still and expressionless as ever. “You can tell me that the map’s sending us to deal with an active volcano, instead,” she said to Twilight. “I won’t mind.”
Applejack glanced at her.
Twilight grimaced. “Sorry, this one’s a bit more blatantly dangerous than the missions usually are. Mount Vehuvius has been dormant for over five hundred years, and the farming town of Pommepei—” she pointed down at a small settlement, barely visible at the base of the projected mountain “—is kind of built in the worst possible spot if it does erupt? So… I guess you two have to deal with that. How, I don’t know!” She let out a little pained chuckle. “I mean, it’s not like you can just stop a volcano, right?”
Maud raised her hoof.
“Yes, Maud?”
“I can stop a volcano,” Maud said. “If I have to.”
Twilight and Applejack didn’t react to that for a few seconds.
“I’d rather not, though,” Maud said. “Volcanoes are our friends.”
Maud was a strange one, to Applejack. That was not unique to Applejack, of course—Maud was strange to very nearly everyone—but Applejack always felt like they should have gotten along better than they did. They were even maybe-cousins, after all! But… something about the way Maud talked, always so blunt and to the point, always made it tough for Applejack to respond.
And she was the Element of Honesty, for crying out loud! She should be all for that! But Applejack was honest because she valued honesty, because she chose it every time. Maud was honest because she didn’t seem to know what lying even was—or at least, it seemed like an alien concept to her.
All that to say, if Maud claimed she could stop a volcano, she could darn well stop a volcano.
“Well, I’m glad to have you on the trip, then!” Applejack replied, reaching out and patting Maud on the back. Just because she wasn’t sure how to get along with Maud didn’t mean she wasn’t going to make the effort. “Those farming folks at Pommepei are going to be mighty relieved when you show up and solve the problem for em!”
“But volcanoes are our friends,” Maud repeated.
“Sure they are.”
The train lines from Ponyville did reach pretty close to Mount Vehuvius, although it was a day long journey, and Applejack and Maud had to change trains a couple of times on the way. It left Applejack pretty drowsy, though she’d tried to get as much sleep on the trains as she could. Maud, meanwhile, had slept like… well, like a rock.
Once they arrived near the volcano, it was still an hour’s walk uphill to get to Pommepei itself. The land around them was strange to Applejack: it reminded her of the Pies’ rock farm, where the soil tended more towards black and gray than her familiar Ponyville brown loam. The main plants she could see were dismal brown scrub. Maud blended right in.
And of course, there was Vehuvius itself, looming ahead, with a faint plume of smoke coming out of the top. There was grit in the air that stung at Applejack’s eyes, here and there.
“So, uh, how’s the rock farm?” she asked.
“Okay.”
“Good! That’s good to hear.” Applejack licked her lips: the air was dry here. “Folks doing all right?”
“Yes.”
“Fantastic.”
It wasn’t easy to have a conversation with someone whose responses were all one word. Applejack felt a bit like she had trying to sleep on the train, always being jolted awake by some bump in the tracks. “Uh,” she tried. “Okay, truth be told, I don’t think I really get what rock farming… is? Like, how do you grow rocks?”
“With love and care,” Maud replied.
Four words. That counted as an improvement. “And, uh, what are they… for?”
Maud looked at her. “I don’t understand the question.”
“How in Equestria do you not….” Applejack took a moment to imagine someone asking her what an apple was ‘for’, and sighed. “What does your family usually do with the rocks you grow?”
Maud shrugged. Now that was an achievement. “It depends. Construction companies want them, sometimes. Not always. Current architectural styles tend much more toward wood and steel. Demand is lower than it once was. We do supply some material for concrete. Which I think is an abomination.” Her mouth curled downward, just a bit. “But I was outvoted.”
Applejack frowned. “Sorry if I’m reading too much into what you’re saying, but… sounds like tough times on the farm?”
“Could be worse. We have a subsidy from Celestia because there aren’t many rock farmers. Her decree says she believes rock farmers have something unique to offer Equestria, which is a nice sediment.” Maud paused. “That’s a rock joke.”
“Yeah, I, uh, I got it….” Applejack rolled her eyes. She’d sure like to get a royal subsidy… although come to think of it, Ponyville was her family’s royal subsidy, so she couldn’t really complain after all.
Half an hour into the walk, the scrub was replaced by fields, and suddenly Applejack felt much more at home. There were rows upon rows of low, leafy bushes, green as any of her own apple trees, as far as the eye could see. Applejack couldn’t see what was growing on them, though: must have been a root vegetable. Maud didn’t blend in as well anymore.
They got to the town another half-hour later, an island in a sea of fields. Pommepei made Ponyville look like a metropolis, with maybe a dozen buildings in the central area, give or take. It took another five minutes for them to find the mayor’s office and explain why they’d come.
“Well, if that isn’t wonderful news,” said Mayor Crisp, wiping his eyes. He wore a bandana over his mouth, and Applejack wasn’t sure if his mane was gray on its own or if it was filled with specks of ash. “I sent a letter to Canterlot just the other day asking for royal aid, but I thought they wouldn’t make it in time. The volcano’s moving faster than we expected—could erupt any day now.”
He pointed to the wall, which had what looked to be a map of the town and the surrounding farms. “We’ve been digging big trenches here and here—” he dragged his hoof across the map in two sweeping curves, north of the town. “They should keep the main town safe, at least, so no loss of pony life. But the fields are just too broad. We can’t possibly divert the lava away from all of them. We’ll lose all our potatoes!”
“So that’s what they were.” Applejack smiled. “Well, don’t you fret, Mayor Crisp. We’ve got just the solution for that.” She nudged Maud with her elbow. “My good friend Maud Pie here is going to stop the volcano for you!”
“No I’m not,” Maud said.
Applejack blinked at her. So did the Mayor. “But,” Applejack said, trying not to stammer, “you said you could do it back at the castle, didn’t you?”
“I can. I never agreed that I would.”
Applejack let out a little groan. “Maud, I get that you’re a fan of geology, but ponies are going to lose their whole livelihoods over this! Can’t you just—” She remembered who she was talking to, and rephrased: “Won’t you just stop it for them?”
“But volcanoes are our friends,” Maud said, once again.
Mayor Crisp snorted. “Volcanoes are our friends, indeed. You sound just like a rock farmer.”
Maud looked at him. “That makes sense. I am a rock farmer.”
“Oh, great, perfect.” The mayor growled and rubbed his forehead. “Just what we need, more of you.”
The words came out so dismissively that even Applejack felt offended.
“Look, I don’t know what’s up with your, uh, friend,” he said, returning his attention to Applejack, “but I’ve heard you’re quite the workhorse. If you’d be willing to help us dig more trenches, we might be able to save at least some of the fields—”
“Where are the other rock farmers?” Maud asked.
He glanced at her. “What?”
“You said there are more rock farmers. Where are they?”
“This again….” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Up the mountain at the edge of town, where that nincompoop can’t do no harm. Now as I was saying, Miss Applejack, could you please help us with—”
“Thank you,” Maud said, and walked out of the building.
Applejack grimaced. “Uh… I’d better go after her….” She ran out of the building, and to her complete lack of surprise, saw Maud marching up toward the north edge of town. “The hay was that about?” Applejack called out to her.
“I already told you.” Maud didn’t look back. It was barely possible to detect a note of frustration in her voice. “I don’t want to stop the volcano if I don’t have to.”
“Because volcanoes are our friends, yes, you did say that. Several times.” Applejack hurried to catch up. “Sorry, Maud, but it’s kind of looking like you have to.”
“I’m going to talk to the rock farmer first.”
“Of course you are.” Applejack sighed. “Why are volcanoes our friends, anyway?”
Maud did look back at her this time. “Volcanic eruptions are beautiful.”
She said it in the same monotone as ever, the one that always made it tough for Applejack to appreciate the beauty of whatever she was talking about. “Is that it?” Applejack asked.
“No. They also greatly enrich the soil of the surrounding area. The potato yields from these farms would not be nearly so fruitful if not for the volcanic soil they grow in.” Applejack saw a bit of tension in Maud’s jaw as she continued: “Everypony likes a dormant volcano. A dormant volcano is quiet. It’s useful. And then it does the thing that everypony knows volcanoes are supposed to do, and suddenly it’s a problem that needs to be dealt with.”
Applejack felt a bit like Maud had just gone on a blistering tirade, except it had all gone over her head… or maybe under her hooves. “Uh,” she said, “well, I guess it’s a little unfair to Vehuvius when you put it like that, but even still—what’s wrong with you stopping it? Maybe just for a little while so we can try to save the crops?”
Maud closed her eyes for a few seconds. “I can stop a volcano. I can’t start it up again.”
Applejack frowned. “So….”
“If I stop it, Vehuvius will never erupt again.” Her gait faltered for just a moment. “I shouldn’t call it stopping. It’s killing.”
They didn’t talk for a while after that.
North of the town was the patch of land that had to be the rock farm. Instead of the endless green fields surrounding them, this farm was a barren patch of land, full of (what else) rocks that threatened to twist Applejack’s ankle with every step.
There was another pony in the field a little ways ahead. He looked a lot like Maud, though with a bluer mane and a darker gray to his coat, and his cutie mark was a knobblier rock than her diamond-shaped one. Applejack winced in anticipation, but raised her hoof in greeting nonetheless. “Howdy! You’re the rock farmer around here?”
He looked up at her, nodded, and then looked down again.
Applejack slowed her pace for a bit. “Good to, uh… hear. My friend wanted to talk to you—”
Maud was already walking ahead, close to the pony. She didn’t look at him, though: she examined the ground next to him. After about twenty seconds, she poked at a particular bit of dirt, and he nodded. Another twenty seconds went by, and Maud murmured something Applejack couldn’t hear, and the stallion shook his head.
This went on for several minutes. Applejack wasn’t keeping count. She waited as patiently as she could. And waited, and waited, and waited some more. At long last she sighed. “Well… you two have fun, okay? I’m going to see about those trenches.” She turned back around toward the mayor’s office, stepping gingerly downhill around all the rocks sticking up.
Several hours later, with the sun low in the sky, Applejack was wiping her brow after a solid day’s work. The mayor had asked her to dig trenches that could spare maybe a tenth of the fields, but she’d had bigger plans: with her expertise, muscles, and stubborn spirit, she’d rallied the farmers to dig even more ambitious trenches. Now, even if the volcano erupted right this second, they should be able to save as much as a quarter of the fields. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
It was around then that she looked up the mountain, and saw a familiar figure approaching—barely, with how well she blended into the dirt. “Hey, Maud!” she said, ambling up the slope towards her, because she was in no mood to gallop. “And hey, you brought your new friend!”
“I did.” She had. He was walking right beside her.
“Great! Did he ever say what his name was?”
“No.” Maud took a few seconds to walk closer before continuing: “But his name is Sill Crisp, if that’s what you’re actually asking. He’s the mayor’s cousin. They don’t get along well.”
“… if he didn’t say that, then how do you….”
“He’s non-verbal.” Maud was up close now. “But he told me a lot.” She glanced around at the trenches that looked over the fields. “For instance, he told me that the eruption is happening within the next twelve hours, and that you should fill those trenches in right now.”
There was a collective outcry of dismay from the farmers behind Applejack. Applejack let out a groan of her own. “You serious?”
“Always. Except when I’m not.” Maud paused. “But I am, right now.”
“This, yet again?” the mayor called out. “Miss Applejack, would you please get your crazy friend out of here if she’s just going to talk nonsense?”
Applejack ignored him and kept focused on Maud. “You cannot possibly expect them to undo all that hard work, just because you said so!”
“I don’t expect them to do that.” Maud looked at her. “I’m used to ponies not listening to me. You should tell them instead. They’ll listen to you.”
“Well, I’m not gonna listen to you,” Applejack growled. “Maud, I have been doing my level best to humor you, but this is plumb nonsense even by your standards.”
“You were glad to have me on the trip when you thought I would do what you wanted.” Maud stared at her. “Because I was useful. And now I’m saying things you don’t want to hear, and you don’t want me around anymore.” She looked away for a moment. “It’s okay. I’m used to it.” Then she looked back. “But you should still listen to me.”
“Oh, for the love of—” Applejack pulled her hat down over her eyes for a moment. Right, fine. She should try to be understanding. “All right,” she said. “Tell me why I should convince the ponies to let all that lava come down and ruin their crops.”
“No,” Maud said. “I’m not going to tell you to convince the ponies to let all that lava come down and ruin their crops.”
Applejack squinted.
“I’m going to tell you that they should let the lava come down and enrich their crops.”
“For pity’s sake—isn’t the enriching only helpful after the lava’s cooled? It’s gonna kill em!”
“It isn’t going to do that.” She glanced back up at Sill. “Sill told me. The potatoes here are crossbred with rocks.”
“Yeah, we know that,” the Mayor grumbled. “Stupid vestigial trait. Makes em last longer, I’ll admit, but you gotta cook em twice as long to do anything with em! We’ve been trying to breed that out, cousin!”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t,” Maud said, staring at him. “Because being crossbred with rocks means they’ll survive the lava with no problems. It will even increase this year’s yield.”
There was a collective silence of about five seconds.
“Oh, sure, right,” the Mayor eventually said. “How would he know that?”
“Because he’s been studying the potato rock crossbreed for his entire life,” Maud replied. “He’s your cousin. Shouldn’t you know that?”
Mayor Crisp blushed with a bit of anger. “Well, why didn’t he say so?”
“He’s nonverbal.” Maud walked toward him. “And you know that. So he told you the way he could, and you didn’t pay attention. Because he was annoying then. But right now he’s useful. So you’re going to listen to him now.” She got nose-to-nose with the mayor. “Right?”
The mayor gulped.
Sill hurried forward and waved her away. Maud stepped back. Then Sill gestured to the mayor, with a bunch of hoof movements and facial expressions that Applejack couldn’t understand… but she was the Element of Honesty. She knew it when she saw it.
“He’s really telling the mayor that the lava will help?” she asked Maud.
“Yes,” Maud said.
Applejack sighed. “All right, everyone,” she said. “Let’s fill in all those trenches.”
There was a collective groan.
“Come on, y’all!” Applejack called out. “If we’re quick, we can get it done in no time!”
At length, ponies started walking back to the work area—the mayor first of all. Applejack hung back a bit. “Hey,” she said, “about what I was saying earlier…”
Maud was already walking toward the trenches, and not looking back at her.
“Right,” Applejack said to herself. “Fair enough.” And she got to work.
Five hours later, Vehuvius erupted.
The ash burst into the sky. The lava rolled down the hill, boiling rock that engulfed everything in its path. But when it reached the trenches that they had dug around the town—trenches which Maud had double and triple reinforced, single-hoofedly—the lava’s path bifurcated. The townsponies stood on their roofs and watched the glowing rivers flow past them on either side… and straight over their fields, whose protective trenches had been filled in only hours before.
Applejack watched it smother acres of crops in minutes, hat in her hoof. She heard the folk around her letting out quiet gasps, and hoped like blazes that Maud was right. Then she found a bed and passed out.
The eruption continued for a solid day—and what a strange day that was, watching lava flow past them as if the town were a ship sailing upon a molten sea. Hardly anypony dared to speak a word. Eventually the ship reached its safe harbor, and the lava solidified. But even then, it was a day and a half more before the lava cooled enough to become rock, and moreover to become rock that could be walked upon.
But at last, one morning, the rock was safe and the air was gloriously clear of soot.
The first pony to walk out on the rock was Sill Crisp, carrying a pickaxe. Applejack, Maud, and the rest of the town followed behind.
He walked for a few minutes, stopping every so often to tap at the crust with his hoof. He moved on after the first few stops, but at last he tapped, and then squinted, and tapped again. And then he nodded, raised his pickaxe, and struck the earth.
It only took him a minute to pierce through the volcanic shell, and once he had, Applejack gasped in wonder. The crops were still there, or at least the one crop he’d revealed, and it looked greener and healthier than ever. And when he dug up a potato to show everyone, that potato was big and beautiful enough to make Applejack’s mouth water.
The ponies got to work, spreading out over the buried fields. Mayor Crisp was first of all, bringing a pickaxe and two trowels in his saddlebags. He passed one trowel to Sill, and the two worked together in their own little region. Applejack had her own work further away, so she wasn’t close enough to hear what the mayor was saying (and Sill, of course, said nothing), but it was clear they were talking something out.
Eventually, Sill looked at his cousin, smiled, and raised one foreleg for a hug. Mayor Crisp raised both forelegs and practically dove into the embrace.
At that moment, Applejack’s cutie mark started pulsing with light.
“This means we succeeded, right?” Maud asked, standing a little ways away. Her frock made it hard to see, but Applejack spied a little glimmer down near her haunches too.
“Looks like!” Applejack laughed. “I guess it was a friendship problem after all. Whaddya know?”
Maud nodded, and got back to work. She wasn’t using tools like everypony else, instead punching the rock in key places until it fractured into big squares that could be lifted away. It reminded Applejack of cutting up fresh-baked brownies, with that smooth rippling texture broken up here and there by flakes where the crust had broken. It didn’t seem any more difficult to Maud than slicing up brownies would have been, either.
“Sill told me that the soil was nearly depleted around here,” she said. “They only had a couple years left until crops wouldn’t grow well anymore. Maybe at all. Vehuvius saved them, in the long term.”
Applejack raised her eyebrows. “So it was helpful after all?”
“Yes. It was very useful.” Maud didn’t look up as she spoke.
Applejack took a few swings of a pickaxe to break up a stubborn bit of rock, then levered it up with one end. She paused, catching her breath for a moment. “Hey,” she said, walking a little closer to Maud. “About what I said earlier, giving you a hard time and all… I wanted to say, I’m really sorry. I was wrong, and you really knew what you were talking about, and I shouldn’t have doubted you.”
“Yes,” Maud repeated. “I was also very useful to everypony.”
Applejack frowned. “Oh, come on, Maud, I’m not apologizing to you just because you were useful or whatever.”
“But if I had been wrong, and therefore useless, you wouldn’t be apologizing.” Maud punched another lump of rock. “QED.”
Now Applejack outright winced. “No… I mean, kinda? But even so, I shouldn’t have….” Her jaw muscles tightened a bit, and she couldn’t find the words. “Oh, you know what I mean, right?” she finished, sounding lame even to herself.
“I know what you say. I guess what you mean.” Maud bent a little closer to the ground as she worked. “Ponies usually don’t say what they mean. I have to guess. I say what I mean, every time. And that makes me the strange one.”
Applejack let go of her pickaxe, and let it fall to the ground.
“For what it’s worth, I accept your apology.” Maud stopped working for a bit and looked up at her, making eye contact. “You’re a good pony. You’re more understanding than most. More forthright. And I know you’re trying, and I appreciate it.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, let out a little breath through her nose, and then got back to breaking the rock. “In some ways that makes it worse.”
“Worse?” Applejack’s eyes widened. “How could that be worse?”
“Because these are the optimal conditions possible. If this is the best we can get along, then….” Maud pawed at the ground a few times. Applejack couldn’t tell if it was from emotion, or just another inscrutable rock-farming technique. “Then maybe I’m just… like lanthanum in the mantle. Incompatible.”
She got back to punching the ground, with renewed vigor.
“Come on, I don’t believe that.” Applejack walked a little closer. “Can’t we just… meet in the middle? I’m trying here, Maud—can’t you try too?”
“I am.”
Maud struck the earth, and massive fault lines burst from the point of impact, dozens of yards in every direction. And Applejack was willing to guess that that wasn’t just part of her usual rock-farming technique. She stood stock-still, staring at Maud.
It was a few seconds before Maud continued, back to her usual monotone after that briefest of outbursts—but she was speaking faster. “I’m trying to guess what everypony means. I’m trying to make myself useful. And I’m trying to talk to you, more than I usually do. Even right now. Do you think I would be explaining like this, otherwise?”
She looked up at Applejack again, and Applejack thought she looked just a little bit tired. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think about dormant volcanoes. I think they’re just trying to be mountains. And sometimes it works, for a while. And sometimes they explode.”
She sighed, and turned away. “It’s silly. I know. Never mind.”
Applejack stared regardless.
It was the darnedest thing, really. Big Macintosh didn’t talk much, and didn’t always emote much either. He had his odd ways. Practically everypony she knew had their odd ways, if she thought about it. So why was Maud, of all ponies, the one who rubbed her the wrong way?
She sighed, and stepped closer, but not close enough to be intrusive. “What can I do?” she finally asked.
“Stop talking,” Maud said.
“No, I really want to make this right.” Applejack’s voice rose. “I don’t want you to feel incompatible, Maud. What can I do to make you more comfortable, right here, right now?”
“I just told you,” Maud said, looking up at Applejack. “Stop talking. Just work with me for a while. Just… be.”
Applejack blinked, and resisted the urge to smack herself in the face. Maud always said what she meant, after all.
She nodded, trotted back to get her pickaxe, and got to work. Maud broke up the crust into chunks, and Applejack levered the chunks up from the field and hauled them away. They fell into a rhythm, after a few rounds of this. It was hard work, to be sure, and harder as the sun rose higher—and hard work was something Applejack was very comfortable with.
And it was comfortable. It was even easy.
At one point, Maud paused long enough to look up at Applejack and smile. Applejack smiled back. And then they got back to work, breaking open the rough stony Vehuvian shell to expose the treasure underneath.
Author's Note
The prompt for this year's Iron Author competition was to write a story including all of the following, and I quote:
- Vexing Volcanism
- Verdant Vegetable
- Vibrant Vestigial
It took quite a lot of thought and hard work to come up with a story based on that, and in fact the story I submitted to the competition was incomplete: it ended hastily in the penultimate scene. Thankfully, that was still enough to earn the judges' approval, and I placed third! However, I definitely wanted to finish the story properly, and show it to you all - and now, here it is!
I'd also like to give due credit to Undome Tinwe and Shaslan. Undome Tinwe not only helped me polish up this story, they won second place with their excellent story Lost Paradise (originally titled Lost Harmony). Meanwhile, Shaslan blew away the competition with her first place winner, Flower Wars, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Also, all the stories from the event can be found here until the end of 2023, so you can read the original versions of this story and Lost Harmony there, as well as anything else from the event that you'd like.
Thanks again for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it!
