There are days I love being an archaeologist. There are days it almost gets me killed. Sometimes, it’s both, and today looked to be one of those days.
I know I’m not the only archaeologist-slash-adventurer in Equestria, but what sets me apart is my humility; I didn’t brag about finding the Abyssinian Asp at every archaeology conference or try and impress the other adventurers with a story about how I won the map to its location in a high-stakes poker game.
I published a bestselling book series instead.
Surprisingly few of my colleagues have heard of it, but I have done my best to keep my life as an author and my life as an archaeologist as separate as possible. Sometimes, I think living a split life like that has frayed my sanity worse than the ever-ongoing fight to keep Ahuizotl’s grubby appendages off of countless priceless or powerful artifacts.
For all the griping I do, though, the Daring Do books have put me in an unusual position within the archaeological community: I can fund my own projects.
And then I found myself preparing for a trip to the Dragonlands. Several weeks earlier, new access to yak territories yielded a lot of interesting finds; my personal favorite was a series of tablets that mentioned a distant yak outpost. Specifically, an outpost in the Dragonlands. The other archaeologists kept their distance; the digs to the north were easy enough to claim, but nopony wanted to linger in the dragonlands under the noses of a bunch of fire-breathing dragons.
I smirked at the thought. Recent relations with dragons had improved so much that there was a “head of draconic relations”, to whom I sent a formal request for permission to perform a dig in the dragonlands as soon as I could. The response had arrived the day before. I still had more paperwork to complete, but apparently the Dragonlord herself approved it.
It was as I debated how many towels I should pack that my little headache came to visit.
“Miss Do! I got it! I got it!” The filly charged through the door and placed a paper on my desk. “I have the permission slip you asked for! Mom and Dad say I can go.”
Petunia Paleo was my apprentice. A favor, of sorts, for a friend of a sibling of a friend of the first fan of the books who found out I was real. She and her friends have had some adventures as well, and they’re alright as long as nopony brings up the books. I admit at first I didn’t really believe taking on an apprentice – especially based on the word of a pony who had recently barged into my life – was anything short of a disaster wrapped in multiple awkward situations waiting to happen. On the other hoof, any other pony I can think of with “Paleo” in his or her name looks old enough to be the sort of thing we’d dig up, and it’s actually nice having someone young enough around to still have an open mind.
For her part, Petunia really knew her stuff. All I have to do is take her out for some hooves-on experience, which is right about my level of ability; foals aren’t in my area of expertise unless they lived at least a couple of hundred years ago.
In the interest of avoiding child-endangerment, I didn’t want Petunia to come on this one, and I figured that no parent would sign a permission slip that said “dragons” anywhere on it. I gave it a sigh worthy of how surprisingly wrong I was.
I stared at the slip for a moment before shrugging it off. “Good enough for me, then.”
Her eyes grew even bigger, and it felt vaguely like a knife twisting in my stomach to keep looking at her. I felt the need to say something to move the moment on. “Pack for a week. With any luck, I’ll find a captain willing to pilot an airship to the edge of the dragonlands. That should save us some time.”
Turns out I made a mistake. I have considered keeping a notebook on how to appropriately interact with ponies before, but never started it. If I had, an entry in the section for younger ponies would be “Do not tell them they are going to ride on an airship.”
The airship lurched. The pilot had warned me that we’d be switching jet streams soon, so I chalked it up to that. That didn’t make it any less irritating that I lost my place in reading the translations of the yak tablets I had brought with me. I would have assigned part of them to Petunia, except that she couldn’t seem to stop admiring the view. To add to my frustration, my crew was busy playing card games in the next room over. Loudly.
In retrospect, I should have anticipated that almost nopony would be interested in volunteering – paid or not – to dig in the dragonlands. In the end, the only ponies that were willing to take the job was a group of construction workers from Manehattan. I cringed inside every time I thought about what would happen if they got too close to an artifact, but thank bureaucracy that this would be a quick-and-dirty dig; all I needed from them was to dig deep enough, then I could break into some of the structures and retrieve anything of interest. After properly photographing everything, of course.
For my part, I was still curious how the yaks and dragons coexisted. I couldn’t decide if their equivalently destructive cultures would bring them together out of respect or cause an endless war. Given their present-day isolation from each other, I had nothing to go off of. On the other hoof, I hadn’t seen mention of dragons on the portions of the yak tablets I’d read through so far, so maybe the yaks lived at the top of the mountain and the dragons stayed below and in the caves and they hardly interacted? That seemed plausible based on what little I knew of dragon culture: before the new dragonlord, they were mostly solitary. Even the Dragonlands would remain considerably empty for years – perhaps decades – between migrations.
One of the tablets which was clearly written after the outpost was abandoned made mention of what I was pretty sure was the reason the yaks left. The only problem was that it appeared to describe what sounded like some sort of plague and a magical ritual that the yaks employed to fix it.
So far as I knew, yaks didn’t use magic. I didn’t fully understand how earth ponies use theirs – mostly because none of them ever seemed to talk about it in the present or a thousand years ago – so maybe the yaks have an innate magic that they can tap into that I haven’t heard of.
I wished that was where the tablet stopped, but what sort of adventure would it be if it didn’t go on to state that the magic ritual had unintended consequences? Namely, it created some sort of monster that bothered the yaks even more. Knowing my luck, it was still down there.
The only way I was going to figure any of it out was to take a look myself, of course. When I picked up the translation copies, one of the translators warned me to take everything with a grain of salt, because yaks have a tendency to exaggerate their stories and their writing was really sloppy.
The Dragonlord met us in person after we landed at the Big Volcano, which was what I called it because almost every dragonlord changed its name to suit their ego. I was a little surprised at how much she seemed to be attempting to emulate pony culture, and also how open she was about her shortcomings in that regard. I’d rather shake claws with a dragon than dodge them, so I won’t complain. I did keep quiet on just how much I knew about pony culture – ancient and otherwise – because she gave me the impression that doing otherwise would lead to a lengthy, awkward, one-sided conversation. Maybe not immediately, but eventually.
Petunia Paleo was a little disappointed that the trip was over after only thirty-six hours. When the Dragonlord greeted us, the semi-permanent grin Petunia still had from enjoying the airship ride fought with her unease being so close to an actual dragon. I wasn’t sure her attempt at meekness worked out right, as it looked a little unnatural. I was fairly certain that the Dragonlord noticed, because she kept shooting what I could swear were concerned glances towards the filly.
When the pleasantries were over, I finally had to admit that there was still one flaw in my plans: I hadn’t figured out exactly where we needed to dig.
While it was fortunate for me that the collective literacy level of yaks meant they favored pictures, their map-making abilities also suffered from messy hoofwriting. It was a surprise to everyone when somepony tried lining up the largest-scale map with coastlines across the ocean and actually succeeded. Equestria had no records of yaks being seafarers, nor had any yak boats been discovered, floating or otherwise. I swore to myself that if I found the yak outpost here, I’d take a vacation and go scuba-diving for yak shipwrecks for a couple of weeks.
I asked the Dragonlord if they had ever noticed anything that resembled pony architecture more closely than dragon… architecture. It was a bit of a long shot to expect anything, but it paid off. Apparently, there was a small patch of odd, somewhat squared stones at the northern base of the volcano. Conveniently enough, the Dragonlord could fly and we had an airship, so it only took a few minutes to relocate.
The stones’ intact faces were suspiciously regular, but I was concerned to see that they were scattered around an active geyser. On the plus side, it lent credibility to the possibility that the stones came from the right depth originally. I also knew that I couldn’t have my crew dig at an active geyser and not expect that to blow up in my face.
I pulled out the maps again. If the yaks had any sense, the geyser wouldn’t be in the middle of their outpost. The best plan I could come up with was to assume what I thought might have been a label was actually more of an outbuilding, and that if I could determine where the compass points fell, I could find the rest of the village. I was uncomfortable with having so many points of uncertainty, but that was hardly the craziest leap of faith I’d ever taken.
These maps didn’t show the coastline, though, and I wasn’t sure what other landscape features would still exist. Well, the volcano in general was definitely old enough. I turned around and compared the mountain to the map. If I assumed the geyser-outbuilding was at the lowest elevation and the largest building – which I imagined was either the chief's home or used to store the village’s food – was at the highest, the bulk of the buildings would land on a mildly less sloping region of the mountainside.
Relieved, I told the foreman to grab his tools and follow me. I picked what I thought was most likely the middle of everything. If we were off, at least we’d be more likely to hit one of the edges.
Petunia Paleo’s excitement was building again, even though it could be a couple of days before the crew dug far enough down to find anything. That didn’t stop her from telling them what not to do if they found any dragon fossils.
If Petunia Paleo was getting bored, she didn’t show it. The crew had been at work for the majority of the day. The sun had already disappeared behind the mountain, though enough light leaked around it that the foreman hadn’t called them off yet. Petunia had offered to help several times, but the foreman declined every time, so she settled for watching the picks fall and the shovels swing.
After another good stint of digging, I set my shovel aside and made for the nearest jug of water. I nearly choked on my drink when Petunia’s voice came from right behind me.
“Miss Do, I’ve looked over the translations you brought and I found the part about the evil monster.” She was thoroughly chipper, despite the topic. “Do you think we’re going to find its fossil? Would that technically be a new species?”
I hadn’t finished choking on my water yet. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that she was bouncing now.
“Would that make us famous? Well, make you more famous and me famous at all?”
I was pretty sure the water was out, but I knew my throat was going to bother me for a few minutes yet. Then I realized that I didn’t know how to tell her that my concern – provided we found the village – was that the evil monster might still be alive. Historically speaking, they had been often enough. Perhaps I was just paranoid, but I’d rather be paranoid than unprepared.
Maybe I could play it down and get her to think about something else. “A bunch of old academics would probably spend years splitting hairs about how to classify it, and for all we know, the monster left the village before it died. Besides, if I’m right about where the village is and we actually find it, that’s going to get a lot more attention from everypony. I’m sure the academics will still bicker about every little thing we find, but more ponies than just the academics can appreciate the discovery that yaks used to live in the Dragonlands and how they managed it.”
I didn’t spend a lot of time indoors as a filly myself, and I especially didn’t spend a lot of time in front of a mirror. I couldn’t say for sure that my eyes had never looked as big as hers were now, but I had little doubt. I don’t know how parents deal with that. Moments like those made me feel conflicted; I couldn’t decide if her expression was cute, creepy, or some mix of both. Regardless, if I closed my eyes, it was refreshing to have someone as enthusiastic as her around. I remembered having that as a filly.
I don’t think I handled the moment very well that time. Before I’d noticed how much I was smiling, my mouth started moving.
“If we find that yaks lived here, there’s a good chance they sailed across the ocean.”
I plugged the leak there, but the damage was done and I knew that I had no hope of keeping my vacation plans quiet now.
“But the yaks don’t have ships now.”
I felt like I was going to get some kind of whiplash watching her jump between puzzled curiosity and amazement.
“You think there might be shipwrecks?”
I nodded, and figured it would be a good idea to ground our expectations. “But if we don’t find the village here, we still won’t have reason to believe that the yaks ever had ships.”
We heard the foreman call off the crew. There was only barely enough light to make out the details on the ground. I knew we should get some rest and stifled a yawn at the thought.
I turned towards my tent. “I’m going to head to bed. You should probably get some sleep too.”
Petunia deflated just a bit and nodded. “Yeah. Miss Do?”
“What?” I turned my head back just a bit. I didn’t like the mischievous touch to her smile.
“If we do find the village, and you ever go looking for ships, can I come too? I’ve always wanted to try scuba diving.”
I let out a defeated sigh. “If we find the village. And we’ll have to see what your parents say about it.” Fortunately, that was enough for her, and she walked to her tent, humming.
In my own tent, I unrolled my sleeping bag and lay down. Usually, I would listen to the sounds of all manner of bugs and birds whether I wanted to or not while trying to sleep. In the Dragonlands, I heard neither; the night was nearly silent save for the snores of my crew and the soft wind.
When I woke up the next morning – after I checked with the foreman – I returned to the yak tablet translations. Some part of the back of my mind wouldn’t stop thinking about the monster they had supposedly created. I had the nagging feeling that I had missed something obvious again, and that frustrated me. The problem was that the yak tablets were so unhelpfully vague when describing anything that related to abandoning the outpost.
I took a moment to breathe and let my frustration subside. There were probably logical explanations for it. Maybe the tablet was made a long time after the outpost had been abandoned and the yaks themselves no longer remembered the details. It seemed possible; I’d even heard of writings that inspired entire cultures even though they were made hundreds of years after their subjects and lacked the factual support that modern archaeology provided.
It could even be that the yaks from the outpost were ashamed. Maybe the yaks involved in the ritual were killed and none of them actually ever saw the beast.
I felt a little more comfortable once I had a few plausible explanations that didn’t revolve around my own stupidity.
I suppose I was absentmindedly flipping through the translations for a while, because the next thing I knew, Petunia called my name. I poked my head outside the tent.
“They found something!”
I felt like I had fallen through the ground without my body moving at all. Then I remembered to breathe. I told myself that they hadn’t necessarily found the village, so I shouldn’t get my hopes up yet. Then I glanced at the dig site.
I was not expecting to see the foreman shooing away dragons as though they were a bunch of pesky birds, let alone successfully and without fire involved on their part. The dragons themselves only seemed mildly disappointed. After blinking away my surprise, I grabbed my saddlebags and sprinted over, catching some air for extra speed.
By the time I had reached the pit, the last of the dragons was already flying away. “What was that about?” I figured it would be best to stick with one question at a time if I wanted a clear answer.
“Found a way to get the work done faster. This ground’s got a bunch of shiny rocks; some kind of gemstone, you know? Well they’re a pain to dig through ‘cause they’re harder than the surrounding material.”
I glanced down the hole. It was already several times deeper than we had managed the day before. It was also several times wider.
“Then a couple of dragons show up and watch us. One even asks what we’re doing, so I guess they were being neighborly or something. Turns out they like those shiny rocks for eating and don’t find them everywhere, so I tells them they can have our pile and anything else they find in return for a little work. Didn’t take long after that to make the hole this big.”
I took another look at the hole, then glanced at the sky. It wasn’t even noon yet. I wasn’t about to complain.
“So what did you find?”
He lifted up a charred block of wood which was splintered on both ends. “I don’t know any trees that grow square. Looks like you found your yak city.”
“Outpost.”
“Whatever. It was going to grow into a city if they hadn’t left.”
“How do you know that?” I didn’t remember reading anything about the yaks’ plans for the outpost in the translations.
He shrugged. “They all do. I heard a little town that started as a fruit stand has its own princess now.”
I accepted his point. I was loosely familiar with Ponyville.
“I’ll take a look, but I might need your help breaking through to the buildings still. Petunia?”
“Yes?”
I jumped. She was right behind me again. I turned around to see her fully equipped with climbing gear, holding a spare headlamp for me.
I briefly entertained the thought that I had been especially useless for this dig, but I remembered that my part was next. I accepted the headlamp. “Thanks. Are you sure you want to go down there? It could be dangerous.”
She nodded firmly. I had noticed that she got more serious the closer she was to her work, at least until she found something. “I can’t just sit here and let you find all the fossils and things.”
“Fair enough, but stay where you can run to the exit faster than the ceiling can collapse.”
I turned my headlamp on and, as it was wide enough now, flew down the hole. It didn’t take me long to find the rest of the wooden post. I had the crew excavate it. I figured the base of the post would give us a good idea of what to expect ‘ground level’ to be. Shortly after, Petunia found the hoofprint of a yak. We had, beyond all of my many doubts, found the yak outpost.
The post turned out to be a part of the large fire pit that yaks commonly build their villages around. I knew from the maps that this ring wasn’t actually in the center of the village, presumably due to geographical constraints. The foreman and I agreed that I didn’t have a good idea of where exactly to find the buildings yet, and while I considered trying to find and follow the yak hoofprints, it wouldn’t even necessarily lead to a nearby building.
The only real option left was to have the crew dig out farther and probe for buildings. I was getting nervous about the amount of stone they were going to end up removing, but the foreman assured me that they would be leaving ample material to support the ceiling.
While we waited, Petunia and I started cleaning up the ground and chipping away at the fire pit. I suggested that we work our way to the middle to see if we could find any clue to what they burned or cooked.
Before long, Petunia found a small bone, shortly followed by many more. I pulled out my camera and took a couple of photos, then we started trying to identify them. As I dug a little deeper, I found more intact skeletons; the creature that they belonged to was no longer than my foreleg. Petunia said it looked kind of like a dinosaur, but she didn’t know any that were that small. Or that new.
I suggested that it was some sort of bird.
By the time we found what I think was the center of the pit, it appeared that the fire had done its job and fully incinerated everything. I scooped up what I figured was the actual wood ash into a bottle and put it in my saddlebags. After that, the work was slow, and we didn’t find much of interest for the rest of the day.
It took the greater part of two days to finally hit a building. They were farther out than I had expected. When we heard, Petunia let out some sort of happy shriek and followed me down.
As I walked through the stone tunnel the crew had dug, I started to second-guess my fears that the monster could still be around. If it was, it would have been buried along with everything else in solid stone. The building wasn’t small, but the far half had collapsed, and from the look of the charred walls near it, it had burned. I suppose that was to be expected from an underground village built on a volcano.
At their rate of excavation and the approximate distances on the map, the foreman estimated that they could reach two more buildings before our trip ended. It was a start, but there was no guarantee that they wouldn’t be collapsed or otherwise solidly full of stone.
Petunia and I got to work searching the building we had reached. It was a struggle to keep up with photographing everything before Petunia could get her hooves on it, at least until I gave her the camera. Then she ran around the room frantically photographing everything, myself included. We uncovered even more of those bird skeletons, and another one that had four feet and a tail, but was longer than any rodents I knew of off the top of my head. Petunia was a little upset that she didn’t know what it was, but I reminded her that her field of study was a lot older than the yak outpost, and told her I couldn’t name half of the animals you’d see in a forest.
She cheered up more when we started digging out the objects embedded in the floor. She found half a flat drum, and I explained what little I know about how much yaks appreciated music. We spent the next couple of hours ferrying them to the airship. I knew with the number of photographs Petunia had taken that reconstructing a map of where everything was found later wouldn’t be hard at all.
After that, one of the crew members informed me that they had uncovered what appeared to be the remains of a dog. I followed him down a new side hole and examined it for myself. The bones seemed off, so after dutifully photographing it, I took one of the longer bones and tapped it against the stone. It was made of wood, which made that “dog” a timberwolf.
I honestly didn’t know what to make of that at first, so I told the crew to dig it up and load it on the airship anyway. Back in my tent, I told Petunia about it and we speculated about what we had seen so far.
Petunia leafed through some of the photos she had taken earlier. “I think they had a bird problem.”
“What about the timberwolf? I haven’t heard of them outside of Equestria.”
Petunia shrugged. “Wolves eat birds sometimes. Maybe they captured a few and brought them here to fix their bird problem.”
“But—” I had a difficult time imagining a yak village swarmed with birds and then releasing wolves in the area to fix the problem, but from what I had read and heard about yaks, that was exactly the sort of thing they’d do. “Well, maybe.”
I sighed and lay down on top of my sleeping bag. “Ugh. If I don’t find something explaining all this soon, we’re going to leave with a lot more questions than when we started.”
I wasn’t sure if I had gotten my wish, but my crew had found two more buildings, as promised, before we left. Both of them were in worse shape than the first, appearing mostly burned down, but that didn’t stop us from finding more birds, another timberwolf, several tablets, and a few other odds and ends to take back and study.
The Dragonlord saw us off in person again. She didn’t say anything, but I had caught sight of a few dragons watching us from farther up the mountain throughout our stay, and “suspicious” seemed more likely than “neighborly”. I could only hope that the outpost remained intact long enough for at least another trip.
For the journey back, I stayed in my room for the most part, and Petunia watched the scenery drift by below from the deck again. I took a look at a couple of the tablets we had found. I don’t think I had any hope of translating it; it looked like the sort of thing my three-year-old self would have drawn, if I'd been given a chisel instead of crayons. I couldn’t even positively identify two matching letters, and I was pretty sure the yak alphabet wasn’t that large.
I did wonder if yaks had ever used crayons, though.
After we landed, I had a mountain of paperwork to go through getting all of the artifacts and relevant information to the right specialists and having the tablets translated. When I was done, I felt more tired than after a long day of digging in the Dragonlands. Nearly every other task could wait, and I could work on them between my daring adventures thwarting Ahuizotl, even if I didn’t have an adventure yet.
Two weeks later, Petunia delivered a packet from the translators. She told me they had finished and they wanted me to read the translation as soon as possible. And that they promised this was literally what the tablets said.
That they had finished so soon was already enough to pique my curiosity. In my experience, they weren’t in a hurry to get anything done. I opened the packet, and pulled out the papers. After a quick glance at Petunia, who stood on the other side of my desk expectantly, I read them aloud.
Yak boat delivering grey exotic birds arrived. Prince [illegible] will be happy that spiders will be gone. Yaks trade 20 large trees of wood for birds. Good for building boats.
I guess that settled it: I was going on vacation.
Prince [illegible] hate birds more than spiders. Says dumb birds are just rats with wings. Yaks have too many birds now. Birds poop on everything. Yaks hear of furry snake of war in mountains up north that kill birds for fun. Yaks trade many shiny stones with griffons for furry snakes of war.
“I was right! They did have a bird problem.”
I sighed, and read on.
Furry snakes of war leave dead bird everywhere. Furry snakes of war everywhere also. Yaks need new animal to eat furry snakes of war and dead bird. Other yak village trade Yaks dogwood seeds. Tell yaks that seeds grow into wood dogs that eat furry snakes of war and dead bird. Yaks trade full boat of grain for dogwood seeds.
Wood dogs eat a lot of birds and furry snakes of war, but still some left. Wood dogs also killing other animals in forest and attacking yaks. Prince [illegible] not happy. Yak explorers not find solution. Yak mages say yaks make solution.
Yak mages very sorry to Prince [illegible]. Yak mages take desert lizard from across water and give it power of volcano to burn wood dogs. Now small lizard big and powerful. Wood dogs burn. Yak forest burn too. Everything burn. Even birds burn. Nothing left for yaks. Volcano belong to big lizards now. Prince [illegible] say leaving still better than spiders.
I was speechless.
My apprentice wasn’t.
“I wonder who’s gonna tell the dragons.”