Back to the Past 01: Grave New World

The pony spent some time searching around the gloomy glade, studying the statues and determining that she didn’t recognize any of them. Meanwhile the sky lightened so slowly that dawn sneaked up on her. Nearby she found the ruins of some buildings, now unidentifiable with only outlines of broken down walls remaining. Weeds grew through tumbled piles of stones, and her brief attempt to poke through them only disturbed angry wasps and snakes.

When the sun cleared the treetops, she decided there was nothing more to be done here. She stretched her wings, carefully flexing them several times, working out as much of the remaining soreness as she could. They still felt weak, but she decided she could risk taking flight. She took a deep breath, steadied herself, partially spread her wings, and then, with a somewhat painful thrust of her hind legs, she leapt into the air. Her wings protested but did what was needed. She leveled off at thirty meters and banked right, settling into a lazy circle around the glade.

She peered into the distance, and what she saw was a mixed landscape: grass, savanna, and clumps of denser forest. There was no order and no visible buildings or other signs of civilization. As she circled, the moon came into view, and she gasped and faltered for an instant in her flight—catching herself only by instinct. The moon! Although it was sinking in the west, it hadn’t set when the sun rose. She thought to herself, “So… I must be far outside of Equestria, or else Equestria has changed in some fundamental way while I was a statue. Could Celestia be overthrown?” Then more troubling thoughts flickered through her mind. “Does Equestria even exist anymore? Do ponies? Did the world end somehow?”

She flapped to gain some altitude, to see further, but there was only a mostly clear sky, the sun, the moon, and what appeared to be an endless expanse of wilderness in all directions. Patches of yellow, blue and purple wildflowers mottled the land with colors of springtime. With no direction in mind she circled an ever-widening spiral, always scanning the land below for any signs of civilization. Eventually she saw where thicker forest snaked through a low, flat area that she recognized as evidence of a watercourse. She glided down to land in the tall grass, then entered the woods. She soon found a game trail to follow, but she went slowly, picking her way past tangled greenbrier vines and large spider webs. The trail led her down through some deep ruts in the earth until she reached a creek bed. There a modest stream trickled from one pool to another across a floor of rounded white stones.

The water looked and smelled clean enough, and she paused for a much needed drink. Next she wandered around the banks, looking for tracks. Frogs jumped and turtles slid into the water when she passed near, and she caught glimpses of large fish in the cloudy, green-tinted pools. Along the sandy shoreline she found tracks from raccoons, tracks from large birds—turkeys, she guessed—and then what she’d been really hoping for: hoofprints! They were cloven hooves, dainty and slender, not the tracks of ponies but of deer. Still, here was evidence that this land was inhabited.

She glanced upward, to the narrow band of sky visible between the tree-crowned banks of the creek. She took flight again, launching directly from the creek bottom into the blue sky. She followed the creek downstream on the theory that villages are built near water. She didn’t fly too high or too fast; her eyes kept busy scanning the land below for people or structures. After some miles the creek joined into a river. Whereas before she’d seen pools linked by trickles of water, now there was a steady stream of muddy brown flowing over and around scattered logs. She blinked in surprise when a couple of the presumed logs suddenly lurched into motion, splashed and disappeared into the water. They were alligators!

The pony’s lips pressed together, her mouth forming a thin line to match her worried thoughts. The ponies that she knew, in the Equestria that she knew, did not like wilderness. To them, Mother Nature was only a foe to be vanquished.

Mile after mile of green passed below her, until she reached a broken bridge. It was a concrete bridge built on timber trestles, and it stretched across the wide river bottom, spanning a couple of hundred meters at least—or mostly spanning, for a portion near the center had collapsed. She glided downward to land on the bridge close to one end.

Despite the bridge’s ultra-modern (to her eyes) construction, the concrete was stained with dirt and moss. Weeds and tufts of grass grew from crevices and cracks in the road surface. She walked to the end of the bridge, where the road almost disappeared into the earth. Relics of pavement remained, a ghost road snaking through the woods, broken by dirt and grass, sometimes encroached by underbrush and even small trees. She lowered her head to closely examine a piece of paving, and she thumped it experimentally with a hoof. The material seemed akin to concrete, though with a matrix of larger pebbles. She could only imagine that it must have once been a very fine road surface, long ago, before Father Time had taken a hammer to it.

She turned and walked back onto the bridge, aiming for the opposite side. She came to the broken span, where a large section of concrete had tumbled to the grassy plain below. She opened her wings, about to hop across the gap, but her motion prompted a loud snort from somewhere below. Glancing down at the flood plain, she noticed what she’d been too preoccupied to see before: a small herd of deer! They stared up at her, their ears perked. The pony reared on her hind legs, placing her front hooves on the bridge railing, and she called down to the deer, “Ahoy!”

The deer turned and fled. A buck was in the lead, and white tails were held high as they bounded across the flood plain with a swiftness and grace that no pony could match. “Wait!” the pony yelled after them. “Don’t be afraid!” She jumped over the bridge railing and glided down to the grassy plain, but the deer were already vanishing into the woods. She took a few steps, but then stopped and looked after them, looked to the line of trees where they’d gone. She mumbled, “I only wanted to talk.” She lowered her head and closed her eyes, taking a moment to calm down. This wasn’t the first time strangers had rejected her based on her appearance. It was understandable, she couldn’t blame them.

It still hurt, though.

She was beginning to feel pangs of hunger, along with a grimly amusing thought: “I wonder how many years—or decades, or centuries—it’s been since I had lunch?” She spiraled down to the river bottom and browsed for a while on the foliage of spring. There was clover and ryegrass in the flood plain, and tender young leaves of greenbrier in the woods. It wasn’t proper food for a civilized pony, but neither was it the first time in her life that she’d foraged. If nothing else, at least she wouldn’t starve here. After some time, with her belly feeling less empty and the sky painted with colors of sunset, she improvised a place to bed down under the bridge.

On the second day of her journey she caught sight of something standing on a hilltop, standing taller than a tree. She veered toward it. When she’d drawn closer she circled around a ruined tower, caked with rust and vines. A bulbous, elevated structure was eaten through by rust, with jagged openings leading into the dark, mysterious inside. After brief puzzlement, she decided the structure was the ruin of a water tower—far larger than any she’d ever seen, and constructed entirely from steel. Another was visible across a small valley, on another hill. She soared over to the second tower, which was of the same design but in an even further ruined state, the tower legs broken and the tank laying on the ground, its shape distorted by gravity and the violence of its fall to earth.

The pony glided to a landing near this collapsed tower, and she began to explore the area. A small hut made of concrete blocks, its door long missing, housed rusted pipes and valves. Finding nothing of use there, she explored in a widening circle around the tower. Using her hooves and magic she poked through grass, and dirt, and tree roots. She found concrete slabs, bricks, pieces of broken and melted glass, and unrecognizable items of corroded metal. She then followed a dirt path down into the valley, to a creek. Near the creek were the recognizable ruins of a town, a village. Crumbling stone walls and a few broken down timbers of what had once been roofs remained, with trees growing up through them. The largest building she found, in the presumed center of town, had pieces of what must have once been impressively large stone columns tumbled in front of it. Scattered around the buildings were some rusting skeletons of abandoned machines, their purpose inscrutable. She spent hours digging in the rubble, magically, to see if she could unearth any clues about the prior inhabitants. She turned up bits of broken glass and pottery, nails rusted almost away, pieces of broken combs, buttons and other mundane household items, along with corroded tools and bits of mysterious devices. Nothing provided the answers she needed about her situation or the state of the broader world she’d awoken to.

As she wandered the ruins, she spotted some distance away a figure partially in shadow. She approached and noted first a curious silhouette, overall rounded, but with some sharp protrusions. As she moved closer she struggled through a few moments of confusion before identifying the shape as that of a giant beetle. Giant, in this case, meant more than three times the size of a typical pony. Posed partially upright on its hind legs, standing taller even than the alicorn who now inspected it, the beetle presented a menacing figure.

It was also quite dead, if, indeed, it had ever been alive. This beetle was constructed from pieces of metal and appeared entirely robotic. Robots were something the pony knew only from dime novels or comic books. This one looked real enough, though. Rust stains streamed down from its joints, and vines strangled its form, draping it in irregular garb of green foliage. The body was black, perhaps once glossy but now dingy and weathered. A pair of horns protruded forward from the sides of its head, along with a nose-like spike in the center, combining to form the head into a sort of trident. On the underside of the head was a shiny metal grill that resembled nothing so much as a shark’s mouth. Its front legs ended not in feet or pincers, but more resembled scythes, and they were held in a posture like that of a praying mantis. The corroded blades were integral with its arms, giving the creature no obvious way to pick up any objects, or use tools, or do anything other than swing its blades and attack.

And then there were the eyes. They looked like faceted compound eyes, the right eye a brilliant cyan-blue, much like the eye color of a changeling. The left eye was broken, the glass covering partially shattered. As she examined the robot, a mud dauber wasp carrying a ball of mud alighted on its head and crawled around the fractured eye, then vanished into the metal skull. Moments later a purposeful buzzing sound emitted as the wasp added material to its nest.

Unsettled and not knowing what to make of the long abandoned robot, the pony moved on to continue her search. She found another robotic beetle, similar to the first, but collapsed in a heap and much more ruined than the first. Then she found the cemetery. The grave stones were tangled in tall grass and scrub, stained, some broken, but many intact. The language carved on them was at least readable, though the dates made no sense. The names were descriptive: Cherry Morning. Sugar Pop. Lucky Music. They might easily be pony names. She supposed she could have found out for certain by digging one up, but there seemed no valid reason to commit such a distasteful action.

She eventually abandoned her investigation and took flight again, despite a leaden heart, as she began to wonder if any civilization still existed. Did ponies survive? Did any other race she’d known from her own time? Even the deer she’d seen, she began to wonder about. Did they have a village, some kind of civilization, or did they only live like wild animals in the woods?

What happened to the world?

That evening was clear, and the pony decided to watch the sky. She had history with the night sky, history both good and bad, and she was anxious of what she might learn. She found a hill with an open view, and she watched the sun set slowly in the west, stately and unhurried—indeed, far more slowly than the sun she had known in her own time. The sky looked like it was on fire, streaked with wild, ragged clouds.

The moon rose late, but not too long after sunset, and its phase was approaching full: closer to full than when she’d first seen it, a couple of nights earlier. Clearly the sun and moon were out of synchronization. Yet, she reasoned, they hadn’t stopped moving, nor were they bouncing around randomly as they had during the Reign of Discord. They appeared to be following their own natural rhythms, as they had always done far outside the borders of Equestria. These rhythms she had learned well during her years of exile and wandering through Lopanga.

Stars were slow to make their appearance in the sky. As she waited, her thoughts drifted back to happier times, stargazing sessions with her mother and brother.

Any night with a bright moon was, she knew from experience, a poor night for stargazing. However… With moonlight washing out all the fainter stars, only the brightest ones remained visible, which in some ways made picking out major constellations easier—or should have. The more stars appeared though, and the more she studied them, the more confused she became. Some bright stars looked familiar at first, but then their surroundings didn't seem right. Some constellations seem familiar at first glance, but important parts were missing or out of place, shapes distorted.

She blinked. Was a star moving? It was! She watched in amazed puzzlement as a star steadily sailed across the sky. She followed its motion with her eyes until it disappeared into the murky horizon.

She knew planets, that moved imperceptibly over a time span of weeks and months, and she knew shooting stars that flared and burned out in moments. This was different. It looked like a normal star that had simply been going somewhere. That didn’t make any sense. Stars don’t do that.

She watched the sky for a while longer and saw two more of the mysterious wandering stars. Curiously, all the ones she saw moved north or south, never east or west.

She finally gave in to fatigue and frustration and abandoned the effort. Some night when the sky was darker, when a bright full moon wasn't lighting up the whole sky, then she could try again to make sense of it. Her horn sparkled as she used her magic to flatten out some tall grass and make a bed, crude but adequate. Then she cast a quick spell and magically summoned a favorite blanket from her equinventory.

Hours later the pony awakened with a start, the blanket tossed back as she sat up under a still-dark sky. Ears perked up, and her eyes were wide as she gasped. In moments she got her bearings, realizing where she was, the dream already fading and slipping away. She blinked and struggled to remember what it was about. It was muddled, confused, but she remembered being in Ponyville… but not exactly, because her old castle had been there, or at least parts of it… and Luna! Princess Luna had been there. They'd talked. She didn’t remember what about, but they’d had some kind of conversation…

And in her dream she hadn't remembered—or even known, perhaps—that Princess Luna was dead. She felt for a moment as though her heart was squeezed in a vise. She’d just spoken with a dead pony in her dream, and it was one of the most unsettling feelings she’d ever known. She shuddered, and gave up trying to remember the details of the dream. A thought much worse had just hit her.

“They're all dead,” she muttered. She wasn’t thinking only of Luna. It was everyone, all her friends, her family, the ponies and other beings who'd taught and trained her. She didn't know how much time had passed, but it was obviously too long. It might be a thousand years, it might be ten thousand for all she knew. Everyone was gone. Everyone except, maybe, just possibly, the one pony in the world who she least wanted to ever see again. She squeezed her eyes shut and hissed through gritted teeth, “Celestia!”

It was too much. She dropped flat to the ground, brought her wings forward to hide her head under them, and her body shook uncontrollably as she cried her heart out.

Later, after her tears had run out, she wiped her face with her blanket and wrapped it around her withers, and she watched the sun rise in the same slow and stately way that it had set. “Who knows if Celestia is even still alive?” she wondered. “Spike might still be alive. But my friends, even my mother… Well, if I’m here, then maybe some of them were turned to stone too. Maybe some of them were trapped somewhere that time doesn’t pass, maybe in Tartarus or in Morbia, maybe in the moon or stars, who knows?” It was the thinnest of hopes, but, there being no way to disprove it, she chose to hope.

She foraged on leaves and grass for breakfast, then rejoined the river and continued flying downstream. Twice she spotted deer below her, but again they fled and vanished into the woods each time she tried to approach.

In the early afternoon she noticed something above her. In the clear blue sky was a thin, sharp streak of white. The closest thing she could compare it with was a comet, but that was hardly any comparison at all. This was visible in broad daylight, and brightly at that, and it steadily moved across the sky. After watching and puzzling at this phenomenon for several seconds, she turned toward it and began flapping hard to gain speed and altitude. The chase was on!

She began with complete confidence in her ability to catch the mysterious streak. She was an alicorn, after all, with the natural speed of a powerful pegasus and the stamina of an earth pony. Rainbow Dash could out-sprint (and certainly out-maneuver) her, but she didn’t think anything with wings could stay ahead of her for very long. With eyes locked on the mysterious missile, she flapped hard and powered her way upward and after it.

After a couple of minutes, though, her target appeared to actually be pulling away, and she had to reevaluate. The source of the white trail was still indistinct to the eye, and she began to wonder if she had completely misjudged its size, distance and speed. Well, she had the powers of a unicorn too. She gritted her teeth, and her long, spiraled horn sizzled with energy. She cast a haste spell on herself, and she shot forward and upward into the sky with renewed vigor. Now she exceeded the ability of even the most talented pegasus.

She was sure that the mystery object was a barely-visible speck leaving a bold trail of white clouds behind it, shining brilliantly as they caught the sunlight. Even making maximum effort with her haste spell, she was gradually losing it—and worse, the air became painfully thin and cold. Never in her life before had she flown this fast and high. Her wings weren’t supporting and propelling her as they should, and her lungs burned as she couldn’t catch enough breath, and the white streak was still somewhere high above her, disappearing toward the horizon.

With a frustrated shout, she gave up the chase, stilled her exhausted wings and began gliding a spiral path toward the earth. Descending took a long while, as she huffed and panted and tried to figure out what she’d seen. A dragon? Wendigo? Some kind of magical super-airship? Something related to those mysterious moving stars? She blinked and peered downward and realized she’d lost her bearings and couldn’t identify the river she’d been following. It had been left far behind. Far off to the south she caught a glimpse of curious bright marks on the land. They were too far to reach by gliding, but she made a mental note to investigate them later.

In a daze she let the thickening air filter through her wings, until she finally landed on a knob-like hilltop, isolated and treeless. She scrambled for footing on the loose rocks while a stiff breeze swept across the hilltop. She stood there, panting with head hung low, wings partially open with the wind flowing across them to help her cool down. When she’d recovered and folded her wings to her sides, she glanced up at the sky, but the thing she’d chased was long gone. Then she looked around. She could see across the open plains for many miles in every direction. A few flat-topped hills jutted upward on the far horizon, but no landmarks worthy of the term. The white marks she'd noted before were somewhere over the horizon, from this vantage point.

She took a couple of hops downward to the leeward side of the wind-swept hill, and she lay down among large clumps of dark-leaved basket grass, and she rested for a little while as she pondered what to do next. Hardly any breeze reached her, but she could hear the rustling of the long, flowing leaves above, on the hilltop. She spread her dark wings to catch the warmth of the sun, and she closed her eyes, and she calmed her thoughts.

After the pony had rested, she took flight again and headed south across the countryside, looking for those mysterious white marks. They were farther away and bigger than she had realized. What she found was an enormous scar upon the land, like a set of gigantic craters roughly gouged from the earth. The white color proved to be limestone, pulverized and exposed, speckled with only light, scrubby vegetation. One of the craters was partially filled with stagnant water, a shallow pond with clusters of reeds concentrated at one end. She descended to investigate, and her hooves clomped on the rubble close to the edge.

The sides of the crater were riddled with holes, presumably the burrows of some digging animals. Her ear caught a buzzing-and-grinding noise, and she saw a gout of dirt eject from one of the holes. It was followed by another and another. She approached the hole and lowered her head, tried to peer into the darkness. From the sizes of the burrows she expected something like a coyote or badger. When a giant wasp backed out of the hole, she screamed like a little filly and instinctively reared up and then tried to stamp it with her front feet. She landed a glancing blow with one hoof and sent the creature tumbling. It thrashed helplessly on the ground for a few moments, then righted itself and started to shake its wings and make a harsh buzzing noise.

In seconds answering buzzes came echoing back from all around the pit. Giant wasps poured out from the burrows and took flight, filling the sky. The pony’s ears folded back and her cat-like pupils shrank to narrow slits as she realized she had, almost literally, stirred up a hornet’s nest.

Her first response was to fly away. She beat her wings, but no creature her size could possibly take off very quickly—without even a running start—and the energy she’d spent earlier chasing the mystery comet made matters worse. She felt insectile claws dig into her flank, followed an instant later by a stab of searing pain in her hip. She screamed again and turned loose a barely-formed burst of magic from her horn with only one impulse: GET THEM OFF ME!! Her horn sizzled, and all the nearby bugs were flung away by the spell’s blue aura. A moment later, through the almost breathtaking pain of the sting, she managed to cast another, more coherent, spell. A translucent blue sphere sprung into existence around her. Swarming wasps bashed into it and fell back stunned by the impact. Some tried to land on it, but their claws found no purchase, and they too fell away.

Gasping with fear and streaming tears from the pain, the pony flew away from the crater. Stubbornly the wasps pursued for a couple of minutes, still trying ineffectually to get through her shield. She increased her speed and eventually left them behind. When she’d gone far enough to feel safe, she dispelled her shield, dropped to the ground and clumsily plowed into the grass. The grass all around was taller than her head, even if she’d been standing, and the weight of her body flattened out a patch of it, such that she almost appeared to be huddled in a green pit. A crazy thought flitted through her mind: Did I somehow shrink? Is that why wasps and grass are gigantic to me now?

She turned her head to try and see her hip where she’d been stung, but not much was outwardly visible: a tiny puncture, and swelling only beginning to appear. The pain of the venom was still intense, though. She drew a hissed breath inward through her teeth and cast another spell. Her horn glowed, and the pain eased. It was the magical counterpart of aspirin, but at least it allowed her to breathe easier and concentrate on what to do next. All the healing magic she knew was modest first aid, not how to neutralize venom from a giant wasp. Her hip and leg felt numb by this time. She’d once read a story in a dime novel where the hero sucked the venom out from a snake bite. That might have been worth a try, but she found that she couldn’t contort her body and neck around far enough to properly reach the sting with her muzzle. She could reach with her tongue, but mere licking wouldn’t help this, and she couldn’t think of any spell in her repertoire that could mimic the needed suction.

A chill of fear went through her. Didn’t wasps paralyze their prey before dragging them back to the nest? If the venom spread through her body, would it paralyze her completely? She struggled to her feet and then started pushing her way through the grass, head lowered, splitting a path through it. She had a vague notion of finding shelter and water, at least, while she could still move around. It only took a minute to realize that she wasn’t going to find anything by stumbling through the sea of grass. She needed to fly, if she was still able. She tried to spread her wings, but the tough stalks of grass interfered with her use of them. She turned around, facing the path she’d already made through the grass, and she took a running start before leaping into the air, trying to get above the grass where her wings could work.

She almost made it, but her numb hind leg snagged on the grass and flipped her forward, landing her face-down in a heap. She groaned and extracted her horn from the earth it had stabbed into. She had to try again. This time she put all her remaining strength into a leap upward, and she managed to get clear of the grass enough for her wings to spread and bite air. With intense effort she stayed airborne and got safely above the grass. Gaining altitude she look around for any sign of a watercourse. The dark green of treetops snaked across the land, a few miles away, and that was where she headed.

Her strength was failing, and a tightness constrained her chest, but she reached the edge of the woods and skidded to another clumsy stop. She pushed her way through the undergrowth, finding a game trail that led down to the creek bed. Thorns raked her as she stumbled down to the bottom of the trail; there she found a murky pool. Along the banks were some large overhangs of limestone that could serve as the most basic shelter. She drank, then settled under the shelter. She once again summoned her blanket and wrapped it around herself.

There was nothing left to do but wallow in misery for a while and hope that her body could burn off the venom rather than succumb to it. As an alicorn, she was supposed to have the strong constitution of an earth pony. It would have to be enough to see her through.

Over the next hour numbness spread to her other hind leg, and her nose and eyes became runny, and her vision blurred. Her mind spiraled into dark places. In the myths of her kind, an alicorn was supposed to be the pinnacle of equine being, almost god-like, able to defeat entire armies or flatten mountains. They weren’t supposed to be defeated by an accidental encounter with an insect. What would ponies think? What would the history books say? That’s assuming there were still any ponies, or that there ever would be any more history books.

Feeling too ill to do much else, the pony rested and eventually drifted into fitful, troubled sleep. By morning she had regained most of the feeling in her legs, but her runny nose and blurred vision remained, and she was too nauseated and dizzy to travel or to eat anything. She was sick most of the day, though by nightfall she’d started feeling well enough to explore a little of the surrounding area on foot. As she’d come to expect, there were no traces of civilization. She continued to rest and recover throughout the next day, waiting until she was strong enough to fly with confidence before venturing out again on her search.

This time she departed at nightfall. She could see practically as well at night as during the day, and she reasoned that any lights of civilization, or even campfires, would be visible from great distances. What she saw instead were flashes of lightning somewhere far over the horizon, although the sky above her was clear. As unfamiliar as the stars were, they still turned around an axis. She took her bearings from the great wheel in the sky, and she headed due south based on little more than intuition.

The land gradually became drier, vegetation more sparse and scrubby. As time passed it was hard to stay alert, to maintain concentration on the land passing below. The rhythm of her wings beating put her almost into a trance, and she lost track of time. She was startled back to alertness when she spotted a flicker of orange light on the horizon. A campfire? A bonfire, even? She banked and turned toward it.

Soon the land below appeared to be traced with a network of white lines almost like a web spun by a drunken spider. Many of the white lines ended in larger nodes or splotches of white. The network stretched for miles and miles across the arid plain, and several fires were burning like gigantic torches in the night. A sour odor wafted in the night air. With the experience of giant wasps fresh in her mind, she approached cautiously and flew over one of the white nodes for a better look.

Up close it became obvious that the white lines were simply roads paved (and rather neatly, at some expense) with pale dirt, and the nodes were square or rectangular pads of the same dirt with all of the plain’s vegetation kept clear. She risked landing on one of the dirt pads.

The sulfurous odor, reminiscent of fireworks, was stronger at ground level. Near one corner of the earthworks was a row of cylindrical storage tanks, presumably made of steel, with a complex mess of pipes and valves connecting them. In the center of the dirt pad was a black machine, its parts continually operating and moving in near silence. Its largest moving part was a beam balanced like a seesaw and moving likewise. A slender rod descended from one end of the beam into a hole in the ground. Next to the beam was a connected flywheel that reminded the pony of ones she’d seen on the sides of a steam locomotive. Although no expert on machinery, she could at least recognize that this was some kind of pump jack.

But what was it pumping? Water? Given how dry the land looked, she could imagine the inhabitants wanting to drill for water. That answer just didn’t seem right, though. There was no settlement here, no village, no farms. If all the dirt pads were like this, there must be scores or even hundreds of wells. And what was that peculiar odor?

She flew again and went to one of the fires. It also had its own pad of barren dirt, and in the center were some pipes coming out from the ground. From the tallest of them roared a swirling mass of orange flames. Try as she might, the pony couldn’t see what substance was burning. It seemed to be nothing but an eruption of pure fire. She closed her eyes and tried to sense magic, but there was no trace of any spellwork.

As she watched the flames and felt their warmth coming through the cool night air, she considered what it all meant. She might not understand all of this, but somebody had built it here for a reason, and somebody was maintaining and operating it. There was still civilization in the world! But what kind? Who?

For days she’d wanted only to find someone she could greet, and talk to, and question. Surely she could follow these roads to their source and find people, but now that prospect suddenly seemed frightening. She had no idea what to expect. Did the world now belong to robotic beetles like the wrecked ones she’d seen? Was the world now ruled by monsters?

Well, she’d have to find out. She couldn’t just retreat back into the wilderness and live like a hermit for the rest of her life. She had to know. But she would have to be cautious. She decided that she needed to scout with care, or else her first encounter might be her last.

She flew again and followed the roads, tracing a path from smaller to larger ones, and soon to roads paved with some kind of hard surface. She dropped down to investigate and found a paving material resembling what she’d see at the ruined bridge. She hadn’t seen any traffic yet on any of these roads, but she guessed that whoever used them might not be active at night.

As dawn approached, she saw a vehicle moving down one of the roads, dust stirring in its wake. It was large, roughly the size of a train car, and moved under its own power, although there was no visible boiler or smoke stack. At the front were some remarkably bright headlights and a cab with glass windows, and in back was a load of steel pipe. The pony wanted badly to see into that cabin and learn what kind of being was the driver, but she forced down the impulse and chose patience rather than risk giving herself away too soon.

Instead, she continued soaring above the highway, heading in the direction the truck had come from. Soon she noticed the highway was joined by train tracks which ran in parallel with it.

It wasn’t long before she caught up with a train. It was strictly a freight train without any identifiable passenger cars: only a long, long series of boxcars and steel tank cars. Most of these were dark and grungy, but some were marked with strangely chaotic artwork, with bright colors starting to become visible in the growing daylight. The locomotives produced no smoke and only a smooth rumble so deep that she could almost feel it more than hear it.

After observing all of this, she matched her speed to the train and came down for a gentle landing on top of a black boxcar. Her wings had gotten quite a workout for the last few days. Now she could rest them and let the train take her to its destination, whatever that might be.

The train rumbled through the cool morning air and golden light of dawn, once in a while passing by trucks on the adjacent road. The pony crouched low and still against the roof of the boxcar, and there was nothing to indicate she’d been noticed. She hoped the train would reach a town or a village soon, but it was not to be. After a while the tracks parted ways with the highway and the train went rumbling across a seemingly endless, scrubby plain for hour after hour. Inevitably, she dozed off.