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// Chapter 3: Discovery 
// Story: Life in the Wasteland 
// by NorsePony 
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       I had drawn third watch with Anvil and Sarge, so as I sipped a cup of hot broth to fight the chill, I had the small pleasure of hearing the Wasteland’s night sounds fade away as the unseen things in the dark hid from the oncoming dawn. Celestia’s sun peeped over the rolling flatlands to the east, throwing long shadows against the low hills to the west. I squinted at the sun as the glowstick faded out behind me, grateful for the connection to Equestria. Searching the horizon near Celestia’s sun, I was able to pick out the old sun, now scarcely more than another bright star. When I was a foal, it had been larger, perhaps half the size of Luna’s moon, and I had heard stories of the old days, when that tiny dot had been the one and only sun. The cataclysmic energies of the End had broken the sky as well as the earth—the moon had vanished and the sun grew dimmer and weaker year by year. Even the stars had come unstuck and began drifting across the sky, though some more quickly than others. After the Shield fell, the changes were all too obvious, or so my parents had told me. Finally the faded sun had become too weak to grow healthy crops, so Celestia and Luna had drawn upon the power below Equestria to create a new sun and a new moon to replace those the End had cost us. Each day, they moved the new bodies around the planet, giving us light even out here in the Wasteland. I liked it this way.
       I took another sip of broth and caught a glint of light out of the corner of my eye. Anvil had gotten an acorn-sized chunk of crystal from somewhere and was levitating it, peering through it at the sun. It shattered the sunlight into fragments of rainbows and sparkling motes that danced over his broad head, shaggy mane, and delighted smile. I carefully surveyed my arc of watch territory, then let my curiosity take me to Anvil. “What’s that crystal?”
       “A trinket I acquired from a friend. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
       I nodded. It was that. “Where did it come from?”
       “Have you heard that the mountain near Equestria was reclaimed?”
       My eyebrows went up. “I hadn’t. When was this?” The mountain was a craggy, conical spire that towered over both its neighbors and the Equestrian plains that the Shield had preserved. The mountain had not existed before the End, so it had been a subject of intense curiosity for decades.
       “Just a few weeks ago. The Front finally covered it a while back, and an exploration team found it empty of creatures.” He lowered the crystal and beamed proudly at me, as though the reclamation of the mountain was entirely his doing. “Progress, Shepherd! We’re doing it!”
       I couldn’t help but grin. Anvil was easy to like. A blacksmith by trade, he was bluff and straightforward. I allowed his words to dive down into that hidden place in my belly where I kept my anger, fear, and frustration. We’re doing it. It was a soothing balm for yesterday and so many yesterdays before it. “We are. Little by little. I take it your crystal came from the mountain?”
       “Just so. It seems that there are natural caves in the guts of the mountain, miles and miles of them, the team said, and just filled with these lovely crystals. They hacked off a few to bring back for testing, and my friend secured a little souvenir for me, knowing my fondness for beautiful things. Look how it shines in the light.” The crystal moved in the air, levitating over to me. Anvil nodded at me, smiling. “Be careful, it’s heavier than it looks.”
       As it approached, my magic sense tingled a faint, unfamiliar message. I frowned at the crystal in puzzlement and cautiously lifted a hoof to hold it. When I touched it, my eyes widened in shock. The crystal had magic inside it. I had almost not recognized that it held a charge, because it felt like nothing I had ever sensed. I hefted it, finding that it was so light that it seemed fragile. It had felt heavy to Anvil because he was having to use extra magic to levitate it, not realizing that the crystal was absorbing much of what he was touching it with.
       Anvil tilted his head at me. “What is it, Shepherd?”
       “This crystal stores magic.”
       He blinked. “Like the Seed?”
       “Like the Seed.” I turned that over in my head. The Princesses had to labor intensely to make a single Seed. What possibilities would become available with an abundant supply of natural magical storage? This deserved investigation. I set the crystal on the ground and stepped back. “Try charging it like the glowstick. But, uh, step back. In case it explodes or something.”
       He looked at me curiously, but nodded. He backed up and concentrated. I found that after holding the crystal, I could recognize its signature more easily, but it was still very faint. I closed my eyes and focused on it, listening with my whole body.
       Where the glowstick with its leaky magic felt like drawing in a breath but never exhaling, the crystal held tightly to the charge, feeling like prodigious lungs holding a breath in preparation for a mighty shout. Anvil continued to expend magic, and the crystal continued to drink it, its charge growing and growing more. It was deeply strange to me that the crystal wasn’t taking on Anvil’s signature when it was holding his magic. The feel of the magic inside was somehow clear and uncolored. Perhaps the crystal was returning the magic to a completely raw state? Such a phenomenon was entirely outside my experience. I knew Doc would be fascinated.
       After a minute, I opened my eyes to stare at the crystal. The sensation I was receiving from it had not changed one iota. It continued to draw power as readily as ever, despite now holding a charge sufficient to cast a powerful spell. How much could it hold? I glanced up and met Anvil’s eyes, which looked just as surprised as I felt. “Give it more,” I whispered.
       Wordlessly, he increased his flow. Anvil’s fire magic was, so I was told, the most basic of fire spells. His ability to manifest blast-furnace heat from such a commonplace spell came from his ability to gather spectacular quantities of magic to channel into the spell. In Equestria, he used his specialty magic in his blacksmithing. He had no need of a forge fire—he could heat metal hotter than any furnace. He channeled magic into the crystal like he was forging steel, and still the crystal devoured it. I felt the magic flowing through him, his vast buffer being filled and drained simultaneously as he pumped magic out of himself as fast as he could.
       Ten minutes we stood like that, Anvil blowing and sweating from the strain, but with an iron-hard look of determination on his face. I glanced back and forth between him and the crystal, wondering which would break first. Then between one heartbeat and the next, the feeling of the crystal changed. It stopped accepting magic all at once, as sudden and decisive as an infant turning away from the teat. “Stop!” I cried.
       Anvil stopped, but not before a blast of fire flashed up around the crystal. I flinched away from its heat and light, then whipped back, hoping the crystal had not been damaged. Flames danced on the ground, blocking sight, but I breathed a sigh of relief as I felt the crystal still humming with energy. More energy than I’d ever felt in one place aside from a Seed. It was eye-watering in its power. It must have been holding an entire day’s worth of magic.
       At that thought I glanced up in fear. Anvil was looking down haughtily at the crystal, triumph on his face. As I watched, his knees wobbled and gave out, sending him unceremoniously to the ground. He rolled his eyes up to me. “I think I’ll be needing the Seed again,” he observed dryly.

       An hour later, the squad was packed up and ready to march. Anvil had been recharged and Sarge had been belatedly filled in on why one of the watch had suddenly collapsed. He’d read us the riot act, but was somewhat mollified by Doc’s very vocal interest in the crystal. She had thoroughly interviewed Anvil and myself about our impromptu experiment, taking copious notes all the while.
       When the interviews were completed, Doc shut the notebook with a flourish, pumped magic into her horn, and dissected a hapless rock. She picked up the crystal with a hoof, closing her eyes in concentration. She nodded. “It seems to refill one’s magical stores the same way a Seed does. Interesting.” She set it back down and thoughtfully added a note to her book. “That in itself will make these crystals useful. I wonder, though…” She glanced up, her eyes holding the girlish glee that was nowhere else on her face. "Shepherd, come here. Monitor the object for any change."
       Sarge checked the position of the sun, his mouth set in an impatient line. “You’ve got ten minutes, Doc.” She gave no sign that she’d heard.
       She might have been breathing a little faster as she leaned forward over the crystal. Perhaps her lips were parted in anticipation. Maybe I was only imagining it from her posture. I knew better than to ask anything about what she expected. She was in her element, and science was more important than talking. I hid a smile as I nodded agreement to her order and focused on the crystal.
       I felt her gathering magic like a paper cut in my brain, and then there was a curious feeling. She was expending the accumulated magic, but in the merest trickle, so delicately she might have been painting with a single hair. I tried to ignore it and concentrated on the crystal. Occasionally it wiggled just enough to stir a few particles of dust into the air, but otherwise nothing happened. Doc began to sweat, droplets making their way down her furrowed brow. Minutes passed. I heard Hook’s big hooves shuffling impatiently behind me.
       Then I found myself flat on my rump and blind as a bat. I realized that most of the squad was crying out in distress and surprise. I panicked for a dozen accelerated heartbeats, then realized that my vision was returning. I was just well and truly dazzled, not blind. I let my breath hiss out in relief. “Doc?”
       Through the haze of my returning vision, I could see that Doc’s eyes were very wide and she was blinking rapidly. “Yes, Shepherd?”
       “There was a change in the object.”
       She frowned disapprovingly in my general direction. “Thank you, Shepherd.”

       Thankfully, our vision didn’t seem permanently harmed by the intense light the crystal had given off, and while we were recovering, Sarge had stern words for Doc about testing potentially hazardous objects in the field. I’ll never know how she did it, but Doc convinced him that the crystal posed no potential danger now that she’d discovered what it could do. That reasoning seemed a bit flimsy to me, but I figured that Doc valued her hide about as much as experimenting with her new toy, and that meant there would be no explosions. Probably.
Soon enough, we could see again and were ready for the day’s march. Before giving the order, Sarge came to me. “What’s our heading, Shepherd?”
       On a normal day, I would have had a heading ready for him, but Doc and the crystal had occupied my attention. I closed my eyes and stood still and silent, listening downwards with my magic sense. The rest of the squad cooperated by practically holding their breath. I felt it. Far below, deep in the earth. The ghost of magic, barely there, like a hoofprint covered in snow or the lingering smell of last week's dinner. It was the remains of a ley line, the bloodless veins of a dead world. I listened harder, taking in every meager bit of information it had to offer. Finally, I opened my eyes. “We're still atop it. It continues to the west, but begins curving to the north in the next few miles. I'll need to take regular soundings to ensure we stay on course.”
       Sarge nodded, then set off westward at a steady pace. He called the order over his shoulder. “Squad, march!”

       The day passed uneventfully. We followed the ley line through rising foothills that lay like a rough lake around the feet of cruelly steep mountains to the north of our course. Dusk found us encamped at the blunt peak of one of the hills. I drew first shift and the night was practically silent by Wasteland standards. It would have been peaceful too, if I hadn't overheard Doc and Sarge having a quiet, intense conversation about how best to fight or avoid the chitinous creatures.
       When I finished my watch, my sleep was troubled by dreams of black spines and shining white fangs in a smiling mouth.