A mare and her dog

by cammera

Night 18: As metal rusts

Minotaurs.

Tartarus damned minotaurs.

The metal clanked under her hooves.

Tartarus damned minotaurs making every single little thing with metal.

The bridge waved gently, bubbles made of metal and glass keeping it afloat. Rather than a single structure, it was a series of individual sections attached loosely to one another, kept a meter or two above the water itself by the bubbles and thick metal bars. Only minotaurs could make a structure so heavy float with glass of all things.

Considering everything it was in remarkable conditions, likely good enough to be usable if someone managed to shoo the moles away.

A breeze made the rusted structure whine in a high pitch. After a few hundred liters of oil, of course.

She reached a new section (Each was around twenty meters long, and the river seemed to be around the two hundred meters wide) and as if reading her thoughts, it instantly fell a few centimeters lower, almost making her fall on her face. She cursed and peeked down to the river. One of the bubbles was broken, leaving the other five a few centimeters under the water rather than with their upper parts in the air.

She looked up, scanning for any rocs that could've been attracted by her lantern, and after finding none kept walking.

-º-

On the other side of the bridge was a carriage, broken in two by a tree. She walked to the tree's base and found that yes, there were several holes near its roots.

Winona growled, and she tensed immediately. There was a rustling of leaves, but she couldn't catch sight of anything.

They tried to follow the source of sound, but it vanished after a moment, and Winona stopped growling. Still, her ears remained erected in tension, and her tail's movement when Applejack gave her a pat in the head was unenthusiastic at best.

Applejack shook her head angrily and kept walking, and was soon followed by Winona. Being still for too long was just looking for troubles.

-º-

Perhaps at gunpoint and against her hopes, the minotaurs hadn't made the vacations resort itself of metal, but wood.

However, what they found was, surprisingly, what seemed to be a floating metal cube, fussed to the small port with decades' worth of rust. She gave the boat a tentative kick and, when it didn't fall to pieces, climbed its stairs.

The interior, while rusty, was safe enough to traverse, and in the cabin a note reminded the ship's owner that what the engine needed was a perisplopapic taredel, whatever that was. Applebloom probably knew.

A short wave of homesickness hit her, but she walked out of the cabin and down to the engine room, where she picked up a few tools clearly designed for hands and in need of oil. It'd make a good gift, if only decorative.

With that done, they went to a room and barricaded its door, not wanting to find out what had made the tingles or rustled the leaves in the worst possible way. She extended her mat over the ground and Winona hopped to the old, rotten coach nonchalantly, and they slept.

Comments

[Aatxe360]

Getting curious about the backstories to these settings. I know it won't be part of this story, but still; interesting.