After taking several measurements and soil samples, Candela was able to locate the most stable spot for us to begin our excavations. She was confident in her abilities, but still worry was etched across her face. While the most capable of us dug, she glanced nervously out over the lava.
The pegasus mare, whose name I’d found out was Elevon, flew small circles around our island, almost like a vulture waiting for its prey to die. She brought news of survivors that had climbed the other mountain peak, and how they were close to being swallowed up.
There was nothing we could do for them, and I kept my head down, trying to ignore the anguished cries for help. My hooves were killing me, so I decided to take a break. Candela approached me as I sat under one of the wilting apple trees.
“You must keep working, there’s only so much time,” she said, trying to push me back onto my hooves. I was far too exhausted to move, and she wasn’t nearly strong enough to make me.
“Look, my hooves are literally bleeding,” I said, holding up my cracked hooves. “We need some tools or something, or some MORE HELP.” I raised my voice in hopes that Crumpet or Hailstorm might hear me. Since Hailstorm had awoken, he’d done nothing but mope about the loss of his wing. And Crumpet was just being Crumpet.
“Tools? You mean, like, a pickaxe?” Candela asked.
“Uh, yeah,” I said impatiently. I thought that a pony as smart as her would have realized this, and maybe even built us a few by now.
“I need materials,” she said, looking around the mountaintop. “I’ll need a workbench, and wood, sticks, anything you can find!”
“Cobble!” I shouted for the large stallion. He poked his head out of the pit and looked around until he saw me beckoning to him. His fur was matted with filth and his mane was drenched with sweat, but he didn’t seem tired at all.
“Yes boss?” he asked as he approached me.
“Don’t call me boss,” I said, not wanting the title. “Candela needs you to get her some things, can you help?”
“Sure can, boss!” Cobble Crusher replied happily. “What do you need first?”
“Knock this tree down,” Candela replied, indicating to the tree I was leaning against. I barely had time to move before Cobble Crusher obeyed the order, bringing the tree down with one kick from his powerful hind legs. Using her magic, Candela constructed herself a modest workbench with some of the wood. “Now until we find more suitable materials, the picks will be made out of stone. I calculate you can get roughly 132 swings from each.”
132 sounded like more than enough swings, so I brought her three of the largest chunks of rock I could find. I watched as she meticulously shaped the rocks into one pickaxe head and secured it to a handle using her magic. While the others waited for theirs to be made, I set to mining.
Grasping the pickaxe with my front hooves and balancing on my rear hooves, I was able to bring the pick axe down hard enough to make a sizable crack in the ground. One by one, the others joined me, and together we started making considerable progress. Hell, even Crumpet tried to help out.
“Step out of the way, you dirty earth ponies, and behold the power of a unicorn.” Crumpet levitated a pickaxe in her cream colored aura and swung it at the ground. It buried deep into the rock and refused to budge when she tried to bring it back up. She strained her magic as hard she could, but simply couldn’t dislodge the pickaxe.
“If you can’t bring dat pick up, how you gonna stop dis storm?” Zan asked. Crumpet ignored him and trotted out of the pit with her nose in the air.
“She’s something, ain’t she?” Toadstool asked, approaching the pickaxe. He grabbed it with his hooves and pulled back with all his might. Slowly, the head of the pickaxe wedged free, and we got our first bit of luck. “Hey, what’s this orange-ish stuff?”
The rest of us gathered around and watched as Toadstool scraped up large deposits of the orange-red material. “Candela!” I shouted out of the pit. “We’ve got something!”
The unicorn jumped down into the pit and pushed through the others. “Excellent, you’ve found some iron!” She squinted through her broken glasses at the ores and grinned. “And it’s high in hematite! This is perfect! Get me all of it!”
We worked to ensure not an ounce of the iron was left behind, and were left with a sizeable pile of the ore. “So how are you going to make this into pickaxes?” I asked.
“I’ll need a crude blast furnace and a fuel source,” she said, looking around at the makeshift workshop Cobble Crusher had constructed her. “We have to conserve what little wood we have, just keep digging until you find some coal.”
“You can’t just use the lava?” Toadstool asked. “I mean, there’s plenty of it.”
“Right, am I supposed to just go get a bucket of it?” The unicorn’s annoyed sarcasm really hurt Toadstool’s ego, and he returned back to the pit. “You know what coal is, right?” she shouted after him. “It’s black and lumpy!”
“I think he knows,” I said, putting my hoof on the mare’s shoulder.
Elevon swooped down to join the group and she hung her head low with her ears back. “The other island is sinking,” she said. The cries that we’d been ignoring were suddenly blood curdling. Crumpet and Dandelion moved to the other side of our island so they wouldn’t have to watch. Hailstorm remained where he was though, watching with some sort of sick pleasure as the helpless ponies circled around their shrinking island. Final Hour hadn’t budged since my conversation with him. Though he could not see, he stared out for the duration of the ponies’ incineration.
“You couldn’t have brought them here?” I asked.
“It’s better that she didn’t,” Final Hour stated. “At least for them, it’s over now.”
The old stallion’s pessimistic comment put me into a rage and I grabbed a new pickaxe. I jumped into the pit with Zan, Cobble Crusher, and Toadstool, and together we mined in silence.
Cobble Crusher flew through pickaxes faster than me, Zan, and Toadstool combined. On top of that, he brought the wagon of rocks up and down the spiral ramp we’d carved along the sides. I just didn’t have the endurance, and finally sat to rest.
“Hey! I’ve got some coal over here!” Toadstool shouted as he unearthed some of the black gold. We excitedly went to help him, but noticed something bad almost immediately; the wall he’d been mining near was radiating heat.
“Stop!” I shouted, holding his pickaxe back. “We’re too close to the wall!” You could literally hear the lava bubbling on the other side of the rock. Toadstool lowered his pickaxe and stared at the coal longingly.
“Just one piece,” he begged. “Just one piece to show I’m not useless.”
“We know you ain’t useless,” Zan said, patting Toadstool on the shoulder. “Take a break and check up on dat sistah of yours.”
Toadstool wiped the sweat from his forehead and dropped his pickaxe to the ground. Zan and I watched as he slowly trudged up the ramp, passing Cobble Crusher on the way.
The three of us continued mining and were quite surprised when Hailstorm and Elevon came down with their own pickaxes. The pegasi watched us work for several moments before actually raising their pickaxes. It was apparent they knew nothing about mining, what with spending most of their lives up in the clouds.
“So is this something you earth ponies do for fun?” Hailstorm asked, stopping to rest after a couple minutes of labor. None of us answered him, so he leaned on the handle of his pickaxe and began sizing us up.
I tried to ignore him as I mined, focusing on the swings of my pickaxe. One twenty-nine, one thirty, one thirty-one, one thirty— The head of the pickaxe crumbled to dust on my one hundred thirty second swing, just as Candela said it would. I looked up to see Hailstorm leaning on his pickaxe, looking over at me.
“You want this?” he asked. Had he not brought it over to me, I would have likely just walked up to the surface for a new one. Besides, it was hotter than Hell down in that hole. We’d dug a good couple hundred feet, and could hear the lava bubbling on all sides.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the pickaxe from him. He stood over me as I began counting my swings again.
“Word from the others is you’re a storm rider,” he said.
“I’m THE Storm Rider, yes” I replied. Thunder rumbled from above and I nearly had a heart attack, thinking it was the walls about to cave in. Crumpet’s shrill voice traveled to the bottom of the pit and she came waddling down the walkway.
“The lava is getting higher! You must hurry!” she shouted to us. Candela was the next to appear, and she shared in Crumpet’s urgency.
“Several more lava spouts just appeared, putting a major strain on our timeline!” she shouted.
“Well then why aren’t you two down here helping us then?!” Hailstorm shouted up angrily. “You’re more useless than the earth ponies!”
“Let’s not go makin’ dis about race,” Zan said, turning to look at Hailstorm with his piercing red eyes. The pegasus instantly shut up and pretended to work. Toadstool returned with a new pickaxe and jumped in to help. We were breaking up so much stone that Cobble Crusher had to devote himself to bringing it up to the surface.
We sweat and moaned as we worked in the inferno, but at long last the temperature started to drop. “I think we’re below the base now!” I shouted over the clanking of pickaxes.
“No, no!” Candela shouted. “The mountain is simply widening, we have to go deeper!”
I swung my pickaxe as hard as I could and the stone at my hooves broke open, revealing a deposit of coal. Using the head of my pickaxe, I scraped out a few lumps of the black substance. “Candela, take these!” I shouted. She galloped over to me and her eyes lit up when she eyed the coal.
“Mine it all and help me get it to the surface!” She threw a burlap bag on the ground and began levitating the lumps through the opening. I furiously worked away at the vein until the bag could hold no more. “Now quickly, come with me!” She levitated the bag and ran for the ramp.
“Shouldn’t I be down here mining?” I asked, still swinging my pickaxe.
“I need your assistance!” she shouted down. She’d already made it a quarter of the way out of the pit, and I dropped my pickaxe to follow her. Hailstorm took my spot and began mining the rest of the coal from the vein.
The first thing I did after climbing out of the pit was take a deep breath of what I hoped would be fresh air. The smell of stone dust and body odor from the pit had been absolutely nauseating, but the air above ground was thick with smog. I coughed and hacked before I could catch my breath.
And then I realized just how close to annihilation we were. The lava was now less than two feet from the crest of the mountain. If Cobble Crusher’s wall actually held, we had an additional three feet. Dandelion, not wanting to feel useless, had been carefully moving the piles of rocks Cobble Crusher brought out of the pit.
Final Hour still stared out at the lava, his beard blowing wildly in the wind. One of the most haunting images I still hold from the whole experience is him, just staring calmly out into that fiery ocean. I ran to Candela’s “laboratory” and watched as she dumped the coal into a crudely constructed blast furnace.
“We only have enough iron to make one pickaxe, so we can’t mess this up,” she said, using her magic to light the coal. Electrical sparks flew her horn and eventually the coal began glowing and giving off heat. She tossed in the chunks of iron we’d mined earlier and we waited for it to melt. Slowly, the orange-ish lumps began to melt into a shiny, silver liquid. In total, the lumps filled the tray three times, and it took three trays to fill the pickaxe head mould.
Once it was cooled, Candela took the pickaxe head and attached it carefully to a handle she’d specially prepared. “Get this to Cobble Crusher,” Candela said, passing me the pickaxe. I took it in my teeth and turned just in time to see the red stallion making his way out of the pit with a cartload of rocks.
I galloped up to him with the new tool and set it at his hooves. He looked down at it and smiled. “That’s more like it,” he said, dumping his load of rocks. Another crash of thunder rumbled across the landscape and several more pillars of lava started pouring down.
“We’ve got to go!” Candela shouted. She levitated her workbench and all her materials into Cobble’s cart and looked around to see if she’d forgotten anything. “Storm! Get Dandelion and Final Hour, we’ll meet you down there!”
The pregnant mare made her way slowly over to me, but the old stallion didn’t budge. “You hear that Fin? We’re going!” I shouted, using his abbreviated name. A wave of lava crashed up against the wall and small little embers rained down around the stallion. He may have been dead before I left him there; he just might have died and forgotten to fall down. I shielded my eyes against the wind and ash as I led Dandelion to the pit. I glanced back one more time at Final Hour, forever burning the image in my memory.