Outside the town limits, Halterdale cut out pretty quickly. Barely fifteen minutes of walking, and Aegis and I were already on the lower slopes of the mountain, surrounded by trees, with nothing more than a beaten-down dirt path to follow. Lots of ponies went to the summit, and the path was pretty much a part of the land now.
There wasn’t much to look at as we walked. Mostly trees and a few hills. No dramatic vistas just yet; we were too low. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at Aegis; his head was turning like a record as he looked this way, jaw slightly agape in mild awe. It was an expression I recognized well from certain types of tourists.“You are such a city colt,” I said with a laugh as I hiked up my saddlebags.
“Not my fault!” said Aegis as he watched a bird flit from one tree to another. “I was born in San Franpinto and grew up in Neigh Orleans. When I was a royal guard, I was never deployed in the wilderness or anything. And, I can’t really believe it, but I’ve never even gone camping. I’ve never actually been out in the country.”
“Come on. Seriously? Never went hiking or anything?”
“Nope. My family was never really an outdoorsy outdoorsy one.”
I could understand that, but something about it didn’t sit right with me. He’d been a royal guard, he shouldn’t be this impressed by the countryside, one way or another. And also- “Didn’t you say your father was a guard, too?”
Aegis was still watching the bird. I think it was some kind of woodpecker. “Yeah. Why?”
“He wasn’t the stereotypically stallionly kind? Being a royal guard is kind of the stallionliest thing you can be, so I was thinking he’d be into other stallionly stuff. You know, lumberjacking, grilling, flannel, outdoorsing.”
“Dad was weird like that,” said Aegis. “He was a guard, but aside from that, not very stallionly.” He finally tore his gaze from the woodpecker to look at me. “He was… not really wimpy, but definitely not the tough guy you’d expect to go into the Guard. He was quiet, withdrawn, kinda introverted, that sort of guy, you know?”
“Huh.” I looked at the path ahead and tilted my head this way and that, trying to figure out what would make a pony like that join the Guard. The only reason I could come up with was “to serve Equestria”, but there were plenty of other places a pony like that would probably be more useful. Even within the Guard; he didn’t have to be a soldier. Eventually, I asked Aegis, “You ever ask why he joined?”
“Nope. Didn’t think it was important. He had his own reasons for it, I never thought I needed to know.”
Bummer. Well, ponies are ponies. Maybe Aegis’s dad was a little more wild inside than he let on. “Hmm.”
After a few seconds of silence, Aegis went back to gazing at the forest. I was used to seeing a lot of trees, and by now, they were boring to me. I rarely saw anything interesting in them. But Aegis was looking at them like he’d never seen anything like them before. But then, if he was a true-blue city boy, he hadn’t. I lightly poked him in the ribs. “So what do you think of the country, city slicker?” I asked.
“It’s… it’s hard to say,” replied Aegis. “It’s just so different from what I’m used to. Like…” He raised his nose into the air and inhaled deeply. “I never noticed how much everything smells.”
“…You mean th-”
“W-well, no, I, I don’t mean it’s stinky,” Aegis said quickly. “I, I don’t usually think about smells, and there’s all sorts of them out here.” He sniffed a few more times and frowned. “Why do we barely have any words for smell?”
“Dunno,” I said, shrugging. “We don’t use it all that much.”
“Yeah, but there’s pretty much no words for smell. It’s all kinda…” Aegis waved a hoof around. “Vague.”
“Smell overall is vague to us. Maybe if we used it more, we’d have more words for it.”
“Maybe.”
Neither of us continued that line of conversation. A few moments later, I asked, “Alright, so you overall like it out here, right?”
“Sure.”
“Anything you don’t like?”
Aegis chewed his lip for a moment. “Not sure. Probably, but let me think it over.”
“Alright.”
As we kept walking, I looked sideways at Aegis. He was staring at the path a few feet in front of him. He always seemed to get really focused when thinking. It made me wonder: what did I look like when I thought? Did I zone out? Did I look into the distance? Did my look change at all? I’d never really thought about it before, if at all. It was a weird thing to think about.
Just as I realized what I was doing, I tried think about what I looked like at the moment. But I immediately grew self-conscious and the feeling was gone. Curses.
Eventually, Aegis said, “I think it’s the lack of street lamps that gets me. We took a few steps outside town, and there was nothing between there and here. How do you see at night?”
I shrugged. “Directed light gems and firefly lanterns. The usual, you know? Everypony has them out here. Barely anypony’s traveling between towns at night, so who’d want to waste time every evening and morning lighting and extinguishing lamps almost nopony would need?”
“Well, it’s… it’s way too dark for me. I like light.”
I snorted. Aegis was definitely a city colt, through and through. Darkness was perfectly normal out here. “It’s not that bad. There’s streetlights in the actual towns. The moon and stars provide a decent amount of light. And if the moon is full, or even close to full, you don’t need any other lights at all.”
“Really?”
“Not even close. The full moon is bright. It might not be as clear as day, but you can see stuff just fine.”
Aegis looked skeptical. “It’s… There’s no way it can be…”
“Oh, come on, Aegis! Think about it! The moon might not be as bright as the sun, but it’s about the same size. That means a lot of light.”
“Well…” said Aegis, “well, yeah, but, but the, the moon being full doesn’t make any difference in the city.”
“Of course it doesn’t,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You’re in the city, where every square inch is illuminated with at least three different lightbulbs. You’re not going to see any difference there. Out here…” I waved a hoof around. “You only have the moon, stars, and your own eyes adjusting to darkness to see by.”
“It… I…” Aegis looked over his shoulder at the eastern horizon, where the moon would come up eventually. “Okay, fine. You can see by the light of the moon.”
It was obvious from his tone that he was only saying that to shut me up. Yeesh. Really a city colt. I was used to the moon being bright, but was it really that hard to believe? It wasn’t like I was telling him it was bright as day. “Look, when the moon rises, you can see it then. It’s supposed to be full tonight.”
“I, um, don’t think I’ll be able to.” Aegis rubbed the back of his neck and looked away. “I’ll, I’ll probably need to leave before then.”
I blinked. “Oh. Train. Right.” Stupid time limit. I’d forgotten all about it. We’d have time to be done before then, but still. Bleh.
Ahead of us, the path divided into two. One side went more-or-less straight to the mountain’s summit, the other off to the side. I knew from experience that the other one went to the summit, too; it just took a bit longer. “So,” I said, “which way do you want to go? Straight to the top-” I pointed to the shorter path. “-or the scenic route?” I pointed to the longer one.
Aegs looked back and forth between the two. I noticed he tended to look at the longer path a bit more. After a moment, he said, “We’ll be able to be back in time either way, right?”
“Sure. Take the scenic route, we get to the summit just in time for sunset, take the shorter path down, get to the train station just in time.”
“Then I say we go for the longer path,” Aegis said, setting off down it. “We’re here to talk, and this way’ll keep us moving and talking at the same time.”
“About what I was thinking,” I said as I followed him. “More or less.”
Aegis looked over his shoulder at me and grinned. “We’re really on the same wavelength, aren’t we?”
“Duh. We both agreed to come here for the same reasons.”
“Come on, quit taking the fun out of this.”