Ungula

"Well what about that one?"

"Mmmmmmmantle."

"That one?"

"Mantle again!"

"Ugh, are they all mantle? How about that one there?"

"Ooh, core!"

As you may recall, ESS Fire of Friendship's mission was, essentially, to fly around and have adventures while writing down what happened and how the ship performed.

"We're not looking for core! Aren't there any here that were crust?"

"I think that one has a little bit of lower crust! Mostly mantle though."

As such, having learned that Umbre was once inhabited, they all decided that having a look at some ancient ruins seemed like a pretty good adventure to have. There are few adventure hooks as clear as ancient ruins.

"Why are they all mantle?"

"Cause most of a planet is made of mantle, silly!"

As you've overheard, this was not as easy as it seemed, because a planet's volume is much greater than its surface area, and so most of the chunks of Umbre were simply big rocks.

Rainbow Dash was getting a bit sick of finding nothing but big rocks. No wonder nopony had explored these things before, it was like finding a needle in a hayburger.

Pinkie Pie was having a much nicer time, because she was looking at rocks. As the team's geologist, it was her job to discern which umbroids were actually worth investigating. If she wasn't pointed at a new target, however, she tended to……

"Did you know the mantle flows? It's really slow, but it's like an ocean down there! And the continents are boats! I mean, not these bits of mantle obviously, they're not hot enough anymore."

"Pinkie. How about that one?"

Pinkie Pie really liked rocks. Not as much as her sister Maud, but you didn't grow up on a rock farm and not like rocks. No farmpony ever tires of their own crop, they all say.

"That one looks good!"

"Uh-huh. And what about– wait, it does?"

"Yepperoni! See, the mantle and core ones expanded a lot once they were no longer under pressure, and the lower crust ones too. So there's cracks and deformations and stuff. But that one shows nooooo signs of expansion!"

Rainbow peered at the umbroid, comparing it to those around it. "I guess? But shouldn't we be able to see, like, the surface? That'd look different from just rock, right?"

"Ssssssort of? It's all dirty and stuff, is the thing, see? Ungravity and soil meannnns… You ever put a vacuum cleaner in reverse, so it sprays the stuff in the bag everywhere? It must have been like that, but the whooooole ground is the vacuum cleaner."

"...Right. I don't… I don't think vacuum cleaners have a setting to do that, but sure. And then it settled down and coated everything once the Halo broke and the ungravity stopped, I guess?"

"I mean, it didn't stop, Cadance said the pieces refused to stay together, buuuuuut… probably! I dunno, I wasn't there. But it's all covered in grayish dirt that makes it kinda hard to tell apart from rock at a distance. I mean, if you're not a rock pony, anyway."

"...Right."

Rainbow Dash decided she was just glad they'd finally found an umbroid to explore.

The exploration teams were as such: Pinkie Pie was accompanied by Rarity, because both of them wanted to look for rocks in some form. Applejack and Fluttershy were united in being a bit aimless and planned to simply wander around and see what they found. And Twilight and Rainbow Dash, of course, were huge nerds.

"So how are we actually gonna find, like, a structure?"

"Uhh… I think I have something for that, actually."

Twilight flipped through her datapad.

"No... No... Not that one... Aha! Clover's Civilization Compass. Designed for finding your way to the nearest settlement – and then if you were still lost, you'd use Clover's Capital Compass to find a bigger town. For thiiiiiiis… We're looking for any size, even a single building, so I'll strip out this, and don't need to check for inhabitants so I can get rid of this… Expanding it to look for ruins too is a bit trickier, but if I… mhm… aaaand… There! The newly minted Clover's Cabin Compass!"

Twilight's horn glowed rosy. She bent down, and the glow shot off across the ground. "That way."

Technically this variant wasn't made by Clover the Clever like the others, but you didn't just break a pattern in a spell name like that. You didn't necessarily have to make it alliterative or put a name on it, there were many ways to name spells, but whatever convention it used, you did your best to keep when you derived something from it. Unless you changed it enough to be a whole new spell rather than a variation, or you thought the old name was stupid, or what have you.

Not that most ponies ever thought about that. Most ponies just used the existing spells, and anything original that happened to arise from their special talent. Twilight Sparkle was just built different.

Score one for team egghead.

The glow led the pair to the base of a cliff studded with openings and balconies, in what had once been a forest.

Shockingly little happens to a tree in a vacuum. It dies, of course. But it still looks more or less like a tree, if a very brittle one, and without living fungi to rot it, it continues to look like this for quite a long time.

The forest was filled with the graves of trees, all fallen over when the soil to which they were rooted floated away only to fall back down again. Roots reached into the air, trunks and branches snapped where they fell, nearly all coated with dirt. Here and there, stumps and branches lay bereft of their trunk – signs that someone had harvested them sometime after it all ended.

Nearer to the cliff, not all the graves were trees.

Leaves crunched upon the ground, brittle and freeze-dried.

The thestral magic imbued within her collar fed meaning into Twilight's mind as her gaze lingered upon alien writing carved into the flat memorial stones, the Umbrish script astoundingly dense with meaning and context. It whispered that each name-story was a Prologue, a name-story given to a chick after first flight and carried until they find a name-story of their own.

A Clear Evening's Rain. Slumber Under The Canopy. A Choir Of One. A Pattern In The Stars. My Kingdom For A Quill.

Yet Unnamed. Yet Unnamed. Yet Unnamed. Yet Unnamed. Yet Unnamed. Yet Unnamed. Yet Unnamed. Yet Unnamed. Yet Unnamed. Yet Unnamed. Yet Un