SS&E's Lemurific Box of Pretense and Prose

by shortskirtsandexplosions

February 2016 - Cotton Fluff - The Last Geologist

Author's Note at Bottom of Page - Read Last

Ash and snow danced across the plateau of dull dead stone, stretching dark and gray from horizon to horizon, as far as anypony could see, as far as only she could see.

She sighed, her eyes thinning as they were encompassed once more by the perpetual grayness of that monochromatic world before her. A hint of moisture sprang from the trembling edges, but they cleared in a huff as the deadpan pony stood up straight and brushed a fuzzy fetlock over her violet optics. With a toss of silken tresses, she shuffled forward into that enigmatic expanse of emptiness, undaunted by the desolation that hounded her from all sides, scuffing her sensitive skin with serrated tongues of grit and grain.

In a miserable march, she lurched forward, drawn in a single cardinal direction that she couldn't name—but nevertheless had to follow—like a moth to a flame, or an abandoned dragonling desirous of the warm embrace of its mother's soft scales, but never to find that satiating comfort no matter how much it sought or soured.

"Alas, we are doomed, boulder," Maud Pie murmured, her eyes and cheekbones as straight as the lifeless plane enveloping her nubile figure. "The Wasteland stretches as far as any mortal can see... any mortal chiefly being me, for all others have surely perished in this grim deathscape of epic proportions, a malevolent fate brought upon us by a cataclysm of astronomical proportion that no sane equine had the common sense to predict much less provide a viable solution to."

Rock in hoof, Maud shuffled over piles of ash, through forests of jagged limestone buttes, and across arid fields of hexagonically spaced sand clusters. The heartless sky bubbled black above her, undulating with onyx clouds of obsidian misery and mahogany decay. Upon the fringes of a dead continent, skeletal rock formations formed fossilized figments in a formulative fashion.

"All I can see are the ghosts of civilization all around us," Maud murmured. "Taunting us like spectrals of the once-warm past, full of mirth and ignorant bliss. They are not unlike pebbles lying on a beach, freshly exposed for a singular gasp of hope before the inevitable tsunami consumes all the surf that has receded and the unsuspecting dry land beyond."

She paused in her march to gaze at the dull gray rock in her dull gray grasp.

"You are my one and only friend, Boulder," she droned. "After all, are we not all like rocks? Every single one of us, from our founding forbears to the last pony: lost pieces of a gravel sea that's been piling up like sediment since the dismal dawn of time. We've brushed up against one another, smoothing out our rough edges, yes, but in the end we are only good for making up a helpless, abandoned, forsaken sea bed of lost dreams, the vague vestiges of a society that didn't live long enough to die with a modicum of honor in tact."

A continental shelf rested before her, wide and gaping, full of howling wind carrying debris from the far corners of a dead and dying world.

"All rivers have dried up, Boulder, replaced by ravines full of screaming cyclones. For the only thing that stands to be animated in this environment of ennui is something mad, wild, unpredictable." Maud's eyes slowly blinked. "Chaos reigned in the beginning, and here—at the end of all ending—it reigns supreme once more. But it might as well be so. There is nothing left that lives to count the erratic lines between that which is order and that which is disorder... nothing save for me, the last pony, the end of geologists(™), alive now but forever unsung before the grand gasp of slain tepid time."

Boulder said nothing. There was no cause to. Thunder rolled in the distance, bringing flashes of deathlight to the evergray. The ground shook, and a fine curtain of dust lifted up, only to briefly kiss the mare's soft fetlocks and fall again with a ghastly gasp of soundless silence.

"My stomach growls, Boulder, but for what?" Maud limped along, coughing every now and then amidst the melancholic meter of her mundane monologue. "Cursed is the body that makes us thirst and hunger for that which is forever lost before it can even be found. Since the dawn of time, everything has been dying—everything save for the equine spirit, a festering parasprite imprisoned within the heart that pleads for sustenance and then punishes the mind and spirit once the soul recognizes that all things—not just some—are hopelessly unattainable. Just a bite of bread... just a nibble of pebble kibble... and I would be sustained, but to what end? Another second... another minute... another hour spent wandering the widths and breadths of this dreaded dead fetusscape that our masochist of a mother earth has miscarried? And to what end must I wander, and for want of what must I desire beyond the morsel of mortality's yearning?"

Her every step grew heavier and limper. One shuddering sigh after another, Maud's fuzzy belly was drawn towards the dusty stone earth below. Soon, she was crawling on all fours, shuffling and shimmying forward on her belly like a blue-gray serpent, encumbered by her emptiness and maligned by her musings.

"Oh untimely death," she muttered. "Now is the geological weathering of our discontent turned to glorious subsidence by this cataclysmic eclipse of existentialist angst. I have wrestled with death; it is the most unexciting clump of rocks you can imagine, full of igneous and fury, signifying nothing. Life is but a stage and we are all boulders in the background, Boulder. And so it came to pass that this world ended with a whimper instead of a bang, and oh how I wish that I could slouch towards my rock collection to be born." She turned to look at her pet rock, nuzzling him close. "I am glad to be here with you, Boulder. Here at the end of all things... but mostly rocks."

Her eyes closed.

Dead silence.

More silence...

...and then.

Maud's muzzle flew open with a gasp: "But let us not forget: to besalt or not to besalt. That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the magma to subsidize the slade and amethyst of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a slab of tribolyte fossils." She sputtered and wheezed. "To slag... perhaps to dredge: ay, there's the rubble. The undiscovered concrete from whose bucket no tektite returns. Alas, poor essexite. I knew it, Boulder." She coughed and spat. "I've... seen things you pebbles wouldn't believe. Abyssal plains on fire off the shoulders of oceanic trenches. I watched silcrete glitter in the dacite near tectonic plates."

She gazed up at the cloudy heavens, her muzzle specked with flakes of ash. Her eyelids hung heavy as she gargled on her own tapering breaths.

"All of those... metasilicates will be lost in time... like... nnngh... trachyte in retrograde metamorphism." At last, her eyes rolled back, and she cuddled Boulder close as she issued her last breath. "Time to drill..."

Maud lay limp... and limper...

...then...

"Maud?!" An adult mare's voice rang across the rock farm. "Maud Concepcion Pie, come in already!"

A little gray filly's eyes fluttered open. Hugging Boulder to her chest, the tiny foal stood up from where she lay atop an ordinary pile of rocks in the middle of a fenced-in yard. "But mother," she droned, facing west across the gravel fields. "Boulder and I are exploring the existential reaches of an apocalyptic wasteland following an inexplicable cataclysm through the gratuitous use of purple prose."

"Well, you can do that after you've eaten two bowls of rock soup!" Mrs. Pie called out from the kitchen door. She adjusted her bifocals and hollered, "Now come in already and wash up! Or else Limestone is going to soak up all of the sweet broth ahead of you!"

She turned around and slammed the door shut.

The echoing clap resonated against the farmland. The windmill high above turned, teetered, then stopped with a muted groan.

Maud exhaled. "Well, Boulder, I suppose we could be rebellious and continue our brazen escapade into poetry and quasi-philosophical monologues."

Silence.

"But that would make mother mad." She lifted Boulder up to her muzzle. "What do you think?"

The rock was silent under the gray farmland sky.

"Hmmmm..." Maud nodded. "You are correct. I too am hungry for some of mother's delicious rock soup." She slid the pebble into her pocket and shuffled slowly... slowly towards the farmhouse. "It's a good thing that I have your wisdom and steadfast reason to rely on, Boulder," she murmured. "Goddess forbid if someday I gave into the impulsive whimsy of my uncontrollably wild imagination."

Silence.

Maud was barely a third of the way to her front door.

"Just shout if I'm moving too quickly, Boulder," she dribbled. "I do not want you flying out of my pocket because of how fast I'm galloping."

Author's Note:

User: Cotton Fluff
Prompt: In a wasteland landscape, the only survivors were Maud Pie and her pet Boulder. She trots across the wasteland on a rough and tumble adventure where boulder is the only one she has to talk to (like Wilson from cast away) and she has to survive in harsh conditions in the remnants of her broken down old farm. Tired and close to the end, her tummy growling in hunger she lay in the dirt staring at a grey sky the color of her coat, she fades away too tired to go on anymore. Then her Mom calls Dinner from the porch and a young Maud Pie crawls out of the dirt with her pet rock to go eat dinner with her family.

Comments

[Cotton Fluff]

Now just imagine Maud saying all her dialogue. You'll be there for a while

This was great

[FanOfMostEverything]

This is far too amusing for its own good, especially the geology puns. Good God, the geology puns.

[Sharp Quill]

the end of geologists(™),

ponybot.net/pix/1206.jpg

alive now but forever unsung

[Paleobrony]

Maud's geological channelling of Flankspeare is just too wonderful for words! Bravo!

[Booster Spice]

I suspect this wouldnt be an episode, even though it certainly deserves to be.

[berrytone]

Holy alliteration, Batman!

[Fana Farouche]

What a well read pony.

OK, this is the chapter that takes this collection from thumbed up, to faved.

[QueenMoriarty]

Much pun. Utter hilarity.

[HiddenMaster]

Probably one of the best uses of comedic and excessive prose I've seen on this site with a wonderful hilarious twist at the end.