Daring woke up feeling almost terrified of what she’d see in Stalwart — what if her lateral reversal had just been the start of something much, much worse? But when Stalwart crawled out of her tent, she looked normal. Relatively speaking. As the group ate breakfast, Daring watched Stalwart intently. Her movements were smooth and natural. She didn’t look to be in pain. She wasn’t coughing. Her eyes weren’t bloodshot. She-
“You know,” Stalwart muttered, “if you’re going to watch me that closely, I’d appreciate it if you told me why. You look like a stalker.”
Daring twitched. She wasn’t sure why; it wasn’t like she was trying to hide what she was doing. “I just-”
“I’M GONNA GET A BETTER LOOK AT THE LAND OKAY BYE,” said Fallende. And she was scampering up the cliff face in seconds.
“Weirdo,” Windrose mumbled as she stoked the fire.
Stalwart stared up at Fallende, but shrugged and turned back to Daring. “So what’s up?”
Daring took a deep breath. “I’m just- I’m still worried about the- flipping thing, you know? And I didn’t want to ask you about it again, because then I’d sound like I was nagging or something.”
Stalwart nodded slowly. “I appreciate the concern — really, I do — but… I don’t know, do you think I can’t take care of myself? I can feel my feelings-” (Windrose had a sudden coughing fit.) “-much better than you can, and I’m fine.”
A few seconds passed. “Call it paranoia,” Daring said eventually. “You’re out here because I hired you. If you hadn’t been out here, you wouldn’t have been flipped in the first place. So, in a way, anything that happens to you…” Her voice trailed off.
“Ah. A sense of responsibility, then?”
“Yeah.” Daring halfheartedly stirred her oatmeal. “I usually work alone, because then the only back I have to watch is my own. Plus…” She folded her ears back and flicked her tail. “When I’m alone, I don’t need to wait up for anypony else.”
Stalwart grinned. “Although I’m guessing reason two matters more than reason one?” After a second, Daring nodded, and Stalwart chuckled. “I get that. I’m not sure what’s worse: being the fastest pony in the group or the slowest, and I’ve been both.” She tipped up her porridge bowl to slurp some of the dregs down. “But really, trust me when I say I’ll tell you if my health goes south. I don’t want to be sick out here any more than you want me to be.”
“Good.” But trust was a tricky thing. You needed to let yourself go for somepony else and just believe they’d do the right thing. And Daring wasn’t completely sure Stalwart wasn’t going to hide any symptoms of dimensional flipping until it was far too late to do anything about them; she’d already seemed pretty intent on exploring Needle Vale. How sick was Stalwart’s “sick”, and how sick was that compared to Daring’s “sick”? How much would being “sick” slow her down?
Although Daring figured she could just watch for the moment Stalwart started coughing or bleeding or her pace started flagging. She wouldn’t be able to say she wasn’t holding everyone else back. Then they could turn around. But until then, she wouldn’t press the issue.
Stalwart nodded. “Glad we’ve got that cleared up.” She wiped down her face and stood up, stretching her legs. “Well, no sense in merely sitting around while we wait for Fallende to return. I’m breaking camp.”
As Stalwart and Windrose disassembled their tents, Daring waited a little longer, occasionally glancing up the cliff. It felt right, somehow, for Fallende to return to a semi-friendly face. But after several minutes ticked by with no sign of her, Daring sighed, pushed herself to her feet, and made for her tent.
Then she heard a voice. “Hey, ponies! I’m back, my gallivanting girls!” Fallende was at the top of the cliff, looking just fine.
“Hey!” Daring yelled. “Everything’s fine down here! Come on, we’re breaking camp!” She ducked into her tent. Clothes, first. The air felt more bitter cold than usual this morning, and she’d woken up shivering. Daring pawed through her clothes, looking for-
“Hey.”
Daring yelped in surprise, nearly knocking over the tent as she jumped, and spun around. Fallende was leaning into the tent, somehow having snuck up completely silently. She tilted her head. “Aren’t you antsy,” she said.
“How did you get here from the top of the cliff so quickly?” asked Daring.
“I walked through the flap,” Fallende said sarcastically. “Anyway, there ain’t a whole lot around here, my avianish adventurer. Trees, trees, and trees. Oh, and trees. You know, for variety.”
“Uh-huh. Figured. Thanks, anyway.”
“Yep.” Fallende nodded and backed out of the tent.
Daring pulled a coat from her bag and was about to put it on when a question came to her. “Hey!” she yelled as she scrambled out of the tent. “Fallende!”
Vertigo hit for a brief second when she couldn’t see Fallende — how had she disappeared in those few seconds? — but then Fallende crawled out of her own tent. “Yo!”
“You didn’t happen to see how close we were to the end of the valley, did you?”
“Uh… sorry, didn’t get a good look at that.”
“ ’Kay,” Daring said with a shrug. “That’s fine.” She wasn’t that worried anyway. It had to come eventually, right?
Then she remembered the river and shivered.
There were times when “adventuring” just dragged. You traipsed through featureless landscapes on your way to the next plot point, but very little happened in the meantime. The sorts of things adventure stories usually skipped over in the name of pacing, and for good reason. The party walked through the sparse, nearly silent forest, with very little conversation and less problems. Of course, Daring could just fly and scope out the valley in a few hours, but that was hardly fair to the groundbound mares and deer (another reason she preferred working alone). Maybe in a few days.
The landscape wasn’t helping anything at all. Ever since Stalwart’s flip, everything seemed a little more ominous. The mountains reached up on all sides like teeth, as if they were walking on the bottom of some monster’s mouth. The trees were gnarled into claws groping at the air. Even the very wind felt worse, with more snow getting into Daring’s clothing coat and melting on her natural coat. The north sucked.
Daring just pushed through the boredom and the cold, focusing on putting one hoof in front of the other. At least the snow wasn’t deep. She turned her ears back in case she could pick up a few snatches of talk, but no. She could hear nothing but the two people behind her, crunching through the sno-
Two?
Daring stopped and spun on the spot. Three people behind her: front to back, Windrose, Stalwart, and Fallende. They all stopped on a bit when she did; Windrose and Fallende even looked behind them, where they thought Daring was looking. “You hear something, my alert adventurer?” asked Fallende.
“Maybe,” Daring said, stalling. Was she just being paranoid? She doubted it. Years of careful listening for guard patrols while on the job as a dynamic archaeologist meant she knew her footsteps, and she’d only heard two people behind her. So who’d been missing? Still looking back, she walked around the three, pretending to examine the valley. “You, uh… You three keep going. I’ll do some quick scouting to be sure nothing’s following us. I’ll catch up.”
“Okay,” Fallende said, shrugging, and set off. Windrose and Stalwart traded confused looks, then Stalwart shrugged as well and they followed Fallende. Daring kept her ears peeled: three different people walking. Daggit.
She looked back and forth in case anyone was watching. Her wing twitches were genuine, but not from anxiety over some monster jumping out and trying to eat her face like the last few dozen. Anywhere else, she would’ve discarded what she’d heard as a trick of the wind, but this wasn’t a place where you could take the slightly odd for granted, not after the cliff and the river.
Daring took a few steps forward, her ears firmly pointed backwards. Three faint sets of footsteps sounded behind her. She walked forward more. What was she looking for, exactly? A sign that someone hadn’t been there, somehow. So… She trotted several yards back and looked down at the snow. The tracks they’d left were still clear. She knelt down and examined the tracks more closely. Three sets of tracks, each from a pony. She crawled forward, looking for Fallende’s tracks, sweeping her gaze this way and that over the ground. Nothing after nothing. Just the U-shaped hooves of ponies-
And then, suddenly, there was something. Fallende’s tracks simply appeared from nowhere. But it was hard to tell if they looked any different from her normal prints, because right when they appeared, everyone had come to a stop. It was right where Daring had spun around.
Right when she’d noticed she was only hearing two people walking behind her and had wanted to check.
Daring looked back and forth between where Fallende’s tracks were and weren’t. There was nothing to suggest any magic, nothing out of the ordinary. It was like Fallende had stepped from a floating platform to the ground.
So what was she supposed to say about this? Hey, girls. Apparently Fallende vanished when no one was looking. But Fallende hadn’t said anything about-
Daring glanced down the path. They were distant by now, but she could still clearly see three shapes.
But Fallende hadn’t said anything about… being gone. How would she respond? Like Stalwart had when she thought they were heading in the wrong direction? Derisively? Curiously? At all? And what could even cause everything here? Nothing Daring had heard of had such disparate effects on the world. Although, Fallende seemed well-versed in esoterica…
Daring bounded forward in long half-leaps, half-flaps, switching her gaze between the tracks (still all the tracks she expected) and the group ahead (still all the people she expected). Fallende was trailing behind Windrose and Stalwart a little. She nodded at Daring. “Hey. Find anything, my pegasus patroller?”
“No,” Daring said, shaking her head. “I’m just getting a little paranoid from how empty this place is.”
“Yep.” Fallende looked around at the mountains. “Weird, ain’t it? There’s barely any animals or- anything. Just tree after tree after tree, plus that stream. You’d think there’d be something.”
“Heh. Yeah. But, hey, quick question.”
“Yeah?”
“You know that cursed deer herd, whatstheirname, the Alver?”
“Yeah…”
“Do they leave footprints?”
Fallende’s expression briefly scrunched into one of confusion as she glanced at Daring. “Well, yeah. They’re still physical, aren’t they? Why do you ask, my questioning questor?”
Because your footprints vanished when I wasn’t looking. Ha, no, not just yet. “Just curious. Do they interact with normal reindeer much?”
“Supposedly not. They think we’re beneath them or something. Somehow.” Fallende snorted. “And as we all know, turning up your nose at your own species has only ever resulted in happy fun times for all.”
“Uh-huh.”
After several moments, Fallende asked, “Seriously, what’s up? Why’d you get curious now?”
“Because- Because right before we stopped, I could only hear two people. When I went back to look at the footprints, yours weren’t there. It was like you didn’t exist until I turned around to look at you.”
The sheer lack of reaction Fallende had was, in all honesty, kind of impressive. “Well, okay, then.” And then she just shrugged and kept walking.
Daring actually stopped walking in shock, then trotted to catch up. “That, that’s it? You’re not-”
“I remember everything from leaving camp to now, my nervous navigator,” said Fallende casually. “So Needle Vale made me stop leaving footprints and making sound. Big whoop. It’s not hurting anybody, is it?” She shrugged again.
“No, but don’t you think-”
“Oh, sheesh, I think Windrose is rubbing off on you,” snorted Fallende. “Or maybe this place is getting to you and you’re losing it.” She smirked and made a cuckoo gesture at her head.
“It’s not like that at all,” said Daring, keeping her voice level. “If you’ll come back with me, I can show you.”
“Nah,” said Fallende. “Not really into-”
Suddenly, from up ahead, Stalwart started yelling. “Daring! Fallende! Get over here now and take a look at this!”
It was a stone pillar and it was suspiciously out-of-place.
“Huh,” Daring said. She tilted her head, as if that would give her a better angle on it. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“You’ve never seen anything like this before,” mumbled Windrose. “Well. Such a great sign.”
“Who knows, it might be,” said Stalwart.
It was standing in the middle of a… “Clearing” was probably the wrong word, given how sparse the trees were. But for a good thirty feet or so around it — a perfect circle, Daring noted — there were no trees whatsoever. Digging through the snow had confirmed that grass still grew. But trees? No. They all stopped at the edge of a geometrically-beautiful ring. Hmm. A fairy ring? The ground within the ring felt perfectly flat, as if it’d been cleared beforehoof. Double hmm.
“If I’d seen something like this before,” said Daring, “this would hardly be research.”
“Yeah, but… Gah, I’d just be repeating myself.”
“You would,” said Fallende. “So shut up.”
And the pillar itself was something else. It wasn’t really a “pillar” so much as a bunch of flat stone slabs (each almost as thick as a ream of paper but otherwise unique in shape) that looked like they’d been melted together somehow, all sticking out from each other at weird angles. They were all the same kind of stone, something that reminded Daring of obsidian but wasn’t smooth enough. The pillar was three or four feet across (it was hard to tell) and maybe twenty or so high. And it simply sat there.
“Is it magical at all?” Daring asked.
“I don’t think so,” Fallende said. “It doesn’t… feel right.”
“Same here,” said Stalwart. “Still, I’m not going to go up and touch it.”
Daring bit her lip as she looked at the pillar. This was the somethingest something they’d found yet. And that was precisely why she needed to take as close a look at it as possible and why she needed to avoid it as much as possible. It could be everything in the best or worst way, and she wouldn’t know unless she risked herself. She delayed herself as she thought. “Anyone know a thing about standing stones like this?”
“Not exactly like this,” said Fallende, “but close enough. Napakivi are standing stones used by reindeer to collect magical energy, but they don’t get cut or carved at all. Carving makes them more artificial and less efficient.” She tilted her head. “I’ve never seen one this weird, though.”
Daring bit her lip again, then took a deep breath. “I’m going to take a closer look,” she said. “Get ready to run if the sky turns black or something.” She took a few steps forward, ignoring Windrose’s and Stalwart’s protests. Every foot she moved, the hairs of her coat stood a little more on end and her feathers felt more like they were stabbing her wings. Her heart ignored her attempts to stay calm. There was something not right about this stone.
But nothing came out. Nothing changed. Nothing tore a hole in space and attacked her for intruding upon its domain. And suddenly she was less than three feet away from the pillar. “I feel fine,” she said to no one in particular. “I think it’s safe, but still, don’t touch it.” She wasn’t even going to touch it with her spear.
The pillar didn’t look like much up close, once you got past the weird design. The stones were all the same black color, smooth and unmarked. It was hard to tell if they’d been carved at all or if they were naturally smoothed. Daring cocked an ear; she heard nothing. She sniffed; she smelled nothing. As if to confirm that it’d only been her nerves, her wings stopped itching so badly.
Stalwart, after a moment’s hesitation, trotted up next to her and examined the pillar. “Hmm. Odd,” she said, making no move to touch it. She glanced sidelong at Daring. “Do you think this is… you know, it? The reason Needle Vale’s weird? I mean, I know I couldn’t feel any magic, but look at it. If that just happens to be here by pure chance, I’ll eat my hat. Well, buy a hat so I can eat it. Where did that phrase come from, anyway? It’s-”
Was it? Was this it? Was this all there was? Just some random spire in the middle of nowhere? It didn’t feel right. Daring surveyed the valley around them. As far as she could tell (which wasn’t very), they weren’t even at some numerically-important ratio of distances or anything. It was simply the pillar, its crooked design, and its lack of trees.
And yet… It didn’t feel right. It was hard to deny the oddness of everything. The pillar was just sitting there, but at the same time, it was just… sitting there. It was doing nothing, but it was also… doing nothing. Like a puzzle dropped in by some fickle god solely to mock her and her trying to find a reason for anything. Maybe it wasn’t the reason Needle Vale was so strange, but Daring had a hard time believing it wasn’t related at all.
She walked around the pillar to look at the other side. Nothing more unusual than before.
“So, um,” said Windrose, “are you gonna… I don’t know, study that at all? It looks important, but…”
“I think we should,” said Stalwart immediately. She leaned around the pillar to look at Daring. “Don’t you? It’s so-”
“Studiable, yeah,” said Daring, wishing she had a better word. She walked back around and gestured at Windrose and Fallende. “Feel free to take a rest. We might be here a while.” She spread her wings and flew to the top of the pillar. Nothing obvious.
“Excellent,” said Stalwart. Her horn began glowing and she trotted a circle around the pillar. “Finally, something worthwhile. Everything else has been too ordinary or too abstract, which hardly makes for compelling… anything, really. So, what are we looking for?”
“I have no idea.”
She didn’t hear anything, but Daring didn’t have to think hard to imagine Windrose groaning.
Daring had owned a certain… sculpture when she’d been younger. Most of the time, it looked like a disparate mass of gray shards, all differently-sized, all poking out from their base at strange, off-putting angles. But when viewed from the right positions, the different parts of the sculpture lined up just right to form distinct silhouettes. Here was a bird, there was a house, here was a sword… Daring had found six different silhouettes and she’d never been sure there weren't any more.
The pillar looked something like that: a confused amalgamation of stone slabs that almost made intricate shapes from the right perspective. But emphasis on the “almost”. It was maddening; she would step into this position, see all the right lines, the pillar would begin to look like something, and then a slab would poke out at exactly the wrong place and the pillar would be nothing again.
“Daring,” said Windrose.
She walked around and around and around the pillar for what felt like an hour, and Daring still couldn’t say whether or not there was something hidden in the pillar. Her mind refused to either give up (she was so close) or even rest until the matter was settled. So she walked around and around and…
“Daring!” said Windrose.
It looked like Stalwart wasn’t giving up either. She kept tapping at it with her magic, probing it, stepping back for a better look, stepping forward for better details, going around and around. She looked almost as invested as Daring, in fact. She alternated between sticking her tongue out in thought and moving her mouth soundlessly. If she’d had a pen and paper, she probably would’ve been taking notes like mad.
“Hey!” screamed Fallende. “Equus to Absent Archaeologist! We’re still here!”
“I hear you,” Daring said vaguely. “This is what I’m here for.”
“Then what are you looking for? You’ve been staring at that- thing for ages!”
“I’ll know it when I see it.”
“If you haven’t seen it yet, you ain’t gonna see it! It’s-” Fallende groaned. “Windrose, I need some help.”
Windrose twitched, but still spoke up. “Look, you and Stalwart have been looking at that thing for a long time. Between the two of you, don’t you think you’d’ve seen anything out-of-place?”
“Maybe, but…” Daring wasn’t sure they knew the feeling. The horrible itching in your mind that meant you were missing something. If you didn’t look into it, it’d gnaw away at you, always pulling your thoughts back to itself. She needed to scratch that itch. Even worse, it felt like finding that missing something was always one step away, no matter how many steps forward she took. Almost, almost, almost kept running through her head and anchoring her mind. Nothing could pull her away from it. The best she could explain it was, “I’ve got a hunch, okay?”
“So do I,” said Stalwart. She reared and squinted up at the top of the pillar. “Why is it here in the first place? It has to mean something. Or do you two both think it simply appeared here?”
“It might’ve!” said Windrose. “Magic, Needle Vale, weird place, right?”
“It didn’t,” said Daring. “I could feel it.” It was just so… unsatisfying. Like looking at clouds and learning that the shapes them hadn’t been-
“One hour,” Fallende said solidly. “Then we’re leaving. I’m sick of waiting.”
“Hmm?” Daring asked. In all honesty, she was just a bit surprised no one had tried putting their hoof down before.
“You heard me.” Fallende’s voice brooked no argument and she was less than an octave away from growling it out. “You have an hour, my laggard leader.”
Daring almost responded, but she could understand Fallende’s frustration. (And from the look on her face, so could Stalwart.) If you weren’t an archaeologist, the slow, painstaking “investigation” phase was easily the most tedious part of uncovering ancient civilizations. Priceless magical artifacts were exciting, but it was the trash heaps that actually told you about a culture. If she could just figure out what was up with this pillar…
Well, she had an hour. Maybe she needed to stop looking blankly at the pillar and actually think about it. She wanted to examine it more closely still, but she managed to tear her gaze from the pillar and glare at the ground instead as she walked. She noticed its shadow.
Daring woke up screaming through her gag and thrashing against her bonds.