Soup.

Almost all Equestrians eat it every day, especially during these coldest periods of wintertime. Two weeks past Hearth’s Warming, few of us think about the process by which it reaches the soup faucets in our homes or our favorite restaurants. Nor do any of us know for certain how the great soup deposits underground came into being. Even the former Diarchs have said that they remember trips to the soup springs when they were fillies, carrying buckets to collect the creamy mushroom chowders that bubbled up to the surface from deep underground. A handful of gastronomists speculate that much of it was Discord’s doing, but the partial historical records from the pre-Discordian era indicate that soup had been gathered long before the draconequus appeared.

The more fragmentary records from Tirek’s first appearance a millennium before the reign of Discord mention natural sources of minestrone and split pea, and most modern food historians support the hypothesis that the seeming oddity of large reservoirs of tasty liquid sustenance locked within geologic structures are the result of the titanic uncontrolled magical forces unleashed worldwide approximately four millennia ago, during the legendary war in which the semi-mythical Mag’ne and her allies defeated Grogar.

Whatever their origins, it is difficult to overstate the effect of soup mines on the history of modern Equestria. I am reminded of this as my train to the Western Territories steams past Goat War Field. Certainly, the Grogarian Hypothesis for geologic soup origin seems persuasive as I look out my passenger car’s windows at the rugged badlands where the final battle occurred, as Goat War Field’s soup deposits were three times as large as the next largest soupfield ever discovered and therefore a natural place for soup mining to have started almost two centuries ago.

Only a few soup derricks, the so-called “nodding donkey” pumpjack rigs, can still be seen pumping at Goat War. Its production now is a mere trickle compared to the great gushers of tomato-based soups that it once provided. Most of the easily pumpable soup had been removed decades ago, leaving only smaller deposits barely worth the bits required to extract them. The train station that we briefly stop at boards and debarks only a few ponies; a far cry from a century ago when the soupfield was the main reason the entire Western Line of Equestrian Railways was built. It is no exaggeration to say that Goat War’s soup spurred both unusually rapid population growth in Equestria as well as the rapid development of the railroad industry.

The Western Line now extends far past my destination, the Pea Ridge Soupfield, to Appleloosa and the Mild West. “But why would you go to Pea Ridge?” one might ask. After all, pumping at Pea Ridge – once the second-largest soupfield in Equestria – stopped four decades ago and now it’s just another tapped out field like Goat War, isn’t it?

Perhaps not, if some ponies have their way.

Three days ago, I had just been seated at the Sandwich Sorcerer when the conversation at the table next to me began to increase in volume and enthusiasm. A quick inquiry revealed that the unicorn and pegasus sitting there were Lemon Hearts, an assistant professor at Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, and Boundary Layer, the leader of a prospecting team for Manehattan Soup and Stew Shipping, often simply called M3S. I gave my name and asked what they were so excited about.

“Spuds Turkel...you’re that reporter, aren’t you?” said the unicorn. “You should come out and take a look at what we’re doing.”

“Come out where, and doing what?” I replied.

“You know how ponies say that Pea Ridge is dead?” asked Lemon Hearts.

Boundary Layer looks straight at me and declared, “We’re bringing it back.”

Author's Note

Notes for the Prologue, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2 can be found here.