//------------------------------// // Darknesses - Warden // Story: Operation Westhorse // by PropMaster //------------------------------// She flew deep into the night. Some kind of manic energy drove Rainbow Dash forward far after the sun had dipped beyond the western horizon. So onward she flew, using senses other than sight to guide her path. There was no moon tonight, and what faint glimmer of starlight there was did nothing to illuminate the terrain far beneath her wings. Flying blindly, Rainbow Dash was still aware of her general direction and the currents of the winds, yet, as she continued onward, she encountered a patch of still air. The prevailing winds had calmed, and for several minutes she had to put significant effort into maintaining her altitude. She paused, hovering for a moment to assess her situation, and realized now with a sudden intensity that she was exhausted. It was time to land and rest. She began a slow, careful descent through the darkness, senses hyper-aware for sudden shifts in air currents, but she felt almost nothing in the air around her to give her clues as to the terrain beneath her. Then, suddenly, the winds picked up again. She was overwhelmed by the speed and intensity of the change. Sound assailed her as the wind built into a gale and then just as swiftly calmed again. She was buffeted by several more gusts as she neared the ground, but while the unpredictable winds made it more difficult to fly, they also gave her clues about the ground beneath her: wind whistled through stone in the distance, plants beneath her brushed against their surroundings, and the scattering of tiny updrafts told her how close she was to the ground. It was enough, barely, to make a landing in unseen territory possible. The landing was still difficult, and a surprising downdraft made Rainbow Dash land harder than she intended. Some kind of large, loose gravel shifted beneath her hooves as she touched down, and, for a moment, Rainbow Dash lost her footing and began to slide down some unseen slope. Rainbow Dash wouldn’t have any of that, however, and she cut the slide short by grinding her hooves hard into the stones and fanned her wings to halt her forward motion. Rocks continued to tumble past her as Rainbow Dash crouched in the darkness, ready to leap back into the air if the ground shifted unexpectedly again, but after the brief mishap the space around her seemed stable once more. The rocks beneath her hooves were strangely irregular as she took a few cautious steps: some were sharp and jagged, others hard and brittle, still others almost powdery. It was a bizarre mix of sensations still further confounded when her next step landed on a much larger stone surface. Yet even this rock had a confusing texture to it: hard, yet pocked with countless holes and almost granular in feeling. She could feel small chunks of the rock coming free as she tested it further with a hoof. It was brittle and weak. Rainbow Dash considered taking wing again and attempting to find some more hospitable, or at least comfortable, location for her bed for the night, but a wave of exhaustion flooded into her at the thought. What was the point? In this pitch blackness she would as likely find a worse spot as a better one, if one even existed. She could make due by clearing a space of the more jagged and uncomfortable stones before wrapping herself up in her blanket. She positioned herself to use the larger stone as a windbreak against the inconsistent gusts. Dawn would only be a few hours away in any case, and then she could make a proper assessment of her location. ## When Rainbow Dash opened her eyes, she was still surrounded by darkness. It was just past dawn. The sun shone down directly on her, and yet everything around her was covered in black. The stones beneath her, and that larger rock she had huddled next to as a windbreak, everything she could see in every direction from where she stood, they were all variations on the theme of black. Everything in the vicinity looked as if it had been burned, yet as Rainbow Dash inhaled deeply, searching for the telltale scent of burnt earth and vegetation, she smelled none of it. The only thing that caught her notice was the faint scent of flowers. Whenever this destruction had happened, it had been a long time ago. At first glance, everything around her seemed desolate and utterly devoid of life, but there were patches of dry scrub scattered about in little divots all around. Life always finds a way, somehow, she thought. She strode slowly to the top of the small hill she had landed on the night before imagining all the while the scope of whatever cataclysmic event had caused this level of destruction. She had seen volcanoes before, but this place was missing the obvious source: there was no mountain cone, nothing that could account for the sheer scale of this devastation. The small hill Rainbow Dash stood on was just one of many in the area. There were perhaps a dozen similar formations of loose volcanic fragments within a short walk of each other, and she stood atop one of the smaller ones. In the distance, to the northeast perhaps a couple miles out, she could just make out a spot of color in the otherwise bleak expanse. It would be worth a closer look at least, for the chance of water if nothing else. She took flight then, rising far higher than necessary for the distance to get a better sense of the lay of the land around her. But as she flew higher, a chill settled itself deep into her bones. The black swath of destruction spread in every direction as far as she could see. It wasn’t regular: some areas had what looked to be fine black sand, others matched her first landing zone with mounds of gravel, still others had monolithic spires of stone. One area, which looked smooth and glassy from above, looked almost like a riverbed, but with no trace of moisture to it Still, her current goal was to examine the color in the distance. As she grew nearer, the spot grew more defined: there were rows of wildflowers planted, as if in a garden along the south-facing slope of the hill. The flowers stood in sharp contrast to the black soil they were planted in, and, even from a distance, it was clear to Rainbow Dash that the gravel of this hill was as fine as soil. She landed briefly and nibbled at one of the flowers. It held only the barest amount of moisture in it, enough to barely keep it alive, but hardly enough to sustain a pony such as Rainbow Dash. She checked the ground more thoroughly, looking for signs of someone who might tend the garden of flowers, but the only traces she spotted in the loose ground looked like those of field mice. The flowers formed precise rows and columns, but there was nothing to indicate this little patch of life had ever been tended to. With a shrug, Rainbow Dash ate a few more flowers. Despite being wild, and a bit dry, they had a trace of a familiar taste to them that reminded her of home. But this was not the time and definitely not the place for aimlessly reminiscing about the past. She took to the sky again, spiraling rapidly upward on an updraft. She had a decision to make: she could turn back briefly and avoid this dead landscape (she would only have to fly back at most a few hours), or she could press onward into uncertain danger and the unknown vastness of the devastation. Aww, who am I kidding, she thought, I’m Rainbow Dash. There’s no choice to make at all. She flew west, deeper into the darkness. ## As she flew, Rainbow Dash was surprised at how a landscape of seemingly singular color could have so much variation in it. There were hills, valleys, crags, caves, fissures, craters, riverbeds, and even open flat regions of the black rock. She maintained a relatively low altitude, making use of the air currents being created as the dark ground absorbed the sun’s heat. She was almost buoyed by a wave of air cooking off the black fields. It was faster than she had expected, and almost effortless once she found the right altitude. Above or below her, the air swirled unpredictably, but here she had almost constant lift and forward momentum. She still spotted the occasional little patch of dry scrub or the infrequent wildflower, but nothing quite caught her attention as much as that first garden-like hill. She kept her senses alert for anything that might indicate a source of water or a change in the landscape ahead. Hours passed without anything, and as the sun began to set, Rainbow Dash felt that tiny trace of fear that she might have made a mistake. The leading edge of the sun dipped into the horizon just as she found a suitable place to rest for the night. A pony-sized ledge jutted out from a short cliff that overlooked a patch of flat ground that went North and South for miles. It had good visibility of anything that might approach, would be difficult for anything but a fellow flyer to reach, and would shelter her from the chill gusts of wind that had made the previous night less than comfortable. She would need to find water in the next day or so, or things would turn ugly, but that was a problem for the next day, and now that she’d finally stopped to rest, she fell almost instantly asleep. ## When Rainbow Dash awoke the next morning, she noticed that her exposed skin and blanket were slightly damp. There were traces of dew all along the rock outcropping she had rested in. Of course, the rapid swings in temperature between night and day would cause some condensation on sections of stone that didn’t start the day in the sun. The amount wasn’t so much that a pony could live on, but it explained the garden-like arrangement of the flowers: they were simply spaced just far enough apart that each flower consumed its own area of what little daily moisture was available. Still, the sun was already up, and if she wanted to make full use of the currents of air, she’d best set out sooner rather than later. Down below her perch, there was no visible trace of water, so whatever dew might have collected overnight must have already either seeped into the ground or evaporated in the direct sunlight. There was no point in sticking around and wasting daylight, so Rainbow Dash set off once again. The landscape shifted as she flew, from large swaths of the varied gravel to stretches of smoother rock formations and deep craters. There were deep pockets of shadow in certain of these, and as Rainbow Dash flew low over one, she flew into a chill breeze flowing out of one deep patch of shadow with the telltale scent of water. She landed carefully on the edge of the crater. There were several cave entrances here, but only in one did she see something that immediately caught her attention: the gleam of white against the black of the rock: snow. She rushed forward, eager to slake a thirst, which once acknowledged could not be ignored. A mere step from the edge of the pile of snow, something gave in the rock beneath her hooves. A loud CRACK filled her ears, and a section of the rock the size of a small room sank beneath her. Rainbow Dash started to catch her fall with her wings when the bulk of the pile of snow slid into her and carried both of them down into darkness. ## She must’ve hit her head on something on the way down, because she woke up half-buried by snow at the bottom of a wide hole in the rock. Apparently, there was a tunnel just below the first cave, and it had a very weak roof to it. Shivering uncontrollably, Rainbow Dash crawled out of the snow and looked around. The hole in the roof above let in some light, enough that she could see the tunnel she was now in extended out of sight in two directions. One side was noticeably lower than the other, so it was clear the tunnel burrowed deeper into the rock in that direction. The other direction curved up slightly and the walls curled somewhat to the side before fading into darkness. But it didn’t really matter where this tunnel went. Rainbow Dash intended to fly back out of the hole she had fallen through. She packed as much snow into her canteen as she could and ate as much as she could until her face started to hurt with the cold. Her body heat would melt the rest in time once she was out of here. With a final look in either direction, Rainbow Dash flew upward back through the hole in the floor of the cavern above. It wasn’t a difficult ascent, though she felt a little wobbly on the wing after her blow to the head. Still, it was nothing she couldn’t handle. Now with water once more, she left the cave and took to the open sky. The caverns and tunnels beneath the dead wasteland intrigued her, but their mystery would have to remain unsolved unless she ever made it back here with the proper resources. For now she would simply have to continue on her way west. Within a few hours she caught sight of a line of brown and green on the horizon. Whatever destruction had claimed the land she had been in had reached its end not too far away. She looked back at the wastelands behind her. The division between the hills around the expanse of darkness was sharp, like the difference between night and day. It was almost as if the landscape itself was a dark cousin of the moon, pocked with craters and almost devoid of life. But she was past it now, and the rest of her journey lay ahead of her. Rainbow Dash turned again toward the setting sun and flew west.